Started sewing children's clothes at her kitchen table because Lagos shops sold nothing she liked
Trained as a lawyer, she left legal practice to make children's clothes at home in Lagos when she could not find well made local options, and built…
Built model housing, libraries and clinics for his typewriter workers in a small Italian town
He took over his father's typewriter factory in the small town of Ivrea and turned it into a design-led global company, while building housing,…
Borrowed from an uncle to trade cement by the bag, then built Africa's biggest industrial group
From a Kano trading family, he borrowed a small sum to start importing goods by the container, then spent decades building cement, sugar and flour…
Fled war-torn China with almost nothing and built one of the first word processing empires
Born in Shanghai, he arrived in the United States after the Second World War with little money and no connections, earned a Harvard doctorate, and…
A bobbin boy on a dollar a week who became the richest man in the world and gave it all away
His family fled Scottish poverty for Pittsburgh when he was twelve. He built the biggest steel company on earth, crushed a strike at Homestead in…
Opened one small shop in Brighton and built a global business that put ethics first
With a £4,000 loan and no business training she opened The Body Shop in 1976, refilling bottles because she couldn’t afford new ones. It grew into a…
A 54-year-old banker who quit a top job to build a bank from scratch on a phone
After thirty years inside big banks she decided they could not be fixed from within and founded Starling in 2014. Her co-founder walked out with most…
A refugee family's son who dropped out of school at fifteen to sell computer parts
Born to a family expelled from Uganda under Idi Amin and rebuilt in Britain, he returned to East Africa as a teenager with a small loan and built a…
Failed at boxing and record shops before borrowing eight hundred dollars to found Motown
After a brief boxing career and a failed record store, he borrowed money from his family in 1959 to start Motown Records in Detroit, building a…
Turned traditional Ethiopian shoemaking skills into a global footwear brand rooted in her neighbourhood
Growing up in a poor district of Addis Ababa where recycled tyre sandals were a local tradition, she founded soleRebels in 2005, building a shoe…
A single mother secretary who mixed correction fluid in her kitchen blender to hide her typing mistakes
Working as a secretary to support herself and her young son, she invented a quick-drying correction fluid at her kitchen table to cover typing…
Turned a small Lancashire town into the world's first Fairtrade town and never moved away
A former factory worker in Garstang, Lancashire, he led a local campaign that made his small town the world's first officially recognised Fairtrade…
The son of a Lebanese immigrant shopkeeper who built Mexico's largest business empire from telecoms
Raised by a Lebanese immigrant father who taught him to keep meticulous financial records from childhood, he built a construction and trading…
The daughter of a Taiwanese tycoon who built her own phone company from a garage-sized start-up
She turned down an easy path into her father's conglomerate to co-found a small contract manufacturer that became HTC, one of the first companies to…
Made billions from duty-free shopping and gave every penny away in secret
The son of a nurse and an insurance clerk, he co-founded Duty Free Shoppers and then quietly transferred his entire stake to a foundation. Nobody…
Ran away from a starving farm four times and built Hyundai, then drove 1,001 cows back to repay his father
The eldest son of a poor farmer in what is now North Korea, he took the money from the sale of a cow to escape to Seoul. He sold ships before he had…
Started a security company with a single client and one van in Zimbabwe
She left a stable insurance career to start a private security company in Zimbabwe with almost no capital, at a time when the industry was assumed to…
Worked as a janitor and petrol station attendant before opening a small Los Angeles clothing store
A Korean immigrant who arrived in Los Angeles speaking little English, he worked menial jobs before opening a small clothing shop in 1984 with his…
Organised India’s poorest working women into a union and a bank when no one thought they counted as workers
A lawyer in Ahmedabad, she saw that the women who carried loads, sold vegetables and rolled cigarettes at home had no employer, no protection and no…
Mixed face cream on her family’s stove in Queens and sold it salon by salon until Saks said yes
The daughter of Hungarian and Czech immigrants, she spent twenty years selling her uncle’s skin creams in hairdressers before founding her company in…
Built a brewery empire in northern Mexico, then funded a university to keep young engineers at home
He expanded his family's Monterrey brewery into a wide industrial group, then founded a private technical university to train Mexican engineers…
Started a courier business in Amman with three staff and built the Arab world's first Nasdaq company
He founded Aramex in Jordan in 1982 as a tiny express delivery agent, building it over two decades into a major logistics company and, along the way,…
Left a senior banking career at 50 to start a beauty business from a spare room
After more than two decades in investment banking, she gave up a stable, well paid career in her fifties to found Nykaa, an online beauty retailer…
A Shell executive who sold his London flat after a cyclone and built the world’s largest NGO
After the 1970 cyclone and the 1971 war of independence, he gave up a corporate career to help refugees rebuild one district. BRAC now reaches over…
