Traditional PPE Isn’t Made For Everyone. Here’s How One Startup Is Fixing It.

AmorSui’s new approach to the safety gear is also more environmentally friendly, and stays usable for longer.

It started with an accident that should never have happened.

While a PhD student in 2013, Beau Wangtrakuldee was working in a lab when her ill-fitting lab coat got caught, causing a vessel to tip over and spill a chemical on her that burned right through the material, causing her serious injury.

“I was out of commission for two weeks,” Wangtrakuldee told Technical.ly. “It got me questioning because I was following safety instructions, I was doing everything I was supposed to do, and I was still hurt while wearing the protective equipment.”

AmorSui, a sustainable personal protective equipment (PPE) company founded in Philadelphia by Wangtrakuldee in 2018, was created to solve several problems with PPE, not least of which is the fact that it often doesn’t fit all body types or protect from lab accidents.

Finding a better lab coat — one that was designed for a smaller-framed woman rather than an average-sized man, made of material that protected the skin — turned out to be a fruitless endeavor. By 2015, when Wangtrakuldee was doing her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, she realized while taking a course on entrepreneurship that the business potential for higher quality, better-fitting lab coats was there.

“I was at lunch with 15 or 20 of my girlfriends who work in the lab, and I shared with them my experience of having an accident in the lab,” she said. “And every single one of the women at the table could tell me a story similar to mine.”

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