How Kraten Created Her Career

Ariel Kraten is the Director of GoBlu, a Boston based company that specializes in sustainable solutions in the textile industry. In this role, Ariel promotes more conscious decision-making in light of sustainability concerns and global interconnections, as well as business priorities. She started her Sustainability Journey as Peace Corps in Suriname in 2004-2006, where she experienced firsthand what it feels like to have limited access to clean water, and how that impacted the health and wellbeing of her remote Amazon community. Ariel then spent five years working with Big Brothers Big Sisters International, an NGO focused on mentoring, where she was fascinated by the challenge of rolling out a program in over a dozen different countries with different cultures and challenges. She then moved to the Netherlands to work at the sustainable fashion consultancy MADE-BY, most recently as a Senior Consultant, where her focus was on creating support tools for brands and helping them develop and apply the right sustainability strategy in light of environmental challenges. Ariel received a Master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in Nonprofit Leadership/Leadership for Social Change and incorporates a group dynamics perspective into her work.

Hannah Uebele: For students today trying to get into the field you’re working, in would you recommend they follow the same kind of academic path you took?

Ariel Kraten: (laughing) No. I think there are so many different paths to it and my own path was so curvy. I think there are a lot of different ways if what you want to do is work in sustainability, and if you have an industry in mind I think that whether you go the more science-y side or the more humanities side there are skills in all of those different disciplines that are needed. When I was talking about how at GoBlu we have people ranging from finance to chemistry, auditors, researchers, academics, it’s all of these different backgrounds bringing something different. When I think about our group, kind of our smaller group of four, I would say one person was very deliberate of being in this industry and two of us kind of came in quite sideways and the third I would say was kind of in between. So sometimes you don’t know where your studies are going to take you.

Kraten stressed the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and the advantages of understanding multiple and different perspectives.

Kraten: What was interesting for me was that I started in biology, so I was really interested in the science-y side, but I really shifted and went humanities. In the role I have been doing for last few years, oftentimes I’m like the middleman between the scientist types and the non-scientist types, so one of the big challenges that we have is that designers and textile chemists don’t speak the same language. It’s going to be really hard to have a conversation between those two, but they need to share information so I often find myself more like the go-between, because I don’t have the same knowledge as the textile chemists but I can follow along and have a conversation with them. Same with the designers, I don’t have the same perspective that they have but I’m not as far away as some. I feel like it’s so hard to find people who are interested and reasonably proficient in the science side who are still able to draw in people who are not naturally open to that side of things, so I think that’s really good to have both sides.

Uebele: Is there something special that a person must have to become successful in this field of work – is there a secret to your success?

Kraten: I think for getting into this kind of a field it’s just about keeping your eyes open to new opportunities. So when I first started I kind of became fascinated with this connection between social economic development and clean water and the garment textile industry and I found a company that was working on it. They weren’t hiring, so I volunteered – I stuck around until they hired me. So I think just keeping your eyes open to the opportunities and building your own opportunities. In some of these emerging industries like this one the opportunities are huge if you’re willing to figure it out as you go along. You have to not be scared if there’s not a clear path because a lot of the interesting stuff is happening in these newer fields and a lot of these newer fields don’t have a path so yeah its kind of fun.

Uebele: Can you tell me about a moment in your life or a decision that you made that was crucial in getting you to be where you are in your career today?

Kraten: Well one would definitely be doing Peace Corps. I didn’t know where that was going to lead me at all and wouldn’t have expected this connection to water to come out of it, but of course you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know what the challenges are going to be or where you end up. I think another one would be when I found this company that was doing something that I was interested in and volunteered and kind of just decided, ‘I’m going to work here, I’m going to make this happen.’

Uebele: Looking back is there anything you would do differently that you would want students now to be aware of?

Kraten: I never thought about careers when I was in school obviously because I was a classics major (laughing). There are so many careers out there that I had never heard of…there are so many jobs out there and I think back now, if I had known that urban planning was a thing, maybe I would’ve gone into that. There’s just so many things out there. I also think… I stressed so much about my major and I think there are very few majors that really set you on a path, especially in undergrad, so don’t worry about it, do what you like, and usually what you’re good at is what will make you happy later. Almost every opportunity that I’ve had professionally has been through my relationships that I’ve built and I think that it is crucial…where you can build those connections with people who are doing things that are interesting and where you can return the favor later.

Uebele: Anything final advice you have for students wishing to pursue a career similar to yours?

Kraten: It’s so hard because I didn’t ever feel like I was pursuing a career. I think that things are changing a lot, I think about with GoBlu what’s so crazy is we circle the globe between the four of us who are the co-directors. What does that mean for our organization and what does that mean for how we work, when we work, how we balance our work and our lives, and all of these things? Everything is so in flux. One thing I was really grateful for was when I was in the Netherlands, experiencing a different culture’s take on work-life balance. I’m very glad I had that exposure because I think that’s something that we don’t do well here and I think that the only way it’s going to get better is if we start taking a stand. So I would stress that there are different ways to do things culturally and I think that understanding the culture of your organization is really important also.