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Madam C. J. Walker
Born
Born to formerly enslaved parents and orphaned young, Walker worked as a laundress before selling hair products for Annie Turnbo Malone. Her own company, based in Indianapolis from 1910, combined manufacturing with a sales force of trained agents and beauty schools, so growth came from thousands of women earning commission. She was one of the wealthiest Black Americans of her day and used the money for civil rights causes.
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Helena Rubinstein
Born
Rubinstein left Kraków for Australia, where she began selling a face cream in Melbourne in the early 1900s, and went on to open salons in London, Paris and New York. Her model mixed treatment salons, which gave the products scientific authority, with department store distribution. Her rivalry with Elizabeth Arden shaped the American beauty industry, and she sold the US business to Lehman Brothers in 1928 before buying it back cheaply after the crash.
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Coco Chanel
Chanel's first millinery shop in Paris was funded by her lover Arthur "Boy" Capel, which is a reminder that capital often came from somewhere. She turned it into a couture house, and the business really scaled through perfume: Chanel No. 5, made and sold under a 1924 deal with the Wertheimer brothers that gave her only a small share. Her comeback in 1954, at seventy, rebuilt the fashion side, and the Wertheimer family owns the company today.
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Rose Blumkin
Born
Rose Blumkin arrived in the US from Russia with no English and opened Nebraska Furniture Mart in an Omaha basement in 1937 with 500 dollars. Her rule was to sell cheap and tell the truth, and when rival dealers took her to court for undercutting fixed prices, she won. Warren Buffett bought most of the business on a handshake in 1983, and she kept working on the shop floor past her hundredth birthday.
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Estée Lauder (businesswoman)
The daughter of immigrants in Queens, Lauder learned skin creams from her chemist uncle and co-founded her company with her husband Joseph in 1946. Counters in prestige department stores, free samples and a gift with purchase were the model, and later brands such as Clinique and acquisitions such as MAC turned it into a group. Her sons and grandchildren have run it since, and the family still controls the votes.
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Beate Uhse-Rotermund
Born
A former Luftwaffe test pilot left widowed after the war, Uhse began by selling a leaflet on contraception to women in northern Germany in the late 1940s. That grew into a mail-order business for marital aids and then, in 1962 in Flensburg, what is often called the world's first sex shop. She fought thousands of legal complaints, built a chain across Germany and took the company public in 1999. It is an unusual entry, but an undeniably substantial business built from nothing.
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Ruth Handler
Born
Handler co-founded Mattel with her husband Elliot and Harold Matson in a Los Angeles garage in 1945. She ran the business side, made the bold call to advertise toys on television year-round through the Mickey Mouse Club, and pushed through the Barbie doll in 1959 over objections from colleagues. She was forced out in the 1970s after a financial reporting scandal, then founded a second company making breast prostheses after her own mastectomy.
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Mary Kay Ash
After decades in direct sales, Ash quit when a man she had trained was promoted over her, and in 1963 started Mary Kay Cosmetics in Dallas with 5,000 dollars of savings and her son Richard Rogers running the finances. The model was direct selling through independent beauty consultants, motivated by recognition and the famous pink Cadillacs. Direct selling has critics over how few consultants earn much, which is worth weighing, but the company grew into a billion-dollar private business.
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Lillian Vernon (businesswoman)
Born
Pregnant and working from her kitchen table in Mount Vernon, New York, Vernon placed a 495-dollar advertisement in Seventeen magazine in 1951 offering personalised handbags and belts, using money she had received as wedding gifts. Monogramming became the business's hook, the catalogue grew into one of America's best-known mail-order firms, and in 1987 Lillian Vernon became the first company founded by a woman to list on the American Stock Exchange.
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Rosalía Mera
Born
Mera left school at eleven to work as a seamstress in A Coruña, met Amancio Ortega at a shirtmaker's and co-founded the business that became Zara with him in 1975, working on its early production and workshops. After their divorce she kept a stake in Inditex that made her Spain's richest woman, and she used it to back a pharmaceutical group and a foundation for people with disabilities. Credit for Zara usually goes only to Ortega; it should not.
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Debbi Fields
Born
Fields was twenty with no business training when she opened a cookie shop in Palo Alto in 1977, with a loan secured on her husband Randy's standing as an economist. On the first slow morning she walked the street handing out free samples, and the shop sold out. Mrs. Fields grew into hundreds of mall stores, run with a computer system Randy built to tell managers what to bake each hour. Overexpansion and debt cost her control in the early 1990s.
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Anita Roddick
Born
Roddick opened the first Body Shop in Brighton in 1976 with a £4,000 bank loan while her husband Gordon was travelling. The cheap refillable bottles, natural ingredients and campaigning stance made it distinctive, and franchising let it spread to hundreds of shops without much capital. It floated in 1984 and was sold to L'Oréal in 2006, a year before she died.
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Lynda Resnick
Resnick started in advertising, and with her husband Stewart built The Wonderful Company, the California agricultural group behind POM Wonderful, Wonderful Pistachios, Fiji Water and Halos mandarins. She ran the marketing, turning commodity crops into branded products, as with the pomegranate juice in its distinctive bottle. The company is also one of California's biggest users of agricultural water, which is a fair caveat about how its farms were built.
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Martha Stewart
A former model and stockbroker, Stewart started a catering business from her Connecticut kitchen, then turned her know-how into books, a magazine, television and a deal to sell homewares through Kmart. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia went public in 1999 and made her a billionaire on paper. A conviction in 2004 for obstructing an insider-trading inquiry and five months in prison dented the business, but she rebuilt the brand and has since sold the company on.
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Oprah Winfrey
Born
Winfrey grew up in poverty in Mississippi and Milwaukee and was a local news presenter before hosting the Chicago talk show that went national in 1986. The key business decision was to take ownership: through Harpo Productions she owned her show instead of being paid by a network, then expanded into magazines, film, a book club and a cable channel. Her fortune comes from that equity, not her salary.
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Diane Hendricks
Born
Hendricks grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm, sold houses, and in 1982 co-founded ABC Supply with her husband Ken to distribute roofing, siding and windows to contractors. After he died in a fall in 2007 she took over and grew it into the largest such wholesale distributor in the US, with several hundred branches. Unglamorous and enormous, it is a useful counterweight to the idea that big businesses must be consumer brands.
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Hilary Devey
Born
Before she was known from Dragons' Den, Devey founded Pall-Ex in 1996, selling her house to fund it. Pallet networks were her idea of how small hauliers could compete with giants: independent members collect pallets locally, bring them to a central hub in Leicestershire overnight, and swap loads for delivery the next day. It became one of Britain's biggest pallet distribution networks. She died in 2022.
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Jacqueline Gold
Born
Gold joined Ann Summers, then a small chain her father David had bought, as a trainee in 1979, and noticed that women were uncomfortable in the shops but keen at home. Her Ann Summers parties, women selling lingerie and toys to friends in their living rooms, transformed the business, and she later moved the shops onto the high street. She was chief executive for decades until 2022 and died in 2023, an example of building something new inside a family firm.
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Denise Coates
Born
Coates ran the accounts at her father Peter's chain of betting shops in Stoke-on-Trent, then bought a domain name in 2000 and built bet365 in a portable cabin in a car park, with a bank loan secured on the family shops. Its edge was in-play betting and live streaming run on its own software. It is now one of the world's largest online gambling firms, and she remains joint chief executive with her brother John, as well as Britain's best-paid boss.
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Zhou Qunfei
Zhou left school at sixteen to work in a watch-lens factory in Shenzhen, and in 1993 started her own workshop making glass for watch faces. When Motorola asked for scratch-resistant glass phone screens, her firm was ready, and Lens Technology went on to supply cover glass for Apple, Samsung and others. It is a story of manufacturing capability built step by step, rather than a consumer brand, and she remains chair.
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Folorunso Alakija
Born
Alakija trained as a secretary and a fashion designer in London and built the Supreme Stitches label in Lagos before turning to oil. In 1993 her company Famfa Oil won an offshore exploration licence and brought in Texaco, now part of Chevron, as technical partner; the block turned out to contain the large Agbami field. Famfa's stake was later disputed with the Nigerian government, and courts largely upheld it, which shows how much political risk sits in such fortunes.
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Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw
Born
Mazumdar-Shaw's first capital was 10,000 rupees and a partnership with an Irish enzyme company, Biocon Biochemicals, which gave her a customer from day one in 1978. She used fermentation skills from her brewing training to make enzymes, then moved Biocon into insulin and biosimilar drugs sold worldwide. Banks were reluctant to lend to a young woman at first, so the partner's backing mattered. She is still executive chairperson.
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Sara Blakely
Blakely was selling fax machines door to door in Florida when she cut the feet off a pair of tights to wear under trousers. She wrote her own patent application, used 5,000 dollars of savings, and persuaded a hosiery mill in North Carolina to make the first Spanx in 2000; a mention on Oprah's favourite things list did the rest. She owned all of it with no outside investment until selling a majority stake to Blackstone in 2021.
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Tory Burch
Born
Burch worked in fashion PR and marketing at Vera Wang and Ralph Lauren before launching her label from a New York shop in 2004, with money from her family and her then husband Christopher Burch. Selling online from the start, accessible luxury prices and ballet flats with the double-T logo made it a fast-growing company with hundreds of stores. She handed the chief executive role to Pierre-Yves Roussel in 2019 and stays executive chair and chief creative officer.
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