I have no room for failure

My father beat my mother when I was a little girl. I thought it was so wrong and unfair, and wanted to make sure that something like that never happened to me.

Sylvia Owori's key to success

She is stylish, she is successful and she believes in herself. Sylvia Owori has done more than others ever manage in a lifetime. She is a role model in the East African fashion industry and a true pioneer. She started Uganda’s first Fashion House, Uganda’s first modelling agency and in 2005 she launched Uganda’s first glossy women’s magazine, African Woman, which is circulated on a monthly basis in five different countries - and sold out after 2-3 days.

Sylvia Owori, PR Photo

Nothing comes easy
Sitting in her office in a warehouse in Kampala’s industrial area, it is hard to believe that Sylvia Owori is not born with a silver spoon in her mouth. But the reality is that she is a Tororo girl, who has been brought up in a modest way in Kampala. Her father died when she was still very young, and her mother took up a small business where she sold imported clothes and accessories to support herself and her children. Sylvia has not gone to the fanciest schools in the country, she graduated from Nsambya Senior Secondary School, and she is the only one of the seven siblings who has made it big-time in the celebrity kind of way. One can not help wondering, where the key is to her success?
- By nature I am very passionate about everything I do, and I think my strong will comes from my mother. She is also a very hard working woman who never sits down thinking anything will come easy. She pleaded for me to go to university, but my character is as determined as hers and I refused completely.

With a little bit of help
Instead Sylvia Owori went to London. She convinced her mother with the help of her grandmother. Her grandmother was married to a British man and lived in a working class area in North London. Sylvia went to stay with them. She was 19 years old and she had a plan. She loved clothes and wanted to be a fashion designer, and by the support from her grandmother Sylvia Owori’s key to success she enrolled at Newham College in London to study Fashion Design.

Admiration and dismal
Seven years later she returned to Uganda, and opened a small boutique selling imported clothes. In her spare time she designed trendy outfits for herself and her friends, stuff which was not available in Uganda. But as it turned out the demand for it was huge. Sylvia had found her niche. Very soon she became famous for her extravagant skimpy outfits. But the fame was split in admiration and dismals.
- It is less than 10 years ago, but if you wore a miniskirt at that time, people in the street would ask  you if you wanted to be naked and start tearing your clothes off. Uganda in the late 90’s was still very conservative. I started hosting fashion shows and had girls showing my designs. But I was a pioneer and dealing in an area of taboo, where most people had no idea what fashion is all about. As a consequence it all created havoc and I was accused of wanting to spoil the girls and corrupt women, Sylvia Owori recalls.

Self confidence
But Sylvia Owori was not on a mission to corrupt anybody. She was laying the first bricks to her own fashion empire and creating the foundation of the Ugandan fashion industry. She did it by fully believing in her own talent as a designer and an entrepreneur.  But in many ways it was an uphill battle because most people did not understand what she was doing.

 - Anybody who does something out of the ordinary is bound to meet criticism. But being a woman one is even more exposed. My father beat my mother when I was a little girl. I thought it was so wrong and unfair, and decided that something like that should never happen to me. Oppression of women is not an African phenomenon. Women all over the world need to be empowered.
But in Africa where many women are uneducated we most work even harder to try and make a better life for ourselves. Nobody else will do it for us.

No room for failure

And Sylvia has for sure worked hard to prove herself and make her ideas flourish. Her trick, she says is, that she has no room for failure in her life. She never starts anything she has doubts about how to complete successfully. This year she has entered a partnership with the mobile phone handset makers Motorola. The beginning of the partnership was marked at the newly opened Serena Hotel in Kampala with a fashion show looking back and celebrating the last six years of her own design since her first show "Face of Africa" held  in Uganda in 2000.

The break through

But, it was not in her home country Uganda Sylvia Owori had her big break through. That happened  in 2004 at the Kenyan Fashion Week. Here Sylvia became the star of the show when the audience awarded her with a standing ovation. Sylvia laughs quietly when she recalls the moment:
- It was so amazing and so fulfilling for me, I was like “oh my God, people really take me seriously.

Tribute to African Women

The Kenyan Fashion Week served as an eye opener in Uganda, where her fellow country men almost overnight understood what captured the Kenyans imagination. Sylvia Owori became an accepted brand at home and her confidence was boosted. She now pays back this tribute through her one year old magazine African Woman.
- The way I contribute to the empowerment of women is through African Woman. It is a glossy magazine, but it is also a voice for women in Africa. It talks about health and illnesses, stress and oppression, it educates and inspires. The magazine shows women as being independent and self-sufficient and very far from the traditional image of the sub-servant African women, which is ingrained in a lot of us. It is a celebration of the African women, I think we deserve it.