Saie Founder Laney Crowell Advocates for Collective Climate Action

Laney Crowell, founder and CEO of the clean makeup brand Saie, has been honored with a TIME Earth Award at the TIME100 Next Gala, recognizing her commitment to environmental sustainability within the beauty industry. Crowell highlighted the significant impact that can stem from entrepreneurial vision and collective action in tackling climate change.

"I’m an entrepreneur. And entrepreneurs have a particular kind of superpower: we can take a teeny-tiny idea, believe it becomes something, and move it forward, until it’s bigger than we ever imagined," Crowell stated in her acceptance speech. She explained that Saie was built on this belief, growing into what she described as a global powerhouse.

Crowell's dedication to environmental action predates her career in beauty, recalling childhood experiences of picking up litter during family hikes. She aims to apply these formative lessons to the beauty industry, which generates an estimated 120 billion units of plastic packaging waste annually. Since Saie's inception in 2019, the company has pledged one percent of its sales to environmental causes and partnered with rePurpose Global to mitigate plastic waste. According to Crowell, Saie has recovered 200,000 pounds of waste over the past five years.

Recognizing that individual efforts can seem small against the scale of environmental problems, Crowell emphasized the power of collective movements. In 2025, Saie collaborated with Sephora and rePurpose Global to launch Planet Beautiful, an initiative that funded the recovery of over one million pounds of plastic waste from natural environments in its first year. Crowell noted that an increasing number of brands are joining this effort, contributing to larger amounts of collected waste.

"In climate, we talk a lot about the enormity of the problem—and we should. But we also need to talk about the power of beginning. That is how individual action becomes a collective movement," Crowell said. Her ambitious goal for Saie is to contribute to the recovery of 100 million pounds of plastic waste from nature, expressing a hope that even this significant figure will eventually seem insufficient in the face of ongoing progress.