A Look into the Efforts of 5 Inspiring Female Entrepreneurs

Successful entrepreneurs are always looking for passionate and positive role models to inspire greatness for their companies. Being a female founded and managed award winning answering service, we want to bring you 5 of our favorite inspiring female entrepreneurs.  

Inspiring Female Entrepreneurs to look up to:

1. Ruth Handler

Born in Colorado to Polish Jewish immigrants, Ruth married her high school boyfriend and moved to Los Angeles in 1938. The coupled owned a small toy company named Mattel. In 1959, Ruth brought her new toy to the market, an adult doll that had fabric clothing to replace the antiquated paper dolls her daughter played with. The doll was Barbie; who interestingly enough, will turn 57 years old in 2016.    

Ruth spoke of her revolutionary toy with admiration, “My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be. Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices.”

A little known fact of this go-getting female CEO is that in 1970 she founded a company called Ruthton Corp. After battling breast cancer and being dissatisfied with the breast prosthesis available, Ruth designed her own product, Nearly Me. 

2. Arianna Huffington

Born in Greece and educated in United Kingdom, Arianna has been in the public eye since 1971 when making an appearance on BBC’s popular television program, Face the Music. Whether she was writing a biography of Picasso; running for California governorship against Schwarzenegger; or acting as President of the Cambridge Union, Arianna has always known how to hold her own.

A self-proclaimed feminist, Arianna shared, “Fearlessness is not the absence of fear; it is the mastery of fear.” Slate.com claimed her to be an accidental feminist, “If anyone was going to build a bridge for women between the rhetoric of career success and the discourse of the beauty industry, it would surely be [Arianna].”

In 2005, Arianna launched the now globally recognized website, The Huffington Post. Being a writer and debater all of her life, her website was focused on providing political stories that represented the liberal side of world news.

After selling her site to AOL in 2011 for $300 million, she acts as president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, and has authored fifteen books.

3. Sara Blakely

Sara Blakely put a new idea behind the term “working up a sweat,” as she held positions at Walt Disney World and office supply company, Danka. Being a Floridian, Sara was frustrated with her pantyhose seam that would pop out at the bottom of her warm climate open-toed shoes.  

While getting ready for a private soiree in 1998, Sara experimented with pantyhose for the first time. She wanted the control top benefits of the hose, but wanted to do away with the unsightly seams found at her foot. In a desperate attempt to quickly resolve the wardrobe malfunction, “Sara cut the feet out of her pantyhose to look smashing in her cream-colored pants.” And voila, the first pair of Spanx was realized.

The next few years consisted of applying for a trademark on her new invention; cold calling various department stores to introduce her product; and knocking down the doors of hosiery manufacturing industry giants. Blakely quickly learned, “The experience of developing her idea also revealed to her that the hosiery manufacturing industry was overseen solely by men who were not using the products they were producing.”

The beginning of Spanx was an uphill battle for Sara and she refused to surrender. After receiving a “yes” from Neiman Marcus and a glowing endorsement from Oprah Winfrey, Sara is now known as America’s youngest self-made female billionaire.

In 2013, this resilient entrepreneur joined the ever-philanthropic organization, The Giving Pledge. Founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in 2011, “The organization’s goal is to inspire the wealthy people of the world to give the majority of their net worth to philanthropy, either during their lifetime or upon their death.” Sara also founded the Sara Blakey Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to helping women in educational and entrepreneurial training.   

4. Coco Chanel

“Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.” These were the words of the one and only, Coco Chanel. Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel –Coco–  was born into poverty to an unmarried mother in 1883. By the age of 12, she was sent off to live in an orphanage after her mother passed away. It was in that orphanage that she would learn to sew; a talent that shaped the rest of her life.

Coco was, “Credited in the post-World War I era with liberating women from the constraints of the “corseted silhouette” and popularizing a sportive, casual chic as the feminine standard of style.” She was ingenious with the fabric she selected for her clothing designs, jersey and tricot; materials mainly used to construct men’s underwear.

Throughout her life of 87 years, Chanel was able to change the fashion industry and impact how fashion was represented and received. Her luxury brand, Chanel, still lives on today with an estimated worth over $19 billion. 

A selection of quotes from BrainyQuote continues to inspire both male and female entrepreneurs.

“A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous.”

“In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.”

“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.”

“Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.”

“Dress shabbily and they remember the dress; dress impeccably and they remember the woman.”

5. Cher Wang

A graduate of Berkeley, 57-year-old Cher Wang is a wife, mother and is the founder of HTC. Fast Company profiles the company by sharing, “HTC makes more than one out of every six smartphones currently on the American market.”

Cher founded VIA in 1987 and HTC in 1997 and is considered to be one of the most influential women in technology. When speaking of HTC, she elaborates on the success of her company, “There is usually an ‘X factor’ that is hard to define. For HTC, I think it is our culture. We embrace the best of our Eastern roots and combine it with the best of the Western cultures where we have leadership and offices. It makes the culture colorful as well as energetic and creative.”

Leading her team of roughly 17,000 employees, Cher is a true inspiration to women who want to pursue careers in the technology industry. With women currently only representing 30% of employees in the technical field, Cher allows females to feel encouraged to successfully enter the dominantly male technologist arena.   

Our very own Inspiring Female Entrepreneur! 

A Courteous Communications was founded in 1985 in humble offices in Orlando, Florida by Doris Primicerio. Our ambitious founder was the only virtual receptionist on staff and slept at the office during the startup phases. A few years into developing a strong and loyal client base, Doris took on Jean Pearson, who is now the proud VP of A Courteous Communications.

Our once 1-employee business telephone answering service has grown to a large family of virtual receptionists that is in the top tiers of the telecommunications’ industry. After 30 years of elite service to our clients, our professional award winning answering service is trusted with answering millions upon millions of calls each year.