As the CEO and first-time female founder of Saie, one of the fastest growing beauty brands, Laney Crowell has shown how to build a business with social impact and purpose. Saie bridges a gap between high performance makeup formulas, non-toxic natural ingredients, and sustainable business practices. What started as a wellness blog that hosted conversations around clean beauty alternatives has turned into a viral business.
On Thursday night in New York, Crowell, a 2025 TIME 100 Next Honoree, received TIME’s 2026 Earth Award. Past recipients of TIME Earth Awards include marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, U.N.
Secretary General António Guterres, and actor and activist Jane Fonda. Saie, beyond gaining cult popularity and surpassing $100 million in product sales, has implemented many climate commitments into its business, including plastic reduction and responsibly sourced packaging. In her acceptance speech for the honor, Crowell stressed the importance of taking action.
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,” she said. But my instinct to take action didn’t start in beauty—and it doesn’t end there.” She recalls picking up litter on trails when, as a child, she went hiking with her family. Now she’s taking those small lessons on leaving places better than she found them and applying them to making a difference in the massive beauty industry, which she said creates an estimated 120 billion units of plastic packaging waste every year.
Since Saie started in 2019, Crowell’s company has committed one percent of sales to environmental causes and partnered with rePurpose Global to collect twice as much plastic as they produce. Over five years, Crowell said Saie has recovered 200,000 pounds of waste. While her contributions sometimes seemed small in the face of the staggering amount of new waste generated daily, Crowell realized that she didn’t have to do this alone.
In 2025, Saie launched Planet Beautiful with Sephora and rePurpose Global, funding the recovery of more than 1 million pounds of plastic waste from nature in its first year. The number of brands that are joining have only been growing, she says, turning into greater amounts of waste collected. But we also need to talk about the power of beginning.
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