In March 2017, Forbes published a feature examining how female consumers were reshaping the global travel industry — and at the center of the story was JOZU For Women, the travel platform founded by Stephenie Rodriguez that would later evolve into WanderSafe.
The Genesis of a Mission
Before WanderSafe, before the Beacon, and before the mission to impact a billion lives, there was JOZU. The name is Japanese for "well done" or "better than," and the company's founding premise was elegantly simple: women drive ninety percent of holiday purchase decisions, yet the travel industry was not built to serve their specific needs around safety, security, and community.
"Women are driving holiday purchase decisions 90 percent of the time and are tasked with researching a destination and determining if it is suitable for themselves," Stephenie explained in her 2017 media appearances.
JOZU For Women was designed to close that gap — a digital travel portal that prioritized safety intelligence, transparent reviews, and community connection for female travelers. The platform featured an AI interface named JENI that helped users find destination information, assess safety conditions, and connect with other women travelers.
The Forbes Perspective
The Forbes feature situated JOZU within a broader trend of companies recognizing and serving the female travel market. With more than 850 million women traveling internationally each year, the economic case was compelling. But Stephenie's pitch went deeper than demographics.
"A positive experience is often related to aspects beyond the hotel's product," she noted, "and the overall feeling of general safety and security."
This insight — that safety is not a feature but a foundational requirement — would become the intellectual bedrock of everything WanderSafe would build. The Forbes article captured that idea in its earliest, most distilled form.
From Digital Platform to Physical Device
The JOZU era proved that the demand existed. Women wanted safety-first travel tools. They wanted transparent information about destinations. They wanted community-sourced intelligence from other women who had been there.
But in September 2017, six months after the Forbes feature, Stephenie attended the Women's Startup Lab in Silicon Valley. Mentors there challenged her to push the concept further. The advice was direct: an app alone was not enough to protect women. The company needed to "productize" its vision.
By early 2018, JOZU had pivoted. The digital platform's AI, data analytics, and community features became the software backbone of a new ecosystem — one that paired a smartphone app with a physical device called the WanderSafe Beacon. The company rebranded, and the mission expanded from making travel better for women to making personal safety accessible to everyone.
The Through Line
Reading the Forbes feature with the benefit of hindsight, the through line is unmistakable. Every challenge Stephenie identified in 2017 — the lack of safety intelligence, the failure of platforms to surface real risks, the absence of tools designed specifically for women — became a feature specification for WanderSafe.
JOZU was the question. WanderSafe was the answer.
The Forbes article captured the moment when that question was first asked on a global stage, by a founder who would go on to answer it in ways that even she could not have predicted.
The original Forbes article is behind a paywall and may not be freely accessible. This article is reconstructed from verified sources.
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