Staying “Dri"

The rain was coming down hard and fast as Deirdre Horan ’14 walked to work. She popped open her umbrella only to have it blow upwards and snap. Before she tossed it in a nearby trash can, something caught Horan’s eye—a tag on the canopy that read, “Made of 100% polyester.”

Normally, Horan wouldn’t have paid much attention to this small detail, but she had just watched a poignant documentary on the ocean plastic crisis. This tag served as an “a-ha” moment. 

“That documentary stuck with me,” she recalls. “I learned that plastic can be recycled and made into polyester yarn. When I saw the tag on my umbrella, I thought, ‘We can make this better.’ So, I have spent the last two years trying to make it better.”

Now, Horan is launching Dri, a company that makes umbrellas out of ocean-bound plastics. “Our focus has been to help make a cleaner and healthier planet by innovating on a product that has been around for centuries but hasn’t been updated or given an eco-friendly edge.”

Horan, who also works as an account manager in the technology industry, began by researching companies that gather ocean-bound plastic. “Seventeen billion pounds of plastic flow into the ocean every single year,” she says. “The main challenge is to prevent plastics from going into the ocean rather than trying to pull it all out right now, so I decided early on to work with ocean-bound plastic.” 

The next step for Horan was vetting suppliers to ensure that she would be using authentic material, and then she worked with a sourcing agency to find the appropriate umbrella factory to manufacture Dri umbrellas. “It was like putting pieces of a puzzle together—getting plastic from the beaches of Thailand to fabric mills, so that the sheets of polyester could be created, and sending that fabric to the umbrella factory for assembly.”

Having never set out to be an entrepreneur, Horan is learning by trial and error. “I went through four rounds of umbrella protypes. The first one, hilariously, wasn’t waterproof.” 

Launching later this spring, Dri will sell four selections of umbrellas all with the company logo, which her fiancé, Eric Bird ’14, created, along with Dri’s website. (“We met as first-year students living in the Sem, but didn’t start dating until our senior year,” Horan shares.) Kaitlyn Simmons ’22 also helped the startup when she worked as a social media intern with Horan last summer.  

A healthcare administration major and communications minor at Stonehill, Horan has always been someone who invests in her passions. As a student, she was part of the Student Alumni Association, a student ambassador, and heavily involved in volunteering through Campus Ministry’s Into The Streets program. She also studied abroad in New Zealand and went on three H.O.P.E. trips. 

“After watching that documentary, I really began to think about the ocean plastic crisis. What would it be like if our beaches were covered in trash?” Horan says. “I just wanted to be someone who saw a problem and took action.”