Photo courtesy of Arx
Kaitlin McCarthy
CEO, Ionic Development, and co-founder, ARX
Age: 38
Industry experience: 17 years
Dr. Hilary Gallin
Co-founder, ARX
Age: 37
Industry experience: 15 years
As the ranks of women in construction grow, the industry’s personal equipment has been slow to adapt to a changing workforce. Two former Harvard Business School classmates – one a doctor, the other a real estate developer – teamed up to design and market a new line of work gear specifically tailored to the female workforce. Dr. Hilary Gallin is an anesthesiologist, and her business partner at their new venture, ARX, Kaitlin McCarthy worked at HYM Investment Group in Boston before founding Ionic Development in 2022. Their first product, a fitted safety vest available in three sizes, retails online for $55. Already, the company has lined up deals to supply equipment to Woburn-based Tocci Building Companies, Wakefield-based NorthBridge Partners, IMCO Construction and Build Health International, a Beverly nonprofit that builds health care facilities in developing nations.
Q: When did it make sense to do something together as business partners?
Gallin: I’m an anesthesiologist, so I’m not actually in construction, but I wear [personal protective equipment] in my day-to-day job and it became challenging for me to find PPE that fit. So I was talking with Kaitlin, and I’ll hand it over to her.
McCarthy: And I said, “I know exactly how you feel.” I’ve been in construction and real estate development for 17 years. I run Ionic Development Co. in Boston and every time I walk on a job site, I feel like the PPE doesn’t fit it. The vests are usually very big. It’s not just a physical issue. It becomes a pride issue and an emotional issue for the women on the job site. And so we said, if this is an issue in our two very different industries, we wondered if this was an issue across the board. We started interviewing women in different industries, and found a resounding “yes.”
This is an issue in every industry that requires PPE. From there, we decided to match the different pieces of PPE against different industries. And we found that the high-visibility reflective vest was a pretty common piece across industries, and one that we consistently heard women had an issue with. So that was when the idea was born, to start to design a better vest.
Q: How did the design process work?
Gallin: We really wanted to reimagine what PPE could be for a woman, and rather than just taking something off the shelf and tweaking it, we really started from the ground up. We really wanted to reimagine what PPE needs to be for a woman. We actually ordered vests from a number of different industries: hunting, construction, runners. We tried to figure out if we could redesign this, and what we wanted it to look like. From there, we had a number of focus groups on job sites to give them prototypes, we had a designer help us make them, and we came up with a design that we feel is made for a woman and really supports them on their day-to-day.
Q: When were the first vests delivered to you and put in service on job sites?
McCarthy: We received our first shipment earlier this year, and it’s been on job sites for a few months now. Because we had been doing focus groups with women at various construction companies, architecture firms, etc., around Boston, we had people ready to go and ready and excited to buy the product. So it’s on several job sites, not only around Boston, but we’ve sold vests around the country. We have a Midwestern civil engineering company. We’ve been in touch with a trucking company, and we’ve even made it international. There’s a group called Build Health International that builds women’s health clinics in Africa, and we actually caught their eye, and they purchased our vest.
Q: What other industries and product lines are you looking at?
Gallin: We want to be a head-to-toe solution for women’s PPE. We are starting with reflective vests to get to know our customers. Then we want to expand to other items. Our next item online is a long-sleeve shirt that is moisture-wicking and is very comfortable to be worn all day on the job site. From there, we want to expand to expand to boots and goggles and gloves, and we really want to be a one-stop shop, because we want to be a trusted partner in any PPE need you have.
Q: What is Ionic Development’s specialty and business plan?
McCarthy: I founded Ionic in 2022. We are both developers on the principal side, as well as offering third-party consulting services. We’re also a joint venture partner in Massport parcel D4, which is 200 units of all affordable housing.
Q: What are the key elements of your proposal for parcel 5 in Providence?
McCarthy: We really took what the [195 District] Commission said as far as their desire to have a pedestrian-friendly site. We put together a plan that took advantage of the fact that the pedestrian bridge comes right over the river and spills right onto our site, so people could continue through and right on to Brown University. So as we were putting together the plan for that site, we really wanted to create a sense of place. We like to call it pedestrian porosity. And the exciting retail programming in the inner street was really our vision for that site. We are currently in due diligence and right after that we would start the permitting and entitlement.
Q: What third-party services do you offer to outside companies?
McCarthy: We offer owners representation, owners project management and we do feasibility studies. We manage entitlements on behalf of other developers, so we really plug into any part of the development process, similar to a Leggat McCall or Redgate. We’re really focused on multifamily. As everybody knows, there’s a housing shortage. And on the third-party side, we’ve done a lot of work in life sciences, actually. We’re starting to see that pick up a little bit more as well, more on the spec suite kind of project rather than the ground-up project. We see that coming back as well. As we’ve seen with the office and life science market, it’s important to be diversified as a firm. The good news about housing is it’s always going to be a need. And I think being in Boston and the Northeast, there’s such strong fundamentals here that it tends to be a place that investors continue to feel confident about.
Gallin’s Five Favorite Boston Parks:
- Esplanade
- Arnold Arboretum
- Boston Public Garden
- Emerald Necklace
- Rose Kennedy Greenway
McCarthy’s Five Favorite Local Restaurants:
- Oleana
- Bar Volpe
- Coppa
- Orinoco
- Amrheins
