One year on

When YEVU founder Anna Robertson was announced as the 2017 winner of the InStyle and Audi Women of Style scholarship for her work with the Ghanaian-based female-led social enterprise, she had a number of goals on her to do list. Of course there was the  continued support for her 25 mostly female employees in Ghana and the 170 family and community members who indirectly benefit from her game-changing fashion business. But she also sought to work towards handing over ownership of YEVU to her team in Ghana, refine operations and explore other creative options for YEVU’s online offering. 

“Since winning the bursary we’ve become more consistent with how and when we produce which has allowed us to understand how viable our business is, how many people we can employ full time and how our customers are responding in Australia. We became more financially resilient last year along with getting the bursary so it pushed us into the next level of business, which has been really nice,” she says.

“I’ve started recruiting people for our Sydney team; a lot of the focus, which it needed to be, was on the Ghana side of the business and now that it’s operating like a well oiled machine we’re able to focus more on our strategic action, our marketing and communications and our branding. But there’s also been some big challenges and changes.”

In July 2017 YEVU had its biggest workspace and a fully operating facilitated workshop, complete with accommodation facilities. However, by September Anna was made aware of some financial mismanagement, which resulted in the dissolution of her relationship with her business partner on the ground in Ghana.

“In hindsight there should’ve been more stringency from my end but we’re working with the informal sector, we’re setting things up from the ground up and we’re learning as we go. The team who are 90 percent women said ‘look there are some things going on you need to know about’. We had to handle things very delicately because there were land, ownership and fear based issues for our staff and that meant I couldn’t take action immediately in the way that I might have had it happened here in Sydney. My priority was to protect my team. While it wasn’t going on for too long once that trust was broken, it couldn’t be repaired. ”

While YEVU lost their place of work, the core team of now nine women operates the business with a much flatter hierarchy and with much more transparency. “Small operational changes have been a major benefit to the team; there’s been more ownership and responsibility taken, especially by the women. A lot of the team who haven’t had much of a voice until the aftermath of this situation have really stepped up.”  

One of Yevu’s quiet achievers effectively led the charge for change. Anna recalls, “If it wasn’t for her I probably would’ve turned around after all the drama and gone, I’m over it, I’m going to lose and I’m scared; and it was her that said, ‘We’ve got to do this. We’ve got to do it now. We don’t want to lose this as much as you do. It’s not just about you.’ It just shows that what feels like a negative experience at the time can actually become a really positive experience.”

 Since then, the business has gone from strength to strength harnessing a real sense of responsibility and community within the team. “The trainees are becoming the trainers and that’s a really important part of the empowerment side of things. They were able to produce the last range entirely without me being there. Last year I was talking to Audi and InStyle about handing things over to the local YEVU community to own, and obviously there’s still things that need to happen in terms of equity, but the business is operating entirely without me being there,” says Anna. 

Upon reflection of her journey Anna has realised that it’s important not to overstate what you’re doing, citing, “People throw around a lot of words when it comes to social enterprise; ethical, eco, sustainable and all sorts of buzzwords. Quite simply for us we’ve seen a clear and tangible impact on the economic empowerment of the women we’re working with. The impact on one person has a 10-fold effect on people around them and especially with women they are much more inclined to spend money to benefit their families and their immediate community.”

Certainly the yin and yang of time spent in Accra and Sydney continues to appeal to the Founding Director of this Ghanaian based social business. “There’s a level of spontaneity and risk taking in a place like Ghana that doesn’t exist here. There’s a much bigger space for innovation over there. It’s loud and chaotic and there’s music in the streets. But it’s also nice to come home and have structure. There are upsides and downsides. And the learnings continue.”