Elizabeth Blankenship-Singh ’08: Pivoting With Purpose — Designing a Sustainable Future

When she delivered the commencement speech to Hutchison’s graduating Class of 2025, she even structured her comments around the idea. She reminded graduates that the foundation they had built at Hutchison “doesn’t just launch you into your next chapter; it prepares you for every pivot you’ll face throughout your life.” She added: “And trust me, there will be pivots—some intentional, others unexpected.”

Blankenship-Singh had her first pivot before she even graduated from Hutchison. There were two subjects she was passionate about: art and English, especially creative writing. Thinking about college, she assumed she’d major in one of those two subjects, and was considering Vanderbilt, where one of her brothers had attended. Between her junior and senior year, she enrolled in summer classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York City. She said it was mostly for fun, but it turned out she loved the experience and asked her parents if she could attend FIT for college.

“I came back to senior year at Hutchison, I told Mrs. [Gwen] English, and she helped me,” Blankenship-Singh recalled. “In addition to all the classic test scores, essays, and a regular application, I had to submit a full portfolio of fashion drawings and several garments that I sewed as part of the application process.”

She excelled in her four years at FIT and decided to continue immersing herself in fashion by enrolling in graduate studies at Central Saint Martins in London. FIT and Central Saint Martins are often considered among the top schools for fashion design, but they have different emphases. She explained that while FIT skews toward technical competence, such as pattern drafting and draping, Central Saint Martins is known for a creative focus and has produced a number of famous European designers. She had missed some of that creativity while at FIT and wanted to complement her technical proficiency.

She spent a year in London, then returned to New York to look for work. During high school, she had followed a luxury New York fashion brand called Proenza Schouler, which she learned about when the brand collaborated with Target in 2007 on a modestly priced resort wear line. At Central Saint Martins she was asked to write down where she wanted to work, and Proenza Schouler was at the top of her list.

The only problem: there were no jobs available at the company.

“I couldn’t get Proenza Schouler out of my mind,” she explained. “So, I pivoted, and I emailed them and said ‘I’ll intern for you for free, if you just let me come in.’ They said yes. By the second week of my internship, they hired me full time as the assistant designer.”

Blankenship-Singh worked for a total of seven years in the fashion industry and was passionate about her work. Her designs appeared on magazine covers, and her work took her to Los Angeles, Italy, Japan, and other locales. In 2019, one of the products she designed, a tie-dye turtleneck, was named the ninth most popular product in the world.

“It’s satisfying to create something out of nothing,” she said. “That’s why so many people will work in fashion for so long, because those wins feel so good. Once a quarter it’s really gratifying because you have a physical, tangible outcome that shows all the hard work you put in.”

Nevertheless, working in fashion required long hours and the pay was subpar, she admitted. There was something else that was nagging at Blankenship-Singh.

“Because I always liked to make things, I was keenly aware of what happened to the things that I made. I knew that whatever gets made eventually gets discarded,” Blankenship-Singh said. “I personally recycled. I tried to avoid creating as much waste as possible. I was conscious about my own personal decisions. It was hard to reconcile that with what I was spending my time doing.

“I was in the factories, and I could see what was happening when a garment was made, how much waste came out on the back end, and how many garments were unsold. That’s what eventually drove me away from fashion. I wanted to finally marry my personal sustainability beliefs with my career.”

An Opportunity for Another Pivot

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Blankenship-Singh was already thinking of making a change. She had considered asking Proenza Schouler to help pay for a master’s degree in sustainability at Columbia University. “Once COVID hit and everyone’s lives changed, it opened up my mind to the possibility of actually doing a full pivot and leaving my career.”

She remembered discussing ideas with her father and with her oldest brother, Brent, who mentioned that some business schools were waiving their Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) requirements due to testing centers being closed. He suggested she should apply to an MBA program.

“I said, ‘Why would I go to business school? That’s not at all what I want to do.’ Then, every night for a week, I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she explained. “I had this idea about setting up a fashion manufacturing business to be zero waste, leveraging a lot of the resources I already had. I said to myself, ‘Okay, I actually have a reason why business school could make sense, because I have an idea, but I don’t know how to execute on it.’ ”

She wondered whether her FIT transcripts and her SAT score from junior year at Hutchison would be enough for admission. She took a leap of faith and applied to the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.

“I applied on a Wednesday night. On Thursday morning, I had an invitation to interview. I interviewed the following Monday afternoon, and by Tuesday morning, I got a phone call saying I had been accepted,” she recalled.

She described Darden as a perfect fit. Instead of teachers lecturing, students took the lead, grappling with business problems that they had to find solutions for. She discovered that problem solving was an “inherently creative endeavor.”

While she was formulating business solutions for her classes, she was also working hands-on running a business. In 2020, Blankenship-Singh started a clothing company that produced garments on demand from the leftover textiles of luxury brands.

“That was the best thing in the world for me personally, because it forced me to do everything from A to Z, be scrappy, and learn how to do new things that were very hard,” she said.

The company saw some good sales as well as some lackluster sales. Making the garments on demand was an expensive, manual labor process. She remembered talking with one of her investors about what to do and wondered how to find technologies that could solve some of the problems her business had. In 2023, she crunched the numbers and projected that her business wouldn’t make a profit in five years, or possibly even ten. After some soul searching, she decided to close it.

“My company just wasn’t in the right time or place to be successful,” she said. “I think I was honestly operating two years too early.” She noted that there is now a company in Portugal doing on-demand clothing production that uses artificial intelligence (AI), which reduces the expense of manual labor.

The failure of her company, she added, is the main reason she’s in her current job.

Investing in a More Sustainable World

Today, Blankenship-Singh is a Director of Investments at Overlay Capital, a multi-asset class investment firm focused on the built environment, with core strategies in energy and waste and materials. Overlay invests across private credit, private equity, and venture capital, backing technologies and platforms that modernize critical infrastructure and enable more resilient systems.

Elizabeth leads the firm’s equity investments, spanning early-stage innovation through growth and control-oriented investments, with a particular focus on upgrading waste systems, materials recovery, and energy infrastructure.

An example of this type of investment is Overlay’s acquisition of 15 Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs), called “murfs” in shorthand. These facilities are in every city, and it’s where trash goes to be processed. Blankenship-Singh said that with the advances in artificial intelligence, trash sorting is becoming increasingly sophisticated and accurate. This is important because trash that doesn’t get recycled ends up in landfills, which, she said, are filling to capacity.

She said many MRF sort lines previously used a robotic arm, which mimicked a manual sort process. Now they are using an AI-powered optical sorter that’s able to identify the chemical composition of every single thing that goes through the system, making the sort more accurate.

“A lot of these technologies have been in development for several years. However, with the rise of AI and the increase of computing power in the past four years, that’s changed everything. Since MRFs have been able to adopt these super smart AI algorithms, they’re able to sort 1,000 items a minute instead of 40 items a minute in a manual sort.”

In addition to investing in the actual MRF facilities, Overlay has invested in the AI sorting technology. The result is that the MRFs are becoming more efficient and profitable, less material is being sent to landfills, and more material is being recycled and reused.

Blankenship-Singh believes she has a unique perspective in her role. “A lot of venture investors have never been company founders, and because I have that experience and understanding, I’m able to connect with founders in a slightly different way. It makes me better at my job. I know how much change I can make by investing in early-stage companies that are doing innovative things.”

She admits that she misses the painting and drawing that she did daily in her fashion career.