Powerful. Independent. Inspiring. These are some of the many adjectives we can use to describe female entrepreneurs. It is known that wage equality is still an issue in the 21st century, but these women took matters into their own hands by being risk-takers and starting businesses of their own.
Here are some accounts of these amazing women worth following on Instagram.
4 Must-Follow Female Entrepreneurs on Instagram
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
Instagram: @ariannahuff
Arianna, a journalist born in Athens, Greece, in 1950, co-founded the popular news blog HuffPost and was made President and Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post Media Group when it was sold to AOL in 2011. She is also a former candidate to the position of governor of California. Arianna has a groundbreaking philosophy – instead of promoting the idea of being a non-stop-work, caffeine-addicted kind of person, she promotes a healthy lifestyle and reinforces the importance of good sleep for better productivity. She even wrote a book about this – The Sleep Revolution – and was invited to do a TED talk on the subject.
Arianna told CNBC that she finds that being productive and chasing professional goals becomes much easier when she does four basic things: get enough sleep, eat healthy food, exercise and meditate.
“We are literally going to sleep our way to the top.” – Arianna Huffington for TEDtalks
SARA BLAKELY
Instagram: @sarablakely and @spanx
Sara invested her entire life savings ($5000), when she was only 27 years old, into creating Spanx, a very popular underwear apparel company. Now, at the age of 47, she is a mother of four children, a billionaire, and a very successful businesswoman. Originally from Clearwater, Florida, she moved to Atlanta, where she researched and developed the concept of her products predominantly on her own.
Spanx is innovative because she created different kinds of waistbands for her undergarments to suit many different sized consumers. This is one of the central ideals of the brand that made it so successful: appealing to different body types. When Blakely launched Spanx, she used three different pictures of women to promote the product, while other companies always used the same type of female model.
GABRIELA FERREIRA
Instagram: @gabiferreirablog
Born in São José dos Campos, in the province of the state of São Paulo, Brazil, Gabriela Ferreira is only 20 years old and is followed on Instagram by 117,000 users. She owns an online clothes store named Classiquê, but her major income is from her YouTube channel, blog and Instagram account. Surprisingly, she also invests in the stock market and talks about finance in some of her videos.
What makes Gabriela so different from other bloggers is the variety of content she posts (in Portuguese) and what kind of content. She started out with the Study Vlogs, a series of videos sharing tips on how to be more productive. She talks about investments, about her life in Biomedicine school and how she manages her time, her money, and now, maternity. Gabriela got pregnant at a young age and had her baby in March 2018, but she never let that stop her from going after success on the different areas she works with, and teaching others how to do so – she teaches classes on productivity and media resources.
OPRAH WINFREY
Instagram: @oprah
The legendary Oprah is famous around the world for hosting the talk show with the biggest audience in history: The Oprah Winfrey Show. Her story is inspiring: her family was not at all wealthy and she was abused by an uncle. Determined to change her way of life, Oprah studied until she obtained a scholarship in one of the most prestigious schools of Milwaukee. She also went trough the death of her newborn at a young age as well. Despite such emotional trauma, Oprah never gave up on herself. She studied Television communications and is known to be the TV hostess with the biggest monthly income in history.
She founded the Oprah Winfrey Network in 2011 and invests on other businesses. The entrepreneur bought shares of the Weight Watchers in 2015 and acted as an ambassador, but sold her share and started out the month of March 2018 with an additional $110 million in the bank. Winfrey owns two magazines (O, The Oprah Magazine and O at Home) and has produced five books. She is also known for being one of the greatest philanthropists of all time and, according to Forbes magazine, is the first African-American woman to be on the list of billionaires.