Emma Wilson: From Intern to Manager

Recent University of Maine graduate Emma Wilson spent most of her senior year working as an intern for a small Orono business as part of the Blackstone Accelerates Growth Innovate for Maine Fellows Program offered through UMaine’s Foster Center for Student Innovation.

Wilson, of Greenville, Maine, says she applied for the internship program because she knew it helped local startups and taught students about innovation.

She was placed with Zeomatrix, a business focused on bringing its patented zeolite technology in odor-absorbing paper products to market. As an intern, she was in charge of handling the launch of the Zeo Litter Bag — a bag lined with the company’s zeolite technology that absorbs the odor of used cat litter and cat waste. The bag is also biodegradable and better for landfills, she says.

Since graduating in May with a double major in management and marketing, and a concentration in international business, Wilson continued to work as an intern for Zeomatrix through the Innovate for Maine program, and was recently promoted to business manager at the company. Her responsibilities include management, product development and marketing.

For the marketing campaign, Wilson completed SWOT analyses (a technique used to understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a company), sales forecasts, usability tests and market research; designed and launched the product’s website; and shot a crowdfunding video.

She recently led the launch of a Kickstarter campaign to help the company raise $10,000 for its pilot run of Zeo Litter Bags.

Wilson says the internship taught her the importance of teamwork and colleague support. It was fun to come together for “create sessions,” where everyone collaborated and came up with ideas — no matter how crazy — for projects, she says.

Innovate for Maine internships are one facet of Blackstone Accelerates Growth (BxG), an outreach effort to create and sustain jobs and economic development in Maine by supporting entrepreneurship and innovation.

Wilson also participated in the latest Big Gig pitch-off and networking event that was held in Orono. The Big Gig is a network for innovators and entrepreneurs in the Orono, Old Town and Bangor areas that was started by a partnership between the University of Maine, Old Town, Orono and Husson University and is supported by BxG.

Event participants were preselected to deliver a three-minute elevator pitch about their business idea to a panel of judges and attendees. Wilson pitched the Zeo Litter Bag and was named the event’s winner.

“Because of the event, I learned to effectively communicate just how great and important our product is in a very short amount of time,” Wilson said, adding she decided to pitch at Big Gig to raise money for the company and to spread the word to people in the community about the Kickstarter campaign.