Dolls are big business. Since she was first created, Moms have worried that their daughters would feel diminished by Barbie’s spectacular and unrealistic dimensions. Contemporary artist Nicolay Lamm got dimensions from the US Center for Disease Control for the average 19 year old in the US. And guess what? She borders on obesity. Lamm attributes Lammily’s physique to her athleticism. Will girls like her as much as her Kickstarter supporters who have contributed $370,000 in pre-orders? Virginia Postel reports in Bloomberg. The Anti Barbie
Entrepreneurs Who Nosedived in 2013 Australia
The most high profile woman to fall is Jan Cameron, who was previously number five on the list. Cameron proved her entrepreneurial nous by founding outdoor retailer Kathmandu and then heading up competitor company MacPac.
But Cameron’s next move has misfired, as she spent most of 2013 battling her creditors and suppliers, attempting to regain control of Retail Adventures.
The company (which owns discount brands Go-Lo, Sam’s Warehouse, Chickenfeed and Crazy Clark’s) was placed into receivership in October 2012 with debts to unsecured creditors of $165 million before Cameron, in a controversial move, bought it back from administrators for $58.9 million in February 2013.
The decision cost Cameron $215 million of the $247 million fortune she amassed after selling her 50% share of Kathmandu in 2006.
Despite implementing various cost-cutting measures, the business racked up $144 million in losses between 2010 and 2012, according to The Australian Financial Review.
It currently has sales of around $600 million, a severe drop from the days it was generating close to $1 billion in annual revenues.
Another top entrepreneur to tumble is Amber Ferguson. The solar energy business collapsed last year in Australia.
Ferguson’s companiesCarbon Management Solutions and Aussie Solar Installations were placed in voluntary administration, with Ferguson saying a new, single entity would be formed to focus on the commercial market instead of residential installations.
Ferguson stresses the company is not disappearing through the voluntary administration, and is instead forming a new group, Carbon Management Solutions Group, which will trade as Aussie Solar.
“We’re merging the two companies together in order to reduce overheads, costs and minimise the pressures on running the business,” she says. “But we’re opening up into different fields as well.”
The company has been working on a battery technology for the past two years, which is now ready to be released to the market. “It’s been a huge investment,” says Ferguson.
Both women are working hard to try to turn their respective companies around and we hope we’ll see them back on SmartCompany’s top 30 female entrepreneurs list in years to come.
But their fall is a word of warning for all entrepreneurs, male and female, as a quickly made fortune can be lost just as quickly.
Top 10 Australian Entrepreneurs
Each year, Smart Company celebrates the Australian female business owners who have been exemplary in their industries, are trailblazers and demonstrate inspiring and aspiring business journeys. This year the list generated a combined revenue of $6.127 billion.
That’s slightly down from last year’s list where the combined revenue was $6.452 billion last year and largely reflects the decline in the fortunes of Australia’s wealthiest person, Gina Rinehart. While Rinehart may have fallen from revenue of $2.37 billion to $1.986 billion she is still far and away the list leader. However, there are some extremely impressive business women in this year’s top 10.
There’s a new top 10 entrant this year, Sue Hollis, who has shot onto the list with a bullet and a revenue of $250 million from her corporate travel company TravelEdge.
Here’s the top 10 for 2014:
| Entrepreneur | Revenue | Company |
| Gina Rinehart | $1.986 billion | Hancock Prospecting |
| Vicky Teoh | $724.5 million | TPG |
| Lesley Gillespie | $575 million | Bakers Delight |
| Naomi Milgrom | $445 million | ARJ Group |
| Maxine Horne | $345 million | Vita Group |
| Charlotte Vidor | $285 million | Toga Group |
| Sue Hollis | $250 million | TravelEdge |
| Janine Allis | $225 million | Retail Zoo |
| Therese Rein | $210 million | Ingeus |
| Iris Lustig-Moar | $175 million | Lustig Moar |
The list of Australia’s top female entrepreneurs is ranked according to revenue. Where possible, revenue has been provided by the entrepreneurs; if not, SmartCompany has sourced the revenue from publicly available sources, industry contacts or internal estimates.
An asterisk (*) denotes where revenue has been estimated.
Goldman Sachs and World Bank Invest in Women
Goldman Sachs and the World Bank will invest $132 million to push banks in developing economies to lend to women-owned businesses.
The money will fund a new facility run by the World Bank’s private-sector arm that will extend lines of credit and share risks with local banks to ensure they give female entrepreneurs access to financing for their small and medium-size companies. The two contributors plan to raise an additional $468 million from other investors, the World Bank said today in an e-mailed statement.
“Gender equality is smart economics and a key driver of development,” World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said “We need to do more so that investing in women becomes mainstream by businesses and financial institutions alike.”
The bank estimates that women-owned companies face a $300 billion credit gap, made worse in some countries by unfavorable regulation. Closing that gap would raise income per capita across the main developing economies, with Brazil and Vietnam gaining the most, according to Goldman Sachs research.
The World Bank’s International Finance Corp. unit will invest $100 million in the so-called Women Entrepreneurs Opportunity Facility, with Goldman Sachs providing $32 million, the World Bank said.
“Another day. Another eighty cents.”
Woman Leader in Banking and Finance Excellence Award for 2014
Executive Vice President and Head of the UAE Nationals Segment at First Gulf Bank (FGB), was awarded the Woman Leader in Banking and Finance Excellence Award’ during the 14th Middle East Women Leaders Excellence Awards ceremony.
Woman Leader in Banking and Finance Excellence Award for 2014
Going After Individual Wrongdoers in the Banking Industry
Benjamin Lawsky, New York State’s Banking Regulator. wants to bypass corporations which are legal fictions and go after individuals and ‘name and shame’ them.
“People do cheat. We want to preserve the reputation of our financial sector and make people realize the vast majority of people on Wall Street and banking do good work,” Mr Lawsky said.
Mr Lawsky, a former federal prosecutor, worked closely with Andrew Cuomo – formerly New York’s attorney-general now the state’s governor. Mr Cuomo created DFS three years ago by merging the state’s banking and insurance regulators and tapped Mr Lawsky to run it. DFS supervises 4,400 entities, with assets of about $6.2tn.
Mr Lawsky’s ambition is to establish New York as the financial technology capital of the world. He’s working on a regulatory blueprint that will woo Bitcoin exchange operators to set up in the state.
He sees regulators as having to adapt and be more nimble to developing technologies – and that includes striking a balance between a bank’s application that can take a year to be approved and the reality that a new technology can become outdated in six months.
Mr Lawsky has personally adopted a revolutionary approach to bank regulation. He tweets from a personal Twitter account – with a modest 2,113 followers – and last month participated in a two-hour long “ask me anything” session on reddit, an open forum social media website, to discuss and learn from users of Bitcoin.
He noted that more than “14,000 people from 117 countries tuned into those hearings online, which was not the usual turnout we get!”
DFS continues to investigate foreign banks for violating US sanctions laws saying the number of existing cases is “not as small as a handful but not dozens”. His office is also actively investigating consulting firms for failing to act independently when advising banks.
US Clamping Down on Yanukovych
Our correspondent Andreas Frank reports: The U.S. Treasury formally warned banks Thursday to watch out for transactions by ousted Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych and his relatives and associates, citing sanctions by Canadian and European officials.
Mr. Yanukovych, some of his family members and other former government officials have been accused by the new government in Kiev of stealing state assets. The European Union and Canada signed orders to freeze the assets of 18 people incriminated by Ukrainian prosecutors.
“The measures being taken against these former Ukrainian officials and their close associates increase the risk that they will seek to move their assets in a deceptive fashion,” Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network said in an advisory.
FinCEN’s notice updates an advisory last week warning that banks need to apply “enhanced scrutiny” to transactions by either Mr. Yanukovych or former senior officials in his government. The advisory was designed to protect against “misappropriated or diverted state assets, the proceeds of bribery or other illegal payments, or other public corruption proceeds.” FINCEN Advisory
Honoring Anat Admati on International Women’s Day
Anat Admati is the George G. C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford University. She is both rigorously and passionately concerned about facing the deep economic issues of the US and the world. A paperback of her book, “The Banker’s New Clothes” will be issued soon. This book, co-authored with Martin Hellwig, challenges conventional techniques used to regulate the banking industry and suggests ways to make the operation of banks safer for the world. She has campaigned hard to make her ideas understood by policy makers and common citizens alike. Bankers New Clothes
Crowdfunding for Women
VERA Community is the first Dutch organization aimed at female entrepreneurs. It aims to attract equity-funding online. To offer this service, VERA Community started a partnership with Symbid, the largest equity-crowdfunding platform in The Netherlands. VERA Community launches its own website the 8th of March. Here, female entrepreneurs can start a crowdfunding campaign. The financial and legal round-up will be taken care of by Symbid.
The Netherlands has approximately 350.000 female entrepreneurs; a number constantly on the rise. The last years a lot of networks for female entrepreneurs have been established. However, VERA Community is the only company to offer funding for these female businesses. VERA Community is aimed especially towards Dutch female entrepreneurs who create a positive impact and social value.
Nicolete Loonen, founder of VERA says, “The cooperation with Symbid actually allows bringing this goal into practice. Besides support and advice during the different phases of the company, we can now introduce the entrepreneurs to interested investors. There are a lot of women who want to create a positive impact with their company and we help them find the right funding. On top of that we notice investors want to know how their money is being spent and that they’re looking for companies that are both commercially and socially responsible. Therefore crowdfunding is very well suited for both the female entrepreneur as well as the investor.”.
VERA Community officially starts the 8th of March; in the week of International Women’s Day. The Symbid-Group for VERA Community will open funding requests for female entrepreneurs and investors interested in their companies. Additionally, in cooperation with WomenInvest, VERA Community has arranged several female speakers who will share their vision on and experience with entrepreneurship during International Women’s Day at “De Baak” in Driebergen,
More information about VERA Community can be found on: www.veracommunity.nl
Celebrating International Women’s Day
March 8, is International Women’s Day. The earliest Women’s Day celebrations were organized in the early twentieth century by commie firebrand types like Germany’s Clara Zetkin and Russia’s Alexandra Kollantai. The purpose was to bring together two great political movements, feminism and socialism, and to pay tribute women’s revolutionary potential. The March 8th date was chosen to commemorate the historic protests that took place on March 8, 1857, when female garment workers in New York City took to the streets to protest low wages and dangerous working conditions. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 women in 1911, led to renewed activism that popularlized International Women’s Day celebrations throughout the world.










