March 2025 Amber Grant Awarded to Eco Bandage

We’re excited to announce the March $10,000 Amber Grant recipient. Congratulations to Kiowa Kavovit, founder of Eco Bandage.

Recently, WomensNet Advisory Board member Marcia Layton Turner sat down with Kiowa for an exclusive interview. You can listen to their conversation and view the transcript below.

Video Transcript

Marcia: We are speaking today with our March 2025 Amber Grant winner Kiowa Kavovit of Eco Bandage. I’m Marcia Layton Turner, one of several WomensNet advisory board members.  

Kiowa, Could you tell everyone a little bit about your company and where the idea came from to start it?

Kiowa: Sure, so I am the co-founder and CEO of Eco Bandage. We’ve created SecondSkin. It is the world’s first liquid bandage, which if you don’t know, it’s basically liquid in a bottle that you can brush on. It creates an antiseptic waterproof layer over any burn, laceration, cut, scrape, or anything where you want that extra protection. 

It’s also a great sticker bandage alternative, which makes it much more sustainable. I think over 10 billion end up in landfills and oceans every single year. 

We come in three diverse skin tones and then two fun colors as well. We just launched last year after a very long development process that started when I was a little kid; I’m 18 now. 

We just launched with FDA approval and we’re very proud of where we’ve come organically. So, WomensNet is coming at a perfect time for us as far as growth and everything like that.

Marcia: Amazing. At 18. And where are you based?

Kiowa: South Florida.

Marcia: Awesome. So, for those in our WomensNet community who are thinking about starting a business or have started and are looking for other resources, could you just tell me about a resource that you found helpful as you were starting or growing Eco Bandage? 

Kiowa: Yes. So, as far as getting into the retail space, which is what we’ve been focusing on this year after getting market validation and getting all of our FDA approvals and things like that, we went to our first ECRM event through RangeMe. It’s basically like speed dating for retail buyers. You have to do 10-minute pitches for your product. 

That has been the most valuable thing for me personally and for my family as well in the past year. Having to pitch your product over and over again makes it really easy and it gets you comfortable and good at it. 

I would say for anybody who has a product that they’re having to pitch or even a business idea that they’re having to pitch, even if you can’t go to one of those types of events, pitch to your family and friends, pitch to people that you meet and get yourself really, really comfortable with talking about your product, because I think that’s really been the most valuable thing for me.

Marcia: Good tip. Certainly, the more you pitch, the easier it gets, the more comfortable you get. 

Kiowa: Absolutely. You get tons of no’s in this business, especially for us being in the first-aid category, which is somewhat stagnant and not easy to break into. But every pitch, the value is that experience rather than the yes or the no that you get at the end of it. So, that’s been an awesome lesson to learn.

Marcia: Good perspective. 

Kiowa: We’ve also done [a lot of our graphic design and branding] through Canva. Canva is an awesome resource. We did all of our new box design through Canva.

Marcia: Let’s talk specifically about marketing. Are there marketing strategies that you found helpful or any that you don’t think are worth the money?

Kiowa: For us, social media has been huge and will continue to be our biggest marketing platform. This product is really for everybody. So, if we had to go and spend money on every single ad for every single niche and every single person, we’d be spending more on marketing than each ad would be worth. So, I think focusing on organic growth is going to be the biggest thing for us in the next year. 

We’ve also been working on teaming up with influencers who we feel are in a similar space as far as sustainability, cosmetics, first-aid, things like that. So, I think finding the right people in your community and making sure that you’re staying involved, social media is the biggest tool.

Other than retail, we’re definitely targeting food service. We’ve had so many messages from bartenders, servers, and chefs saying that this product is really saving them. We actually had one bartender say that she had been struggling with bar rot for five-plus years and that Eco Bandage was the only thing that was helping her at this point. She was using it to actually protect her hands before that was happening.

Marcia: Excellent. I hope you’re collecting testimonials, Kiowa.

Kiowa: Absolutely. That’s another huge thing for us.

Marcia: Kiowa, is there one thing that the WomensNet community could do that would really help you?

Kiowa: I mean, just being here in and of itself has been so beneficial. The grant came at an incredible time for us. We’re in the middle of scaling and all of that is going into our product production. So, that’s awesome. 

We’re also in the middle of our seed round as far as investments. We have a lot of interest from retail buyers that we can’t necessarily provide for. We basically have more interest than we can provide for being a family-owned, bootstrapped business at this moment. So, I would say anybody that you guys can think of that might be interested in investing within WomensNet or outside of it would be awesome. 

And then following our social media — it’s just Eco Bandage on everything. Checking out our website would be awesome. Yeah, just tell your friends about it. It’s a great product. 

Marcia: Will do. Well, amazing. Thank you again for spending the time with me, sharing your story with the WomensNet community. And congratulations again on being our Amber Grant winner for March 2025.