Lioness Weekender spoke to Carla Frankel about her vision for her brand, her entrepreneurial journey so far, and her focus on fine craftsmanship to create luxury products and experiences.

What does your company do?

Top Drawer Collection is a ready-to-wear brand with a heritage in personalised sleepwear. Born out of the desire to create a celebratory experience of self-love and appreciation for the finer moments in life- we focus on the coming together of luxury design, fine craftsmanship and bespoke gifting. Ethically made and finely-finished in South Africa, we set out to create a brand that allowed a woman to be the purest version of herself – elegant, relaxed, and confident. With a strong social media following, we are the sole distributors of our product over our e-commerce website www.topdrawercollection.com

What inspired you to start your company?

Top Drawer Collection was born out of the desire to create a celebratory experience of self- love. During my second year of university, during a health scare that was comforted by matching pyjamas bought by my mom for her and I, I had my “uh-huh” moment. At the time, there wasn’t anyone in the country doing personalized sleepwear that focused on a bespoke gifting experience. I had found my gap in the market based on a desire I wanted to fulfill through what I had personally experienced. Top Drawer Collection was built through a deep desire to create a core experience rooted in self-love, backed with incredibly high-quality, locally made products, that offered an international quality, sensory gifting experience like no other. I had no fashion experience, but a really firm idea of the product and experience I wanted to create, so I dived right into the ocean and learnt how to swim when I got there. I learnt from every mistake and both my product and business skills got better with time. Often entrepreneur’s wait for their product to be perfect before launching. If I look back at the first draft of the product it was great, but it has grown so much since then. In hindsight, I got into the market at the right time and perfected the details later.

Why should anyone use your service or product?

When Top Drawer Collection launched, we were the first in South Africa to offer luxury personalized sleepwear. We also offered a gifting service that was only being offered by the likes of Jo Malone. When we sent our first orders out, we had gotten feedback from clients comparing our packaging experience to internationally renowned companies such as Net-a-Porter. The brand became an Instagram sensation and chosen brand of the elite within our first 3 months, with celebrity’s such as Sarah Langa, Kefilwe Mabote and Connie Fergurson ordering from our little business. We believe that it’s accelerated success and “instagrammabilitly” was due to the fact that we based our product off creating an incredible experience for our clients, one that they wanted to share with their social following. From the moment you receive our package- the scent of roses that fills the room as you untie the silky ribbon enclosure, to the delicate embroidery that personalizes the set for each unique individual, the short intro card introducing you to the skilled seamstress who made your sleepwear set, to the feeling of the ultra-high quality garment that slips over your skin- we are separated from our competitors through our love affair with “attention to detail”. Three and a half years later, fuelled by the pandemic, many other businesses have joined the sleep and loungewear phenomenon and like many other businesses, we could no longer rely on only a great product to lead the market.

However, during that time and until today, we have retained market loyalty, and we truly believe that it’s not only because of our unwavering quality and experience – but more so that our client’s really feel the story behind Top Drawer Collection. The story is more than only fashion and beauty, it is about a deeper experience of comfort and vulnerability that I craved myself and wanted to create for the world. They choose us to create memories with – from weddings, birth’s, birthday slumber parties, to even one’s last moments in hospice. Top Drawer Collection is not just high-end sleepwear, it is a story and that is the difference.

Tell us a little about your team

The Top Drawer Collection team is a close knit team of eight. 95% female run, our team is made up of skilled ladies from our local community. I’m super passionate about building a business that helps people grow, and the Top Drawer Collection team is a team of people who are all really passionate about great service and large scale impact. Our seamstresses are seasoned veterans in their field, understanding the importance of the “finer details” and consistent quality, and our management team is a team of young women who have a common goal of creating real impact in the world. We are a part of a movement called fashion revolution which is a platform that shines a light on the skilled hands behind your garment, and the ethical and fruitful working conditions that allows them to flourish.

Share a little about your entrepreneurial journey. And do you come from an entrepreneurial background?

From a little girl I knew wholeheartedly that I wanted to create something of my own. It’s safe to say that many business ideas came and went – the first one being my card making business that I started when I was 10 years old. My parents didn’t believe in pocket money, they believed in us working in exchange for money. I figured, selling cards to most of my family who felt obliged to support a bidding 10 year old would earn me more than washing my parents’ car for pocket money. This entrepreneurial feeling was with me in every decision I made growing up, and that’s why when I finished high school I chose to complete a bachelor of commerce degree specializing in finance. I figured that even though I didn’t know what business I wanted to start at the time, I did want the skills of managing the back end of a business. Because of the “entrepreneurial nag” that was with me in my early life, I knew that the moment that “THE GAP” crossed my path, I would immediately recognize it and take the bull by the horns. Having no experience in fashion and no real experience of running a business, I knew my gap had come and I was confident in the experience I wanted to create. So, I worked very hard to make that outcome happen. For as long as I can remember, all close family members of mine were business people of some sort, owning businesses from successful companies, to small mom & pop shops. Some successful and some failing, but mostly all started with courage and their take on a solution to a gap in the market. Growing up in this environment, I was always taught that firstly you can make an impact in this world if you can touch peoples’ hearts’ or peoples’ needs’, and secondly, nothing in this world will come to you without hard work.

What are your future plans and aspirations for your company?

We are only in the beginning of our business journey with so much more room to grow. We have overcome the first known hurdle of a business which is the 3 year mark. Our next goal is to take Top Drawer Collection retail concept abroad, with the goal of wanting to put African manufacturing and fashion on the map. Right now, we are continuing to grow Top Drawer Collection aggressively with our first local retail experience currently in the works. In our first 3 years of business we have focused on becoming really well known for our core product, which is personalized sleepwear, and now that we have our clients’ loyalty and trust, we have so many more products in the works. This is something I always advise entrepreneurs, focus on doing something really well, become known in the industry for doing it really well and then expand. Don’t grow too quickly – patience is such an important part of growing a business.

What gives you the most satisfaction being an entrepreneur?

I love creating really great products and building a really strong brand identity, one that is a step above what is available in the market. There really is quite a thrill in creating something from nothing. On a broader scale, I’m super passionate about building a business that helps people grow. On a large enough scale, that’s how you make your mark in the world – impacting and empowering one person at a time.

What’s the biggest piece of advice you can give to other women looking to start-up?

1. Start before you’re ready.

2. Embrace your feminine edge in business and see it as a strength. There is power in your softness.

3. Be patient – social media has created a culture of instant gratification, and the truth is that in business, nothing is built over night. It takes patience and resilience to build a strong foundation that will stand the test of time.

Find out more about Carla’s entrepreneurial journey and the Top Drawer Collection, email Carla: carla@topdrawercollection.com or visit the company website and social media pages:

WEBSITE | FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM

Book Review

In her new book, Becoming Self-Made, Elaina Ray walks you through her journey of finding her soul’s purpose and building a multimillion-dollar business in under two years and across multiple continents. In this travel memoir/powerful business guide, you will discover, as Elaina did, what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, create and scale your business, and use your innate gifts to chase your wildest dreams so that you, too, can do what you love without sacrificing your most valuable resource: your time.

Filled with stories from around the world, timeless wisdom, ironclad strategies, business truths and myths, and reflective homework prompts, Becoming Self-Made is where Elaina Ray invites you to be unafraid of reinventing yourself, of starting something new, and of building from the ground up as many times as it takes.

Do you desire:

• To keep the power of your time, money, and energy in your own hands?

• To be a sought-after leader in your industry?

• To meet revenue targets with systems and stand-out marketing?

• To become someone who runs your own company, makes your own rules, decides your own hours, and receives unlimited amounts of wealth?

• To help build an economy where people circulate more wealth, more joy, more purpose, and more satisfaction?

To answer that desire that’s been calling to you, perhaps at deafening levels, you must take big risks, understand your genius, monetize your gifts, heal your childhood wounds, stand up as a leader, and open your heart to the wildness and richness of the journey itself—a journey that led Ray to Bali, Indonesia, where she found her purpose after a quarter of a lifetime searching the nooks and crevices of the world for her “why.”

It’s time to get the all-access pass to the freedom, abundance, and joy that is your birthright. It’s time to become self-made.

Author Quotes

I didn’t see myself as an entrepreneur. My goal was to be a freelancer and to be able to piece together enough sources of income to keep me out of the nine-to-five. Fundamentally, I was in survival mode.

By thirty two, I had claimed my throne as a woman and as a confident entrepreneur. I became a self-made millionaire and international real estate investor.

I wouldn’t be here today if I was still standing on the edge of The Void, calculating all the potential ways it could go wrong or waiting, hoping, praying for someone to come along and go first and show me it was safe.

About the author

Elaina Ray is a business coach and success mentor for entrepreneurs who want to start and scale businesses doing the work they love to do most. She works with coaches, healers, personal development experts, product-based businesses, done-for-you agencies, thought leaders, authors, speakers, and all kinds of business owners. After leaving her corporate career at Fortune 500 companies like IBM and Uber and traveling to more than 60 countries, including places like Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, and Mongolia, she started her own coaching company and became a self-made millionaire by age 31. Today Elaina combines heart and passion with systematized and proven business strategies, authentic marketing, and high ticket sales mastery that has helped hundreds of clients accelerate the growth of their own soul-led business. She’s passionate about helping more entrepreneurs who have decided to make a living from their god-given gifts and purpose become self-made millionaires while also achieving the true energy, time, and lifestyle freedom they hold as top values. Elaina is a dedicated world traveler and global citizen who currently lives in Bali, where in addition to running her 7 figure business, she indulges her passions for ecstatic dance, kirtan, personal growth, yoga, real estate development, and conscious international community.

www.elainaray.com

by Lionesses of Africa Operations Department

The date was March 8th 1966 and one Kenneth Ewart Boulding stepped forward to present his paper at the 6th Resources for the Future Forum on Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy in Washington, D.C. (here).

With our usual apologies about the gender specific usage from yesteryear, let’s take ourselves back to 1966 and listen to what he had to say…(our emphasis):

“We are now in the middle of a long process of transition in the nature of the image which man has of himself and his environment. Primitive men, and to a large extent also men of the early civilizations, imagined themselves to be living on a virtually illimitable plane…there was always some place else to go when things got too difficult, either by reason of the deterioration of the natural environment or a deterioration of the social structure in places where people happened to live…

The closed earth of the future requires economic principles which are somewhat different from those of the open earth of the past…I am tempted to call the open economy the “cowboy economy,” the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior, which is characteristic of open societies. The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the “spaceman” economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having inputs of energy.”

So began what is known as ‘The seminal text’ on The Circular Economy. In a background paper for an OECD/EC Workshop on 5 July 2019 “The Circular Economy: What, Why, How and Where”,(here), they confirm: “It is truly astonishing how this single brief paper (with just five references) set out most of the insights on which current circular economy thinking is now based, and little less astonishing how long these insights took to become more firmly entrenched in thinking about the environment, resources and the economy.“

Back to the hero of our story this weekend still on stage unaware of the excitement he will be generating in 2019 and indeed in 2022…“The difference between the two types of economy becomes most apparent in the attitude towards consumption. In the cowboy economy, consumption is regarded as a good thing and production likewise; and the success of the economy is measured by the amount of the throughput from the “factors of production,”…

By contrast, in the spaceman economy, throughput is by no means a desideratum, and is indeed to be regarded as something to be minimized rather than maximized…”

Let’s leave Kenneth for a while to ponder on his words. On the one side he is saying that we have the cowboy economy or as Milton Friedman pushed, the shareholder value concept seen in his article for the New York Times those many years ago (here): “…there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception fraud.”

On the other hand, the ‘Spaceship’ economy – everything you have is all you have, as shown so well in the film The Martian (2015) (Trailer here), the hero of which finds himself on the planet Mars with 31 days of supplies, yet 3-4 years to wait for rescue…everything has to be ‘circular’. Anything that is required must be created by what and only what, he has in front of him. That which escapes, negatively impacts.

Back on our stage, Kenneth is in full flow: “It may be said, of course, why worry about all this when the spaceman economy is still a good way off…so let us eat, drink, spend, extract and pollute, and be as merry as we can, and let posterity worry about the spaceship earth.

Why should we not maximize the welfare of this generation at the cost of posterity? “Après nous, le deluge” has been the motto of not insignificant numbers of human societies. The only answer to this…is to point out that the welfare of the individual depends on the extent to which he can identify himself with others, and that the most satisfactory individual identity is that which identifies not only with a community in space but also with a community extending over time from the past into the future.

…there is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that a society which loses its identity with posterity and which loses its positive image of the future loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon falls apart.”

This speech was soon picked up by others, such as an address the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science made (here) in 1970: “The object of the next industrial revolution is to ensure that there will be no such thing as waste, on the basis that waste is simply some substance that we do not yet have the wit to use… In the next industrial revolution there must be a loop back from the user to the factory, which the industry must close.”

Just how did this recognition of a finite amount of material on Earth and how we should prepare ourselves for the day when we all have to behave as if on a spaceship, move and evolve from there until the present day…

Having been whacked off course by Milton Friedman’s shareholder value concept that was wholeheartedly picked up by nearly all business leaders across the globe, it seems we now find ourselves in the position whereby if we want to get anything through and into law, or even into normal usage, we have to colour out any phrases that might upset other powerful interests – and they have serious lobbyists! As Kirchherr, Julian and Reike, Denise and Hekkert, Marko, in their paper: ‘Conceptualizing the Circular Economy: An Analysis of 114 Definitions’ (September 15, 2017), found (here): “…the circular economy is most frequently depicted as a combination of reduce, reuse and recycle activities, whereas it is oftentimes not highlighted that CE [Circular Economy] necessitates a systemic shift…the definitions show few explicit linkages of the circular economy concept to sustainable development. The main aim of the circular economy is considered to be economic prosperity, followed by environmental quality; its impact on social equity and future generations is barely mentioned.”

Do we find ourselves still so fixated by creating pure shareholder value that although recognizing the need for a circular economy, we hide it behind economic prosperity, or is this something that is talked about openly by shareholders, but behind the scenes they still push profit? Perhaps the strength of the political will is too weak, it’s not for nothing that the most oft-heard complaint at the various COP meetings is that previous promises have not been met and new promises are simply old promises, cleaned up and presented as new – ‘Après nous, le deluge’ it seems, has powerful friends.

Perhaps this is why the concept of sustainable development within the Circular Economy is hidden (as suggested above by Kirchherr et al). With perfect timing, this week the EU announced that Gas and Nuclear would be considered Green (here), perhaps there is a lesson for us all – better to have some movement towards saving the planet (through pleasing some powerful lobbies), than no movement. Think we are making this up about having to be careful about keeping all parties ‘on side’ rather than opening a full ‘Them vs Us’ battle as we are seeing in parts of the world? The recent US Supreme Court ruling on limiting the EPA’s powers says it all about the dangers of polarisation. Coal is firmly back on the agenda.

Are Martin Freeman’s words still too strong in our unconscious minds? There is no doubt the opening paragraph in his NY Times article (here) pulls no punches: “…businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting desirable “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are — or would be if they or any one else took them seriously — preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.” (Yikes!)

If the private and public sectors are hamstrung, growing up as they have with Milton Freeman’s words ringing in their ears, and an insatiable appetite for campaign finance in some quarters that feeds the lobbying world, then perhaps it is up to us to lead the way up and into the spaceship. The only way we can do that is by aggressively preparing now.

Don’t just think reduce, reuse and recycle, but go the full 9 yaRds, with the 9R’s: Rethink, Refuse (are straws really even needed?), Reduce, Reuse, Re-gift, Repair, Rent, Recycle & Rot, all the while imagining that we are on a spaceship. Nothing must escape.

Of course we shall today fail in creating a true spaceship ecosystem – as the phrase goes, “Nothing concentrates the mind more than the hangman’s noose”, yet that noose will come fast. But the plans we put in place today, the knowledge we gain from trying but failing and still trying again, will go a long way towards avoiding the ‘deluge’ or flood of tomorrow. We would also suggest that through turning the ‘old way of doing things’ on its head, so ‘social equity and future generations’ first followed by ‘environmental quality’, one will arrive at and enjoy ‘economic prosperity’. Many of our inspirational Lionesses have done just that and ‘economic prosperity’ for them and their communities is a very welcome by-product of their determination to drive ‘social equity and future generations’. They have shown it works. Now time for all of us to follow their leadership.

This was something that our hero this week hoped for, ending his speech by admitting of such efforts, that “This may sound like a rather modest optimism, but perhaps a modest optimism is better than no optimism at all.”

A dark reminder from 1966:

“…a society which loses its identity with posterity and which loses its positive image of the future loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon falls apart.”

Stay safe.

Today, Wednesday 6th July 2022, FAWE sends off an Educationist Icon, a fearless defender of girls’ education. She will be laid to rest in Moyo, Uganda. Her footprints live on. May she rest in peace.

Click here to access link to the livestream of the funeral service.