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Men have been at the top of the leading board for years, dominating the world of business. But with the rise of influential women like Coco Chanel and Estée Lauder came the launch of a whole new era for businesswomen across the globe. Union Square VenturesModern Fertility is a women’s health company focused on making fertility information more accessible to women everywhere. They offer the first comprehensive test you can take at home to check in on your fertility.
Before the pandemic, in 2019, there was over 45,000 tech startups launched across the UK, with over 17,401 of these being registered in London. This figure is seen to have risen, with many new startups being registered in the UK which is why female entrepreneurs are so important to the UK economy. A recent study by Print-Print was carried out throughout the two UK lockdowns and the results show a significant rise in the number of women starting their own company for the first time. Since the pandemic started, the results of the study suggest that female-owned startups have grown by almost one third. The founder of SPANX dealt with plenty of failure in the professional world before starting the wildly successful shapewear business. This female entrepreneur founded an innovative online startup to help people find child care, pet sitters and house sitters. Care.com is now one of the top sources for finding child care providers online.
Net Worth: $65 Million
The Global Fund for Women supports organisations run by women, girls and trans people outside the United States. Successful applicants will receive funding and resources to help their local communities and often get multi-year grants. Resnick founded the Wonderful Company with her husband Stewart, home to brands like Pom Wonderful, Wonderful Pistachios, and Fiji Water. CEO and founder of Epic Systems, a medical-record software provider, her net worth is $2.5 billion. Along with her husband Tom Love, she founded convenience store chain Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores. The co-founder of ABC Supply Co., a wholesale home-construction materials distributor, has a net worth is $4.7 billion.
Rinehart became chairman of the company when her father passed away in 1992, and since then has become one of the richest female entrepreneurs in the world. Among all of Oprah Winfrey’s ventures, she’s been able to amass a total net worth of around $3 billion, making her one of the richest, well liked, and famous female entrepreneurs in the world. Folorunsho Alakija is actually the richest female entrepreneur in Nigeria. She may not be as well known in comparison to other female entrepreneurs like Oprah Winfrey, Arianna Huffington and Beyonce, but she has a net worth of around $2.5 billion. Cher Wang is definitely one of the most successful and famous female entrepreneurs, and HTC is now one of the top competing mobile technology companies among others such as Apple, Sony and Samsung.
When Hardenbroeck died in 1691, she was the wealthiest woman in New York. With the creation of the Barbie doll, Ruth Handler has changed the way little girls play and dream, and has forever left her stamp on American culture. Handler came up with the idea of creating a doll that looked more like an adult after noticing that her daughter preferred to play with paper dolls that looked like adults. Although her husband didn’t think the idea would sell, Handler debuted Barbie (her daughter’s nickname) at a New York toy fair in 1959. Handler and her husband, Elliot, were already selling dollhouse furniture and other toys through their company, Mattel, based out of their Hawthorne, California, garage.
If you’re interested in learning more about Oprah Winfrey and some of the lessons for entrepreneurs that can be learned from her advice; check out this article I wrote on 8 Business Lessons from Oprah Winfrey. Denise Coates is the founder of Bet365, an English based online gambling company. Denise purchased the Bet365.com domain name back in January 2000, and spent a whole year building the site before launching it out to the public. Cher Wang is the co-founder of HTC, the famous mobile technology company. Wan Laichun bought the company with her brother in 2004, and now her estimated net worth is roughly $1.5 billion.
Annie Pilon is a Senior Staff Writer for Small Business Trends, covering entrepreneur profiles, interviews, feature stories, community news and in-depth, expert-based guides. When she’s not writing she can be found on her personal blog Wattlebird, and exploring all that her home state of Michigan has to offer. An accomplished entrepreneur, Leslie Blodgett has stood at the helm of multiple beauty brands, including Bare Escentuals and Shiseido. Once she graduated, she got a summer internship at Xerox and now she runs the entire company.
Though Gisele Bundchen might be more well known for her modeling career, she is also an accomplished entrepreneur. Arianna Huffington founded the Huffington Post, one of the most notable news publications online. But Huffington remains involved in business endeavors and has another startup in the works called Thrive Global. Angie Hicks is the founder of Angie’s List, a website that helps connect consumers with local service providers. She started the business back in 1995 and has since grown it into one of the most recognizable sources for finding service providers. This popular fashion designer has built a worldwide brand of shoes, handbags, clothing and more. She is also a philanthropist and has won several awards for her designs and business acumen.
Founded in 2013, Heidi Zak left Google to build a new kind of bra company to help women reinvent how they shop for bras. Dan has been running Wealthy Gorilla and studying self-development, personal finance and investment for the last 7 years, whilst traveling the world and being able to call Bali, Indonesia, his HQ. To this day, Wealthy Gorilla has become one of the fastest growing self-development sites in the world; with over 160 million views worldwide, and more than 200,000 followers on social media. Dan’s mission is simply, to inspire others to live their dreams and be the person to whom they say; “Because of you, I never gave up.”
Daring Female Entrepreneurs From History
GVBlavity is a venture-backed technology and media company aimed at building beautiful products and experiences for black millennials. Founded in July 2014, has quickly grown to become one of the fastest-growing digital media outlets on the web, reaching more than seven million millennials a month. Having a net worth of 1.6 billion dollars, Cher has been featured on Forbes world’s billionaires list in 2010, 2011, and 2012.
Zum provides safe, efficient, and reliable child transportation for school districts and busy families. The company currently provides services in the San Francisco Bay Area, all of Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego. Workday VenturesBased in New York, Landit is a personalized career pathing platform that helps women and diverse groups succeed in the workplace. Landit creates personalized solutions that enable enterprises to attract, develop, and retain high potential diverse talent. 23andMe is a human genome research company that helps customers understand what their DNA says about their health, traits, and ancestry. raised $100 million in a Series D round led by Sequoia Capital in March of 2019. The financing reportedly sets a $1.2 billion valuation for the New York-based company.
There are thousand of females working as entrepreneurs in the world, but this list highlights only the most notable ones. Historic entrepreneurs have worked hard to become the best that they can be, so if you’re a female aspiring to be a entrepreneur then the people below should give you inspiration. There’s absolutely no doubt that the business world is dominated by men, but women are coming strong from behind. Their fresh and ingenious insight in niches like design, architecture, finances, and management simply reshaped the way we see the world today. Even the printing business would look extremely different without the sweeping force that is female entrepreneurship.
Meet The Women Of The Next 1000
Lauer is the founder and owner of Sweeten – a startup that serves as an intermediary between home renovators and contractors. Sweeten was launched in 2011, and ever since, it managed to raise $4.3+ million in funding. When Walter died in 1950, Beech became president—the first woman president of a major aircraft company.
Roddick and her husband stepped down as co-chairmen of the company in 2002, but she continued to consult until her death last year from a brain hemorrhage at age 64. She brought makeup from the stage to everyday life and slowly developed a global empire. Elizabeth Arden, born Florence Nightingale Graham in Woodbridge, Ontario, moved to New York at the age of 30 to pursue her dream of building a cosmetics corporation. There she began working with a chemist to create a beauty cream, something new for the cosmetics industry at that time. After traveling to Paris in 1912, Arden became the first person to introduce the concept of eye makeup to American women and offered the first makeovers in her 5th Avenue salon.
This female entrepreneur created an online presentation tool that’s popular with a lot of small businesses — SlideShare. She’s been named as one of the most powerful female entrepreneurs in the world. So, in honor of the women who dared to dream beyond the limits of societal pressure, today we want to name some of the most inspiring names among female entrepreneurs. She’s a media queen, and she reaches an estimated 49 million viewers a week through TV alone. Oprah Winfrey was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, in 1954 and lived in poverty while growing up.
It wasn’t until she designed her own wedding dress at the age of 40 that she decided to start her own fashion label. Luckily, Wang had all the right contacts, having worked atVoguemagazine, to make her brand a success. She has since expanded her company and now designs everything from jewellery to homeware and kitchenware, as well as clothes, shoes and accessories. Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and former editor-in-chief of the successful news website HuffPost .
Although her original entrepreneurial venture, Nasty Gal, folded earlier this year, Amoruso remains involved in the business world. The news site focuses on providing informative content to young self-employed individuals and entrepreneurs. Cynthia Ndubuisi is the entrepreneur behind EverGlow, a company that makes biodegradable dish soap that’s derived from plants. She created the product because of some challenges faced by people in her native country of Nigeria. And her success is magnified by the fact that she does it all in the tech industry, a sector that has traditionally been dominated mainly by male entrepreneurs. She provides coaching and consulting services to other entrepreneurs looking to boost their bottom line. Weili Dai is the co-founder of Marvell Technology Group, a company that makes semiconductors.
Born Sarah Breedlove on a Louisiana plantation on December 23, 1867, Walker was the daughter of Owen and Minerva Anderson, freed blacks who both died by the time she was 7. After her husband died only six years into their marriage, Walker moved to St. Louis, where she worked hard as a laundress and cook, hoping to provide a life free from poverty for Lelia. There is little evidence proving the medical efficacy of Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, and she is often lumped into the quackery category along with hundreds of other 19th century patent medicine producers. But she was also addressing a need for women-centered health care, which was often inadequate at the time. To find alternative methods of care, and avoid dangerous, expensive doctor visits, women often turned to home remedies—like Pinkham’s compound. Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was one of Washington, D.C.’s most popular 19th century dressmakers—but it was a long and difficult road to financial independence and recognition.
More Famous Female Entrepreneurs: Dame Emma Warmsley
Thrive CapitalHonor, a home care company, is a pioneering national network of home care providers. Founded in 2015, Honor is now one of the fastest-growing, non-medical home care companies in the U.S., currently providing care to families in California, Texas, and New Mexico. With a community of over 75,000 professionals and more than 1,000 companies, The Mom Project is committed to building a better workplace for mothers and the businesses they support. Founded in 2017, Metawave is a wireless technology company that builds intelligent and high-performance automotive radars by leveraging metamaterials and AI. Based in Mexico City, Grin Scooters is a software company that operates a network of operational shared electric scooters. Currently, Grin operates in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Sao Paulo, and Bogota, but it has plans to expand to other cities throughout Latin America.
There are plenty of trailblazers making their mark on a variety of different industries. If you’re looking for some inspiration or any female entrepreneurs to look up to, take a look at the successful women entrepreneurs listed below and learn how they’re changing the world with their businesses. So if you’re interested in learning a little more about some of the most successful women in business; check out this list of the most famous female entrepreneurs in the world. With all the industries together, there are around 250 million self-employed women, worldwide; a figure expected to grow to 490 million by 2030. Women are starting businesses at record rates and female entrepreneur activity is up 10%.
She’s proof that absolutely anyone can make her dream business a reality. Debbi Fields, a young mother with no business experience whatsoever, opened her first cookie store in Palo Alto, California, in 1977. At the age of 20, Fields was able to persuade a bank to finance Mrs. Fields Chocolate Chippery. Despite critics, she garnered worldwide acceptance as the premier chain of cookies and baked goods. The company was acquired in 1996 by a Greenwich, Connecticut-based investment firm, Capricorn Holdings. Fields went on to author several cookbooks, host a weekly program called “Great American Desserts” on PBS and sit on various boards, including the board of Outback Steakhouse Inc. in Tampa, Florida. Now known as Debbie Fields Rose, she lives in Memphis with her second husband, Michael Rose.
- It really is a true example of why she’s one of the most famous female entrepreneurs.
- Now with a net worth of $1 billion, Sara Blakely’s success story is worth a read.
- Dan’s mission is simply, to inspire others to live their dreams and be the person to whom they say; “Because of you, I never gave up.”
- Pleasant was successful enough that she became a philanthropist, and continued her abolitionist work by housing escaped slaves and finding them jobs.
- As a self-employed woman with two young children, these women definitely do inspire me to keep on going even when things get tough.
In 1997, the businesswoman centralised all her ventures with the creation of her media company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. She has since delved into TV and radio, and she continues to focus on her cooking success. Vera Wang was a late bloomer, compared to the rest of the ladies on this list.
Bootstrapping is launching a business with little or no cash investment or other support. She proves her business acumen by guiding double-digit growth in her OWN network and demonstrates her passion for educating females worldwide through her support of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. She added fashionista to her list of accomplishments, with the launch of the now-defunct House of Dereon in 2004 and shop.beyonce.com in 2012. Women have been paving the path for entrepreneurs in every industry for many decades. Women Who Tech regularly run Startup Challenges to showcase and fund innovative, female-led startups around the world. Ten finalists pitch to a panel of industry experts for a share of $60,000, resources and mentorship.
In 1866, Pleasant brought a civil rights case against the North Beach Mission Railroad Company, which refused to pick up black passengers. Her success in court, as well as in continuing the Underground Railroad through her businesses, have earned her the title the mother of California’s civil rights movement. Pleasant was successful enough that she became a philanthropist, and continued her abolitionist work by housing escaped slaves and finding them jobs. Like Walker, Malone’s parents were former slaves who died when Malone was young. Her older sister Peoria raised her, and together, they began experimenting with hairdressing.
Jack Ma’s Worth And Influence
In 1775, Goddard became the first American woman postmaster in Baltimore, Maryland. But she is most famous for printing the first copy of the Declaration of Independence that included the names of all the signers. Goddard remained postmaster until she was replaced in 1789, then continued to work as a printer and bookseller until her death in 1816. Thanks to their passion and determination, these outstanding women have made and continue to make a difference in our lives. While there is still work to do as equality is not yet the norm in the workplace, it’s still important to celebrate current successes.
