“IT ALL COMES from having an open
mind about art, design, and sustainability,” says Oskar Metsavaht, founder
and director of Osklen, a Brazilian
fashion label with 70 stores (and
counting) worldwide. The “it,” of
course, is Metsavaht’s role in turning
his native Brazil into a real force in
global fashion, by creating sleek, sensual clothes that are gaining fans in
France, Italy, Japan, the United States,
and more. The designer also had his
mettle tested by disaster last year,
when a fire struck his Rio headquarters. “It was sad,” he recalls, “but the
OSKAR METSAVAHT /
Osklen
moment I saw the colors and prints
mixing together—something I would
never have imagined—I felt life coming up.” So he gathered the remains to
seed an entirely new collection. The
much-lauded line, appropriately
dubbed Fenix, hits stores later this year.
RESURRECTION
IN RIO
1 / Metsavaht surveys
the rubble at Osklen’s
Rio headquarters,
which burned down
last year.
2 / The charred fabric
moved the designer to
create his new Fenix
clothing line.
3 / His fire-inspired
fashions debuted on
the runway in January;
they’ll hit stores later
this year.
JESSICA MAH
inDinero
“We want to provide fea-
tures that people can use to
actually understand their
money,” says Jessica Mah,
the 21-year-old CEO of
inDinero, a new online
finance-management
platform that functions as a
Mint.com for small busi-
nesses. Among the tools its
more than 15,000 users can
leverage: an automated
budget maker and a sleek
dashboard that tracks
income, spending, and
profits in real time.
3
1
PAMELA RONALD
University of California, Davis
Pamela Ronald has always
felt at home around plants—
nurturing them, modifying
them, propagating them—so
it seems natural that she is
developing new crop vari-eties. One of her breakthroughs: a strain of
flood-resistant rice created
through precision breeding,
not genetic engineering.
The new rice has increased
yields three- to fivefold
under flood conditions in
countries including Bangladesh, India, and Indonesia.
The question to ask about a
new crop, she says, “is not
‘Is it GM?’ but ‘Can it help
food security in less developed nations?’ ”
RIO CARAEFF
Vevo
In just 18 months, Rio
Caraeff has created the
impossible: a successful
business built around
music videos. In March
alone, his Vevo platform
lured 337 million global
unique visitors, who logged
some 2. 5 billion streams
via computers and mobile
apps. Not that Caraeff is
surprised. “Music and
images have always sur-
rounded me,” he says,
citing his father, Ed, who
shot album covers for Elton
John and Carly Simon,
among others. This month,
Caraeff will lead Vevo
through its latest block-
buster live stream—the
Bonnaroo festival.
