WIRED and Porsche: The Journey of the Entrepreneur with Sharmadean Reid

Greg Williams sits down with Sharmadean Reid to discuss her true passion of unlocking the potential of female entrepreneurship.

14 September 2022

Growing up in Wolverhampton in the 1980s, ‘entrepreneur’ wasn’t a word that Sharmadean Reid heard often. But the British-Jamaican beauty mogul knew a powerful woman when she saw one.

She also knew that she wasn’t seeing enough of them. That’s why she founded BeautyStack, a social marketplace designed to help independent beauticians grow their businesses and gain wider attention for their unique visual style.

By spotting the potential for disruption that had been overlooked in a tech ecosphere dominated by white men, Reid has helped transform the beauty industry, receiving an MBE for her services in 2015. Yet, as she tells WIRED Deputy Global Editorial Director Greg Williams in this virtual briefing, her true passion has always been helping other women to unlock their own potential.

That’s the motivation behind her latest venture, the Stack, a platform for women to share their experiences, whether in beauty or business, and learn from each other’s successes and failures. And that’s what motivates her involvement with Porsche’s The Art of Drive campaign, which seeks to spotlight thought leaders to help inspire and educate the creators of the future.

With three successful start-ups under her belt, Reid has a lot of experience to share. In this briefing, she describes the importance of bringing your vision to bear on every detail of your project, how businesses can be incredible vehicles of social change, and why she believes entrepreneurship is much less about the independence of working for yourself than the responsibility of working for others.

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