Houston-based subscription box startup plans expansion and new subscriber features

Hostess with the Mostess

Lindsey Rose King created a seasonal home goods box that shows consumers how to enjoy each item. Courtesy of Mostess

A few years ago, Lindsey Rose King offered to host her friend's engagement party, and she realized she had no clue where to start. There weren't any real resources out there for her to seek out.

King created Mostess, a seasonally curated home goods subscription box aiming to make it easier to host friends and family into their homes. The company was founded in January of 2017.

"I came up with the idea out of a need," says King, founder and lead curator, "it's hard to casually invite people into your house."

Almost two years later, King has managed to accomplish a lot of her goals, and Mostess has a great retention rate of subscribers with about a 30 percent growth each quarter, King says.

"We have a 5 percent churn rate, so 95 percent of customers have been customers since their first purchase," says King.

Mostess moves to disrupt the retail space by changing how consumers shop for home goods, accessories, and tabletop items. The box presents products in a different setting than consumers are used to seeing in a brick-and-mortar store by combining products from different brands and lines that may not be typically paired.

"Consumers are getting a product because we are referring it and picking it for them," King says. "We're choosing for the consumer, rather than them choosing themselves."

Growing business
In need of more space, the growing company recently moved into a warehouse in the Houston-area in a partnership with Alpha Graphics West Houston to launch its first local fulfillment center.

Currently, Mostess ships to 48 states, and next year, King says she wants to be able to ship to Alaska and Hawaii by July. Since the box has already got some buzz around it in Canada, King says she hope to be able to start her first international shipping there by 2020.

Mostess is in the wrapping up its busiest season; the company just released its winter box, which, along with the autumn box, King says subscribers usually purchase additional boxes for friends and family.

Looking forward to 2019, she's got exciting advancements for her subscribers.

In 2019, Mostess will begin offering slight customizations to each seasonal box and a special evergreen box. Customers will be able to purchase add-on items beginning with the spring box, such as extra candles or accessories in addition to what is offered. The Mostess evergreen boxes will have neutral and classic home accessories and hosting pieces. King says she wants these boxes to be a go-to gift idea or party-hosting asset for everything from a housewarming to an engagement party.

Starting from scratch
King first had the idea for Mostess toward the end of her 10-year stint living in Washington, D.C. Anticipating a move to Houston, King began to research local bloggers and small businesses to build a support system and platform for Mostess prior to the launch.

"In the small business world in Houston, there is the blogging community and there are actual small businesses," says King. "Both are very active and both very open to chatting about how to make business work between both of you."

King tells InnovationMap that Houston is an ideal city for an entrepreneur, offering a collaborative community of friendly, laid back, and hard-working small business owners.

King shares that she launched Mostess without any outside investment, using only her personal funds to get the product off the ground and relied on her friends and family as a test market. From there, she sought feedback from every single customer and potential customer, collected data, and tweaked details leading up to the launch.

"There was not a home goods subscription box on the market," says King, "I didn't have something to model after."

Elegant items shipped to your door

  

Paige Baker/Mostess

Mostess memberships begin at $120 per seasonal box.

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UH, Baylor researchers make breakthrough with new pediatric leukemia treatment device

childhood cancer

A team of Houston researchers has developed a new microfluidic device aimed at making treatments safer for children with hyperleukocytosis, a life-threatening hematologic emergency often seen in patients with leukemia.

Dr. Fong Lam, an associate professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and a pediatric intensive care physician at Texas Children’s Hospital, partnered with Sergey Shevkoplyas, a professor of biomedical engineering at UH, on the device that uses a large number of tiny channels to quickly separate blood cells by size in a process called controlled incremental filtration, according to a news release from UH.

They tested whether performing cell separation with a high-throughput microfluidic device could alleviate the limitations of traditional conventional blood-filtering machines, which pose risks for pediatric patients due to their large extracorporeal volume (ECV), high flow rates and tendency to cause significant platelet loss in the patient. The results of their study, led by Mubasher Iqbal, a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical engineering at UH, were published recently in the journal Nature Communications.

“Continuously and efficiently separating leukocytes from recirculating undiluted whole blood — without device clogging and cell activation or damage — has long been a major challenge in microfluidic cell separation,” Shevkoplyas said in a news release. “Our study is the first to solve this problem.”

Hyperleukocytosis is a condition that develops when the body has an extremely high number of white blood cells, which in many cases is due to leukemia. According to the release, up to 20 percent to 30 percent of patients with acute leukemia develop hyperleukocytosis, and this places them at risk for potentially fatal complications.

The new device utilizes tiny channels—each about the width of a human hair—to efficiently separate blood cells through controlled incremental filtration. According to Lam, the team was excited that the new device could operate at clinically relevant flow rates.

The device successfully removed approximately 85 percent of large leukocytes and 90 percent of leukemic blasts from undiluted human whole blood without causing platelet loss or other adverse effects. It also operates with an ECV that’s about 1/70th of conventional leukapheresis machines, which makes it particularly suitable for infants and small children.

“Overall, our study suggests that microfluidics leukapheresis is safe and effective at selectively removing leukocytes from circulation, with separation performance sufficiently high to ultimately enable safe leukapheresis in children,” Shevkoplyas said in the release.

Greentown Labs adds 5 new Houston startups to climatetech incubator

Going Green

Greentown Labs announced that it added five startups to its Houston community in Q1 of 2025.

The companies are among a group of 19 that joined the climatetech incubator, which is co-located in Houston and Boston, in the same time period. The companies that joined the Houston-based lab specialize in a number of "green" applications, from converting plastic waste into sustainable materials to developing energy-storage solutions.

The new Houston members include:

  • Concept Loop, a project of Pakistan-based Innova8e Inc., aims to repurpose post-industrial and post-consumer plastic waste into sustainable building materials.
  • GeoFuels, a Sugar Land-based company that produces hydrogen by using baseload geothermal power and methane pyrolysis.
  • PLASENE, a Houston-based company with an innovative platform that converts plastic waste into liquid fuel and low-carbon hydrogen through its proprietary catalysts and modular, scalable, pre-engineered units platform. The company was named to Greentown's ACCEL Year 3 cohort earlier this year.
  • RepAir Carbon, an Israeli company with a fully electric, zero-heat carbon-removal technology that consumes minimal energy, operates without liquids or solvents, and produces no hazardous materials or waste.
  • RotorVault from Pasadena, California, is commercializing energy-storage and load-following solutions that are containerized, modular, and field-deployable systems built on flywheel technology.

Fourteen other companies will join Greentown Boston's incubator. See the full list here.

PLASENE and five other new members—Thola, Respire Energy, Andros Innovations, FAST Metals and Tato Labs—join Greentown Labs through its most recent Advancing Climatetech and Clean Energy Leaders Program, or ACCEL, cohort. ACCEL, which works to advance BIPOC-led startups in the climatetech space, announced its third cohort last month.

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A version of this story originally appeared on our sister site, EnergyCapitalHTX.

Houston startup unveils its innovative leather alternative at the rodeo

sustainable fashion

Last month’s Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo stirred up another rootin’ tootin’ time for Houstonians and beyond.

But before the annual event galloped into the sunset, there were quite a few memorable innovations on display, with one notably coming from Rheom Materials.

The Houston-based pioneer of next-generation materials presented its scalable, bio-based alternative known as Shorai, a 93 percent bio-based leather, through two custom, western-inspired outfits that showed off cowboy flair through a sustainable lens.

“I'm a Houstonian, I love the rodeo,” Megan Beck, Rheom’s business development manager, recalls. “We're sitting there talking about it one day and we're like, ‘Okay, we've got to do something with this leather to show people how good it can look in apparel, how easy it is to wear.’”

Buoyed by the idea that their materials are meant to “change your impact, not your life,” Rheom captured the real-life energy of their bio-leather outfits under the rodeo’s neon lights in a short commercial video and photo shoot with models donning the samples, while dancing and enjoying the festivities. Rheom created a skirt, a leather jacket, and then a leather top for the look.

“Houston is such a vibrant city,” Beck says. “There's so much innovation here. I think the rodeo is just a really, really great example of that. And so we wanted to take this opportunity to take some of these garments out there and go on the slide, go on some of the rides, go into the wine garden and go dancing, because if you've ever felt some of the materials in the market in this space, they're very stiff, you can't really move in them, they're a little fragile, they kind of fall apart.”

Not only do the models in the video look fashionable, but they also look comfortable, and the leather looks natural and supple. And to the naked eye, Shorai appears to be like the leather most wearers are accustomed to.

“What we really wanted to showcase in this is the energy and the movement of the leather, and to show people how good it can look in apparel, and how easy it is to wear, which I think we were able to accomplish,” Beck says.

Next up, Beck says Rheom wants to scale production of Shorai, the Japanese word for “future,” at a competitive price point, while also reducing its carbon footprint by 80 percent when compared to synthetic leather. According to Beck, Rheom plans to see Shorai products come to market sometime this year.

“We have companies globally right now that are testing materials, that are prototyping, that are making garments, making handbags and footwear, and making eyewear because we have a plastic, as well,” Beck says. “So, this year, I do believe we'll start seeing those products actually come to market, which is very, very exciting for us.”

And with their large-scale production partner already set up for Shorai, Rheom plans to start its first production run of the product soon.

“In April, we'll actually be starting our first production run,” Beck says. “We'll be doing it at full scale, full width, and a full run of materials. So over the next five years, we're only going to just try to increase that capacity.”

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