So to help mark the milestone, they’ve selected their top ten entrepreneurs to watch this year.
Happily, five of them happen to be women, and they’re building a wide range of businesses.
We’ve published the list of women below. Check out the full SmartCompany list here.
Lana Hopkins—Mon Purse co-founder and chief executive
The bag building game is now a global proposition for Lana Hopkins and her team.
The business is barely two years old, but Hopkins and co-founder Andrew Schub have created a multimillion-doallar company in Mon Purse that now has a foot in the door in the UK and US thanks to deals with Selfridges and Bloomingdales at the end of 2016.
While Hopkins tells SmartCompany she “couldn’t have written a better script if I tried”, the brand’s pitch to customers is highly calibrated to the rising interests in personalised goods. The founders know their brand, and are riding the wave of strong interest in the “design it yourself” bag and purse range.
“It’s affordable and you don’t need to mortgage a home to buy your bag. It’s about quality and it’s about technology,” Hopkins said last year.
Alyce Tran—The Daily Edited co-founder
Anyone dreaming of transitioning from a day job into their own million-dollar operation should review Alyce Tran’s career path so far. The young lawyer has turn her blog The Daily Edited into a $5 million leather goods business that boasts an Instagram audience of more than 150,000 fans. With a partnership with David Jones well underway, the business is poised for another big year.
Along with co-founder Tania Liu, Tran has carved out a strong look and voice for the business, and is one to watch when it comes to engaging with users on social media.
“More people are on Instagram at night than watching TV. So put content up there and put some energy behind it,” she told SmartCompany in 2016.
Kayla Itsines—The Bikini Body Training Company co-founder
Kayla Istines and Bikini Body Training Company co-founder Tobi Pearce were the youngest entrants on the 2016 BRW Young Rich List, with a combined estimated worth of $46 million.
The fitness entrepreneur’s “Bikini Body Guide” programs have reached millions around the globe and continue to do so, although the company has always kept quiet on exact audiences and profits generated by the fitness empire.
What we do know is the reach of the brand’s social media profiles: Itsines has more than 10 million Facebook fans, 6.3 million Instagram followers and 390,000 Twitter followers. These platforms prompt tens of thousands of engagements with every post, while fuelling sales of the brand’s programs and merchandise.
Richenda Vermeulen—ntergity founder
The founder of impact-driven digital agency ntegtrity says she’s been able to grow her business by keeping honest and sharing stories. She believes strong team connections are the key to long term success—a lesson she recently blogged about on the company’s website after taking her whole team, and their partners, on an intensive strategy boot camp where they all shared a villa for a week on Thailand’s Koh Samui.
In a climate where startup founders and entrepreneurs say building sustainable businesses that have a direct social impact is the most important thing, ntegrity is an example of one operation that continues to grow while keeping a focus on impact-driven projects
Vermeulen told StartupSmart this month that as ntegrity expands, her own willingness to rely on others for expertise and support has been key, with the belief that the ability to work through roadblocks is a matter of personal introspection.
“The person who I was five years ago is not the person I am now and that’s a good thing,” she says.
“One of the best things about being an entrepreneur is you’re not stale.”
Zoe Pointon–OpenAgent co-founder and chief executive
Zoe Pointon (right) and co-founder Marta Higuera
The chief executive of the real estate agent comparison platform has previously said you should work for a startup before launching your own.
Her own entrepreneurship journey began at a very young age, which has no doubt come in handy when making big decisions after she and co-founder Marta Higuera closed a $12 million funding round in August 2016.
OpenAgent is getting started on a national expansion plan, with Pointon telling StartupSmart last year the team is confident in their focused approach and the ability to disrupt this one specific area of the real estate market.
“Real estate is an area where people that are thinking about buying or selling have a lot of pain in the process and there’s nowhere near enough transparency,” she says.