Working on “Wonder Women”, Katy and I spent considerable time researching stories of how women had contributed to the success of brands old and new, and we have included 40 tales in the first section. Over 50% of the stories feature American women so we’re delighted that the book has just been launched in USA.

In the book we grouped the stories into four categories – A Woman’s Intuition, Girl Power, A Women’s Work and A Woman’s Place.

We thought we would give you a taster of a story from each category – today is the final example from this mini-series;  A Woman’s Place

A Women’s Place

A woman’s place is….where she wants it to be.

Revolution is often seen as masculine trait, but we found women are good at challenging the status quo, making things better, doing things in a different way. To quote Dolly Parton: “If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.”

In recent years they have also proved that anger can be a force for good; annoyed with the prejudice and the inertia of many businesses they are catalysts for change.

Stories here are plentiful from Coco Chanel, the convent girl who became the highly successful darling of the Parisian set, to Anita Roddick who challenged many of the beauty industry norms, to Nathalie Molina Niño of Brava Investments. She launched her first tech start-up at 20, and, by her mid-30s, she had already built four companies.

Niño realized her success wasn’t just that she was a female engineer and technologist, it was her ability to tell stories. “There were engineers who could code circles around me, but I was always the person who could explain complex concepts to anyone. I was good at creating narratives, and I loved doing it.”         

With the confidence this insight gave her she decided she wanted to shake up the approach to investments. Her twist though was she didn’t want Brava to limit its investments to female-owned businesses; instead, they would focus on companies that benefit women.  She explains the difference, “An investment in a female-owned company may make a nice headline, but if all that investment does is make one woman very wealthy or worse, if that company harms the environment or perpetuates workforce abuses, is it really moving the dial for women? We look for high-growth companies that do things like pay their mostly-female workforce living wages and give them benefits in industries that rarely do – think elderly care, childcare, domestic workers, food.”

Women tend to modest about their abilities, but we hope our book helps blow their trumpets, women have contributed much to the history of successful brands and will offer much more in the future.

You can read all the stories and interviews in the Wonder Women book, available via amazon USA , amazon UK, or The Book Depository