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24 octobre 2017

Michaela Turancova, 21, wants her fashion start-up Wingal to help women out of poverty

When 21-year-old management consultant Michaela Turancova decided to launch into the start-up world as an online fashion entrepreneur, she resolved that it must be about more than trying to make her fortune.

Having read Richard Branson's book Screw Business as Usual, Turancova decided online fashion subscription service Wingal, would fund the creation of a side venture aimed at helping women in the developing world escape poverty and become fashion designers.

With Wingal, customers subscribe to monthly personally-shopped clothing packages containing a complete outfit under a selected style of casual, corporate, beachy or cocktail.

"The premise was that the traditional way of doing business, making profits at any cost, was so unsustainable," Turancova says.

"The book was full of examples of social enterprises killing every aspect of business. The idea just came to me."

Each box of clothes costs $65 and includes three clothing pieces and an accessory. The clothes are predominantly vintage and brands range from Kookai and Review to designers such as Roberto Cavalli and Tommy Hilfiger.

All of the profits from Wingal will go towards starting Wingal Seeds, a for-profit business which will help women in developing nations design and manufacture underwear.

Turancova, who is originally from Slovakia and comes from five generations of tailors and seamstresses, says Wingal will pay the women a commission, sell the products and then pass back 50 per cent of the profits from every sale to the designer.

"Something like this has so much potential ... it could quadruple the income of these women and when someone is empowered to be an entrepreneur, it has flow-on effects in their communities," she says.

"It will be a lot harder to start and could need some investment, but the next trip I take will be to India or Nepal to find some people and get some samples made for a proof-of-concept."

The concept of Wingal is similar to successful US start-ups Birchbox, which provides beauty products, FabFitFun, which provides monthly subscription lifestyle boxes, and local start-up Bellabox, which delivers boxes of cosmetic samples.

Despite the good intentions the business is launching in a sector which is tough to crack. Earlier this year men's online subscription retailer Kent and Lime shut its doors after four years in business, attributing its closure to a lack of in-house marketing smarts.

Turancova says she is spending 16 hours a day and most of her weekends balancing full-time work as a management consultant for a boutique global consultancy, while starting up Wingal.

As a social entrepreneur she follows in the footsteps of renowned founders such as Thankyou Group's Daniel Flynn, Who Gives a Crap founder Simon Griffiths and KeepCup creator Abigail Forsyth.

Turancova says she was inspired to take the leap into the fashion sector after a conversation with a colleague one night who said she liked her style.

"I was complaining about work and she suggested I could volunteer somewhere as a stylist to get some experience. She also suggested reading Sophia Amoruso's Girlboss. After reading this I decided that rather than volunteering, I'd start my own thing," Turancova says.

"It's been something my dad has always drilled into me from when I was young. He would say: 'You want to be the owner, not someone working for the owner'."

In her first year Turancova, who taught herself how to build a website to get Wingal off the ground, has set herself the goal of $100,000 in sales.

"In Australia there's no other women's subscription clothing box I'm aware of. What that means though is people don't fully trust it yet, so you have to break through that mindset," she says.

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