🐇🐇🐇 🍫 💐Time for some chocolate eggs from the Easter bunny💐🍫🐣🐣🐣

Heyyy!

How have you been?

The time to eat hunt for and eat chocolate eggs, and to take a short break has arrived.

If you’re celebrating, I wish you a Happy Easter this coming weekend! A Happy Pesach to my Jewish girls and Ramadan Kareem to my Muslim sisters. Please invite me over for Eid in a couple of weeks. Thanks!

There’s a lot happening at Shades and Layers and so we need to give you a quick update and let you know what’s been on the radar.

• Latest Episodes: As we continue our fashion focus, we feature the brands Otrium (a digital market place you want to know about) and the dope Lydia Endora (Athleisure) 🎧💪🏾

• ICYMI – “Black Women and Stories of Resilience”, Michelle McKenzie and I hosted our second Insta Live conversation

• I was also a guest speaker on “women mean business” to end women’s month and I have some reflections on ‘Invisible Work’ after that panel discussion

• What’s on your mind?

Before we get there, remember to share the newsletter and ask others to join the squad! If the newsletter was shared with you, please 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

S6, E4

Episode 4 of Season 6 features Zuhairah Washington, COO at the Dutch-born digital fashion marketplace, Otrium. She’s in charge of the US expansion for the company and they are an online fashion outlet that’s on a mission to change how clothes are made and used. If you’re into timeless fashion and appreciate a good price, then this is a story for you. Zuhairah is a seasoned tech executive with a background in private equity. Her story is powerful! And bonus, she has a gift for all Shades and Layers listeners, go to the episode or read on and find out at the end of the newsletter.

S6, E5

Lydia Endora is the founder and creative designer at her eponymous fashion label and has been a friend of the podcast for while. We are so happy she chose Shades and Layers to make her interview debut and tell the story of how she got her brand off the ground and how she’s building it up. If you ever wanted to know the practical side of e-commerce, done only the way a badass can do it, then this is it.

ICYMI

To conclude Women’s History Month, Michelle McKenzie from Where’s The Funding podcast and I teamed up once again for an IG Live. This time around, we were talking “Black Women and Stories of Resilience”. We each highlighted three stories from our back catalogues and picked out our top three stories of resilience during the conversations.  The Shades and Layers top three pics were:

• Mathebe Molise from BeautyonTapp, who recently opened her first bricks-and-mortar store in Johannesburg. What’s amazing to me is how she’s kept going for more than ten years now, to reach where she is. A true story of resilience and ‘overnight success’.

• Nonkululeko Britton-Masekela from Kula Organics was the other pick. She is an agriprenuer whose journey started in the creative arts, continued into the banking world and eventually business school, where she met the man who would change her life and how she viewed food, organic produce an sustainability forever.

• Last but not least, we had Ifeoma Dike from IDDUK who challenges everything you know about being an art dealer. She is a psychologist by training and has always been an art enthusiast. Inspired by her sculptor dad and encouraged by her self-taught photographer mom, she switched careers and has become one of the most successful art dealers in the UK. And the way she did it was through believing in herself and growing an extra thick layer of skin in a world that was not designed to include someone who looks like she does.

• Check out the IG Live replay to hear stories of Resilience from Michelle’s podcast.

DOUBLE STANDARDS EVERYWHERE

I was recently a guest on a panel called “Women Mean Business” together with some former colleagues from the Business Education Universe – I was once upon a time a business school recruiter . MBA Waves, which is run by my friend and MBA Coach, Eric Lucrezia, hosted the live event on LinkedIn. The conversation was focused on various topics about women in business and particularly why business schools were still lagging behind in representation compared to other professions like Law and Medicine. My take on that was that it is a complex issue that includes:

Culture (some families and communities pressure daughters into ‘traditional’ and so-called stable careers),

Representation – Forbes has only forty one Fortune 500 companies led by women and when you’re searching for women of color on the list, there are only three, and

Opportunities – Women and men are certainly not treated or rewarded in the same manner for their efforts in the workplace. The kinds of activities/contributions that are valued is certainly not favorable to women.

This brings me to the issue of invisible work. There is a lot of data gathered over the years about invisible labor or work, both at home (all the extra unrewarded domestic chores we take on) and at work. A great illustration of this phenomenon is this article from Huffpost where the writer, Kelli Thompson, was asked to lead a time consuming fundraising project and got a thank you that lasted less than 10 seconds at the end of it all.

Enter the pandemic and the various racial and gender-related injustices it exposed in  our home, work and ‘communal’ lives came into the spotlight. So many companies started talking DEI and promised to do better now that they were aware of where they were lacking in promoting equality in their institutions. However, even before the pandemic, before DEI became part of the corporate lexicon, women have been championing  equality initiatives and advocacy work, and in fact helping companies to be better corporate citizens and yet there are no financial or career rewards attached to being an LGBTQ+ rights advocate at work for example. Instead women are exhausted from all these efforts and they end up walking away from the workplace. Marianne Cooper from Stanford University, wrote a very insightful article for HBR on the topic and highlights how things got even worse during the pandemic. She ends her article stating that companies are in fact obliged to do better by their women employees.

What are your thoughts on invisible work? What’s your experience with rewards vs. effort as a woman in corporate? I’d like to hear from you. Drop me an email: [email protected]

WHAT ELSE DO YOU HAVE ON YOUR MIND?

I’d like to hear from you on which guests you would like featured on the podcast. I’d also like your opinion on any topical news featuring black women in business

Before we go, a quick gift for you for being a Shades and Layers Listener and a member of the squad! Otrium (their COO is a recent guest on the podcast – see above) is giving you a 20% discount on any purchases you make via their platform when using the code SHADES20 at check out.

That’s all from me this time around. Spread the love and bring your friends over to join the squad.

Until next time, please do take good care!

Kutloano

(your host with the most)