Chuck Slaughter

Chuck earned a BA in Architecture and a Master’s in Public and Private Management from Yale. After trying and failing to build successful businesses in bike repair and then documentary film, Chuck founded TravelSmith, and grew it into a leading travel gear company with over $100 million in catalog and online sales. In affiliation with private equity firm Golden Gate Capital, he participated in the acquisition and turnaround of several major apparel brands with combined sales over $2 billion.

Seeking to apply his business skills to a more meaningful purpose Chuck lead the turnaround of a system of franchised clinics serving the poor in Kenya. This experience inspired Chuck to create Living Goods, which operates networks of ‘Avon-like’ health entrepreneurs who go door-to-door teaching families how to improve their health and wealth and selling life-changing products, like treatments for malaria and diarrhea, fortified foods, family planning, clean cook stoves, and solar lights. Living Goods empowers agents with an innovative smart phone app that automates diagnosis, ensures prompt follow ups and provides real time data to every manager on any device. A recent randomized evaluation shows the Living Goods model is reducing child mortality by over 25%, for less than $2 per capita. Working closely with local governments Living Goods is helping solve two of the most vexing problems in community health: how to keep vital medicines in stock, and how to pay the millions of health workers needed. Now LG’s advisory division is helping some the worlds largest NGOs replicate the model in Uganda, Kenya, Myanmar and Zambia.

Chuck serves on the boards of Yale’s School of Management and the Horace Goldsmith Foundation. He received an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, a Draper Richards Fellowship, and is a World Economic Forum Social Entrepreneur of the Year.