January 2026 Startup Grant Awarded to Shellf Life

Video Transcript

Marcia: Welcome to a chat with our January 2026 Startup Grant winner. Today I’m speaking with Felicia Neuhoff of Shellf Life. Our Startup Grant is for entrepreneurs who are more in the early stages of building their business. They might just be thinking about it, developing it, or they may have established it and have not yet hit $10,000 in total sales.

I’m Marcia Layton Turner. I’m one of several advisory board members, and every other month, I get the wonderful opportunity to talk to our winners. So, I always love this part. So, thank you all for being here today.

Marcia: I can’t wait to hear more about your business. So, Felicia, could you tell everybody just a little bit about your business, about your company, where you got the idea, what it is—all the things?

Felicia: Sure. So, Shellf Life started with a plate of mussels at a restaurant. I was in Providence watching these beautiful shells pile up on plates, both on my plate and the plates at all of the diners around me, as well as oysters. And I was looking at these beautiful iridescent blue, black, white, cream, architecturally perfect materials and watching a busboy scrape them into the trash. And something about that I couldn’t really let go, and it really kept me thinking about how waste is truly misplaced genius.

So, I started experimenting on my kitchen stove in my little galley kitchen, I was a graduate student at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) and studied architecture at the time. I wanted to see if I could turn these shells into something useful. And of course, I was thinking through an architectural lens, so architectural material was really my target.

The first tile that came out was 10 times stronger and far more beautiful than I ever would have expected. And the process felt like following a recipe. So, that experiment became Shellf Life. It was my master’s thesis work for my architecture and M.Arch degree.

This business, Shellf Life, transforms discarded seafood shells into architectural building materials—things like tiles and surfaces that can replace carbon-intensive things like concrete, ceramics, and terrazzo—so far less extractive, far lower heat, much more sustainable. The idea actually won King Charles III Terra Carta Design Lab as the first American winner ever selected. It was pretty incredible to take literally this tile and place it in his hands at Hampton Court Palace and to see his eyes light up with just that recognition of this was headed to the trash, and now this is something quite beautiful, quite durable. He called it “genius.”

And I took that prize money and wonderful kind of high and built a real material manufacturing facility, of which I’m sitting in the office part. Right now, I’m developing a network of around 30 different restaurants in the Providence area to collect those shells daily and then weekly. And I have about 150 plus architects and designers asking me, “When can I use this material? When can I place my order?” which is really exciting. So, it also started because I couldn’t accept that something so beautiful should end up in the trash.

Marcia: Wow, amazing.

Marcia: So, Felicia, when you were getting started, was there any particular resource that you found especially helpful to get you on the right path or give you any guidance? You’ve accomplished so much, but what might you suggest to other women business owners?

Felicia: Sure. I have some, I guess they’re kind of local-specific resources, but Rhode Island is the smallest state in the nation. So, there are some pretty tight-knit communities here, and I think that’s part of why I wanted to really establish my business here. I’m a New Englander. I’m from Vermont. I thought I was from the smallest place, but it turns out Rhode Island is even smaller.

So, there’s one place called RIHub, and they’re a venture mentoring service. They’ve done a really wonderful job of pairing entrepreneurs like myself with experienced mentors for free and having people who have actually built businesses from every sort of sector just kind of help you, tell you like, “Oh, that’s normal,” or maybe, “Watch out for that,” or perhaps when it comes to funding, trying to figure out how to fund something so novel as I’m working through has been quite the exercise.

Marcia: Felicia, is that Rhode Island specific, RIHub?

Felicia: Yes, it’s RIHub. And it’s called VMS. It’s their Venture Mentoring Service. And then there’s also, they’re located actually within this building called CIC Providence, and there’s, I think, one in Boston as well. But it’s just an incredible entrepreneurship hub here in Rhode Island.

At CIC I found my legal counsel as well, so both in filing a patent. That was a pretty intimidating process, and I found out in the process of that that only 12% of women hold patents in the world. And so I really made it a mission to figure out how to become part of that very exclusive, small, hopefully growing club, and hopefully ideas like ours help kind of push that along.

Then other women founders. I think the isolation of entrepreneurship is real, and especially as a woman in manufacturing, a woman who’s quite literally trying to develop an entirely new industry that connects the dots between a lot of existing industries like hospitality to architecture and waste management, kind of in the middle of that. It’s been just incredible to be able to lean on other women founders, but also to have those moments of understanding, “Wow, I don’t really have anyone to turn to in this moment of this specific problem I’m addressing.”

But I think just having support to keep you going, keep putting one foot in front of the other is huge. And then looking for grants like this one. When you don’t have a large safety net, grants are how women like me stay in the game long enough to prove that what we’re building works.

And I would say book-wise, obviously, this was a business born out of thesis work, so I did a lot of reading, a lot of theorizing, as well as actual recipe experimentation and material development. So, a few that I found really helpful. The first is called The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability—Designing for Abundance. That’s by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. And then another one is called Story Driven by Bernadette Jiwa. And then Julia Watson, she’s done an incredible job of really documenting Lo-TEK building methods from around the world in a lot of indigenous cultures and just ways of working with Lo-TEK in ways that have been really inspirational when rethinking how you build an industry from scratch. And she actually just came out with a book that’s fully about water, and there are aquaculture farmers and mussel farmers and all of that in there. So, highly recommend Julia Watson’s Lo-TEK Water: A Field Guide for TEKnology.

And then my last one is it’s called Material Reform: Building for a Post-Carbon Future, which is by a series of contributors, and it’s incredible. It’s a small book, something easy to take around with you, and it’s a real deep dive into traditional how stone and oil and brick and timber, just how the things that we build with are created and made and harvested or extracted and just really gets you thinking of new ways to make materials like that.

Marcia: Beautiful. Well, so let’s talk a little about marketing. What kind of marketing tactics have you found that have worked well for you?

Felicia: My biggest marketing strategy has been letting the story do the work. I haven’t spent money on advertising—no money. And instead, I’ve focused on telling an authentic story. And journalists have really responded to it. Of course, since winning the Terra Carta, I’ve been featured in the Boston Globe, Architectural Daily or ArchDaily, Architectural Digest Italia, DesignWanted, Dezeen Global, Cement Magazine, many, many others. The press has just continued to snowball and snowball, which is real credibility that you can’t really buy, especially if you’re in a startup position like mine.

I think with that, I’ve also learned that showing up in person really matters. Exhibiting at design shows like Milan Design Week and being in the room where people can actually touch the material, ask questions, it converts that curiosity into real-world demand. Then I think third-party validation is extremely helpful. I think really trying to find someone or something that can really help champion and pull you along, and awards like the Terra Carta or I was just named to Marquis Who’s Who in America for 2026, ongoing press coverage and now the WomensNet Startup Grant. These are signals to people that this isn’t just an idea. Other organizations have vetted this, and that builds trust faster than any ad ever could.

Marcia: Excellent. If there was one thing that our community of fellow women business owners could do to support your business, what would that one thing be?

Felicia: Well, the first thing is to vote when Shellf Life goes live on the WomensNet voting page. Every vote counts towards the end-of-year $50,000 grant, and all of that money right now is going towards our third-party material testing to help get us to commercialization. So, that would be extremely helpful. And then of course to follow and share. We are on Instagram @shellf.life. And the more people who learn that building materials can come from restaurant waste, the faster the idea spreads.

And spread that word. So, if you know an architect or a designer or anyone renovating a space who cares about sustainable or even better, regenerative design, tell them about Shellf Life. And word of mouth from the community like this would change everything for us.

Marcia: Fantastic. It’s been so interesting chatting with you three. I really appreciate your time. Thank you for sharing your stories, and congratulations again for being our January Startup Grant winner.