The most Inspirational Turkish Women Entrepreneurs

Müjde Esin

Turkey’s Female Social Entrepreneur

Müjde Esin, 34, nominated as Turkey’s Female Social Entrepreneur of 2018, has devoted herself to girls’ education and wellbeing.

Her platform KızCode (kız means girl in Turkish) organizes workshops in coding, project management, presentation and other skills. It currently offers mentorship programs for disadvantaged girls in Turkey and in the UK, with the aim of expanding to other countries.

“Our first center, offering girls and women digital and arts education, will be opened in Zanzibar. That will be followed by KızCode Institutes in Diyarbakır and Istanbul,” Esin told FemaleOneZero.

“I was sharing the fate of so many other girls born and raised in this geography. But I never gave up.“

Sometimes in the places where Esin travels in Eastern Turkey, nobody even owns a computer. She herself had to struggle to get education. The youngest daughter of a six-children family from Turkey’s eastern province of Ağrı, Esin was prevented from going to university after high school. Her family expected Esin to become a traditional housewife.

“I was sharing the fate of so many other girls born and raised in this geography. But I never gave up, and after five years of sitting idle at home, I was finally able to go for further studies”, she says.

During her years at home, Esin read a book which inspired her, and she decided to reach out to its author. The famous professor in Turkey, helped her to take the university exam. Esin passed the exam and started studying despite her family’s disapproval.

After a bachelor’s degree in communication and media studies in Istanbul, Esin gained a scholarship for a master’s degree at the University of Westminster in London in 2014. In London, she inspected the problems of women and girls in migrant communities, launching KızCode in 2015 to help those girls. That same year the project received ‘The Most Successful Social Enterprise’ award from the government of UK.

In 2017, Esin also won Microsoft’s ‘Women Leaders of Technology’ award as the most successful Woman Educator of the Year.

“A majority of women want to do something in life, but they lose courage. And so they give up,” she says.

Gamze Cizreli

One of Turkey's top restaurant entrepreneurs

Gamze Cizreli, 50, is one of Turkey’s top restaurant entrepreneurs – if not number one. Preparing to open a branch in Germany soon, her brand BigChefs has 60 restaurants in five countries, employing more than 2,800 people in Turkey, Arab Emirates, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

“Everything starts with dreaming, and it becomes reality through hard work and love. It also requires great sacrifice,” she told FemaleOneZero from Istanbul.

Gamze has no doubt made sacrifices. When she opened her first small cafe in Ankara in 1993, together with her then-fiancee, she had left a safe and well-paid job in the defense industry. To prepare for the leap, Gamze worked as an evening waitress in a restaurant alongside her day job.

The couple’s cafe business took off quicker than expected. Western-style items such as cappuccino, cheesecake or brownie, were still novelties in Turkey’s landlocked capital city. The couple went on to found three restaurant brands together.

But after a divorce in 2005, Gamze Cizreli had to restart on her own and from zero, having given up on her partnership in the restaurants. By then, she also had two sons to care for. With a bank loan, she founded BigChefs Cafe & Brasserie in 2007.

“Everything starts with dreaming, and it becomes reality through hard work and love. It also requires great sacrifice.”

“Failure can definitely be a part of the journey. It is also an important experience. One must be prepared for failure, prepared to be falling to the bottom and getting back up again,” Gamze said.

Recently she started “to give back” by supporting 24 women food producers in rural areas, including their products and traditional dishes in BigChefs menus.

“My biggest goal is to increase their number to hundreds (of women). It is important to protect local production and local knowledge. I want that to blend with women’s entrepreneurial spirit.”

Ferda Doğruöz & Peykan Nebioğlu

Mother-daughter duo launched a natural beauty brand

This mother & daughter team are currently making a name in Turkish all-natural cosmetics sector. Toxicologist, pharmacist Ferda Doğruöz, 67, and her finance controller daughter, Peykan Nebioğlu, 42, started producing all-natural cosmetics four years ago. First for personal use: doctors had found cysts in Peykan’s breasts, and advised her never to use deodorant again.

Making use of Ferda’s pharmacist skills and knowledge, the mother and daughter mixed a deodorant at home. They improvised using a formula on internet and replaced substances which were difficult to find in Turkey.

“When we succeeded at that, we started researching whether we could replace all other cosmetic products by homemade substitutes, and we made hair care oil, too,”Peykan told FemaleOneZero from Istanbul.

“Women should have confidence in themselves. With our problem-solving skills, our intellect and the ability to use it, our time-management skills, and our devotion, we truly can make wonderful things.”

When the mother daughter duo diverted all their energy and time into the making of natural cosmetics, Peykan left behind a 20-year career in Turkish and international companies. Ferda had retired from a long career in health sector and pharmaceutical industry.

Today, their brand Simya Evi (House of Alchemy, in Turkish) has 47 products sold in their online-store, ranging from essential oils and anti-aging products to perfumes and baby products. Simya Evi employs a team of advisors and professionals in an atelier in Istanbul, and sends products to far corners of Turkey.

“Women should have confidence in themselves. With our problem-solving skills, our intellect and the ability to use it, our time-management skills, and our devotion, we truly can make wonderful things.”

Begüm Savaşan

Co-founder of the technology startup “Nailtronics“

Begüm Savaşan was a 28-year-old bioengineer when she co-founded an innovative technology startup ‘Nailtronics’ in her hometown Izmir in January 2018.

She took the leap of courage with the help of a governmental science and tech fellowship, teaming up with a colleague Oguz Yetkin at the university who had, like herself, worked on hand prosthetics and previously studied in the United States.

The duo came up with a wearable “smart fingernail”, Nailtronic Commander. It may be used as prosthetic device control, be paired with a wide range of smart devices, used in games and virtual reality sector – Begüm believes the device has countless possibilities.

“I never hold myself back from wearing colorful clothes and accessories, and I do that on purpose, too, to break prejudice.”

“We are planning to make mouse and keyboard unnecessary with this fingernail,” she said to FemaleOneZero over the phone from Izmir.

Eight months after its launching, Nailtronics was accepted to pitch at the European Startup Festival in September 2018 with Nailtronic Commander, receiving a lot of positive feedback. The company has applied for a patent for the technology with the United States Patent Office, and wants to enter the gaming sector in the U.S. in the future.

Steering a path as a young woman in a male-dominated sector, Begüm is grateful for her open-minded upbringing and the support of her closest circle.

“I have often been mistaken for being (co-founder) Oguz’ wife. But I never hold myself back from wearing colorful clothes and accessories, and I do that on purpose, too, to break prejudice,” she says.

Sezen Saral

Turkey's top female entrepreneur 2018

Co-founder of Turkish technology company ‘reeder’, Sezen Saral is the woman who brought the first e-book reader to Turkey. Her company also launched the first local android tablet brand.  Last year 35-year-old Sezen was titled Turkey’s top female entrepreneur, eight years after founding the brand.

It all started when Sezen was attempting to sell her old e-book reader online. She was surprised by the enormous interest her once-broken and repaired reader attracted. In those years, e-book readers were not available in Turkey.

Together with her husband, computer engineer Uygar Saral, they sold family property and launched their company ‘reeder’ in 2010. They were inspired by the idea of making a difference in people’s reading habits in Turkey.

“In the first six months, we sold 10,000 readers – that’s really something for a country that is known not to read books,” she recalled in an interview with FemaleOneZero.

The couple’s areas of knowledge blended well: Sezen had studied international business at Istanbul’s Bogazici University.

“As a woman, you always need to push harder to get past the predetermined gender roles of the society. But being a very ambitious and a resilient person, I have overcome that.”

Today, the brand encompasses a wide range of products, including laptops, tablets and smart phones. Their first product, e-book reader, is being developed to be relaunched in the future, as the world has moved from e-readers to reading books from tablets and to audio books.

Sezen is no stranger to prejudice she faces sometimes as a woman in technology.

“As a woman, you always need to push harder to get past the predetermined gender roles of the society. But being a very ambitious and a resilient person, I have overcome that,” she says.

Realising not everyone has similar self-confidence, she takes part in projects to promote other women entrepreneurs as an active member the Women’s Entrepreneurs Association of Turkey, Kagider.