Lenka Gourdie is Co-Founder of BagServant.co.uk, a one-stop-shop retail site specialising in handbags, enabling browsing of favourite brands from trusted high profile retailers using sophisticated navigation.

BagServant searches hundreds of luxury and designer brands and high street offerings, seeking out new upcoming designers to find the perfect bags for its customers. A comprehensive search facility offers filtering by occasion, price, personality, colour, brand, bag size and much more.

Lenka has over 15 years’ experience in B2B and B2C business development and marketing in a variety of industries. After studying Economics in her native Czech Republic, Lenka moved to the UK, where she set up her own executive coaching business before moving to a headhunting role. Before founding BagServant, Lenka’s most recent post was with Kingston University, where she was responsible for the commercialisation of their healthcare faculty.

In 2011, Lenka decided to make the most of her business development experience and leave her full time job to set up BagServant.co.uk with her husband Allan (Co-founder) to tackle the challenges of the fashion industry.

Nikki Hesford is a 25 year old award-winning entrepreneur, single mum and ex-glamour model now owning the Miss Fit group of brands that include clothing, lingerie and swimwear for big busted women.

Since Nikki founded it in early 2008, the company has flourished to include several brands that are supplied to the high street, as well as white-label manufacturing of fashions for large chains.

Nikki will be opening a small ‘British Made’ factory this summer, which will employ a dozen long-term unemployed local people.

Nikki's journey into business has been a turbulent one; after growing up in a deprived area, moving out of home at 16 and having a child at 17, she embarked on many small ventures to put herself through university before launching Miss Fit UK  aged just 21.

Nikki has gone on to have numerous business successes, including Lancaster Playschemes (a childcare establishment that was set up and sold within 6 months) and The Big Bra Bar.com (a new online shop selling ‘Everything the Big Busted Woman Could Need’ which turned over £25,000 in its first 10 days of launching without any paid-for promotion). She shares her experiences, tips and advice through mentorship, via various speaking platforms and in her forthcoming business book due to be published in December 2012.

With a lifelong interest in fashion, Alison Barnard used the skills she learned while attending Babson's business school to start her own retail store, in-jean-ius, centered on the one must-have clothing item for women: the perfect-fitting pair of jeans.

Alison stocks the store, which is located in Boston's newest hip neighborhood, the North End, with more than 30 brands of jeans in order to accommodate the many body types and personalities of her customers.

When Barnard isn't at her flagship store helping women find their perfect fit, she's down the street at Twilight, her newest store, which focuses on other style staples beyond denim including dresses, tops, accessories, and handbags.

Alison’s accomplishments earned her a spot on Inc. magazine’s “Top 30 Under 30”.  She was named one of Boston’s 25 Most Stylish according to the Boston Globe and in 2008, 2009 and 2010 was put on the 100 Best Dressed Bostonians list by Fashion Boston.  Barnard received one of five Winning Women awards at the 2008 Entrepreneur of the Year Awards hosted by Ernst & Young. 

REVIVAL Style, founded by Neetu Sidhu and Allie Taylor, is empowering women from the villages of rural India to the streets of NYC. REVIVAL Style is a social enterprise that fuses female Indian artisan craftwork with modern design to produce apparel that meets the needs of stylish and socially-conscious North American women.

Harmeet Neetu Sidhu is an NYU Gallatin Graduate student pursuing an interdisciplinary Masters program in Social Entrepreneurship within the fashion industry, which entails a heavy focus on entrepreneurship, marketing, anthropology and design.

Neetu has helped launch two NYC-based start-ups including Haden, a women’s wear clothing line, and InvenTours, a design-driven executive education program. Neetu also has marketing, communications, business development and project management expertise from her years working with SMART Technologies and Karo Design.  

Allison Q. Taylor is an MBA candidate at NYU Stern, focused on Social Innovation and Impact, Global Business, and Luxury Marketing. Allison was a Social Impact Internship Fund Fellow, and spent her summer building retail partnerships for Indego Africa, which is a Social Enterprise working with Rwanda artisans and US based fashion designers and retailers. She has experience working in product development and merchandising in the fashion retail industry with both The Limited and Target.  She also has expertise in fundraising and strategic partnership development from her time working with the national nonprofit organization, KaBOOM!.