Competitors were evaluated by a panel of regional business and entrepreneurship experts, including Deb Colitas of FocusPoint Communications; Tasemere Gathers of DMFirm LLC; Edith Gutierrez-Hawbaker of TLJ Creative Group; Katie Kupstas of ICW Capital; and Rachael Wolfe of the Kutztown Small Business Development Center. Collectively, the judges brought expertise in communications, branding, entrepreneurship, economic development, investor readiness, marketing and small-business strategy.<\/p>\n
In addition to the competition, the evening featured networking opportunities, vendor displays from current and past competitors, and an update from the 2025 LaunchBox Ladies grand prize winner, highlighting the continued impact of the program.<\/p>\n
“LaunchBox Ladies is about far more than one evening of competition,” said Cindy Evans, director of Lehigh Valley LaunchBox. “Our goal is to create an environment where women entrepreneurs can access mentoring, education, connections and encouragement throughout their business journey. Every founder who steps onto this stage becomes part of a community committed to helping one another succeed.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Competitors were evaluated by a panel of regional business and entrepreneurship experts, including Deb Colitas of FocusPoint Communications;…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":229093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[153,155,154],"class_list":["post-229092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}