Stephanie Benedetto traces her entrepreneurial DNA to her great-grandfather, Pappy, who immigrated to the Lower East Side of Manhattan (the original garment district) from Austria in 1986. Pappy collected odds and ends of unused fabric and other decorative items from which he made clothes that he sold in what became a thriving business. After several years practicing law on Wall Street, Stephanie decided to go back to her roots in the clothing business. However, instead of creating new clothes, Stephanie vowed to follow in Pappy's footsteps and turn fashion waste into profits.
In 2014, Stephanie and her co-founder, Phil Derasmo, launched Queen of Raw as a marketplace to address the growing problem of unused textiles which eventually ended up in landfills. On the Queen of Raw platform customers could buy and sell unused textiles. Unlike many founders who focus first on raising capital to fuel their company's growth, Stephanie focused relentlessly on securing customers. That strategy paid off. Queen of Raw's first customers were fashion icons, Marc Jacobs and Kering.
By the time Stephanie participated in Project W's 2020 Women Entrepreneurs Boot Camp (WEB), Stephanie was solving a much bigger problem, one that was exacerbated by the pandemic: excess inventory and waste throughout the entire supply chain. Queen of Raw developed a proprietary SaaS software product – Materia MX – that enables customers to minimize waste along the entire supply chain – from procurement of raw materials to manufacturing, packaging, and shipping. Using Materia MX, customers can easily elect to resell, recycle, divert, or donate excess materials at any point in their supply chain.
Materia MX software also captures auditable data that companies are now required to report or that they voluntarily report under various ESG regulatory requirements or standards. The first customer to use this data in its public reports was Ralph Lauren. Its 2023 Global Citizenship and Sustainability Report notes that "[i]n 2022, we partnered with Queen of Raw, a global textile marketplace, to address fabric waste in production in two key sourcing countries: China and Vietnam. Working with our suppliers and Queen of Raw's global network of recyclers, we were able to divert 11.8 metric tons of unused materials from landfill." Since then, numerous other companies, including Shein, Cotopaxi, Victoria's Secret, and Anheuser-Busch, have adopted the company's solution to minimize waste and collect data to share in their public reports.
Stephanie's vision – and her mission – continue to grow. She aims to tackle the existential threat to our environment resulting from waste across all industries – which currently amounts to $1.77 trillion worth of excess inventory annually. Since WEB, the company rebranded as Aloqia (for more on the name's meaning, click here), has expanded beyond fashion to the food and beverage, CPG, hospitality, and automotive and aviation industries with its sight on more verticals, and collects auditable data on ESG metrics such as water usage, landfill diversion, and carbon emissions. Along this journey, Stephanie has discovered that Aloqia's solution is not just good for the planet, it's good for business. By avoiding or redeploying inventory waste, a company can improve its bottom line by 15% on average while also driving its top line.
Although her vision and mission are boundless, Stephanie's raison d'être is simple: she is doing this for her two sons. As Stephanie notes, "I think every day about the planet we are leaving them. I want them to have clean water to drink, clothes to wear that are not toxic, and a healthy planet to live on." Stephanie and Aloqia are doing their part to make that happen for her children and for all our children.
Hear from Stephanie here.

Stephanie Benedetto
Co-Founder and CEO of Aloqia