Sharmadean Reid
Most organisations talk about gender equity in leadership but cannot explain why their pipeline of women founders, operators and senior commercial leaders remains thin. The harder question is structural: who has access to capital, customers, and the networks that compound into business ownership. Without that, inclusion programmes produce optics rather than economic shift.
Sharmadean Reid is a serial founder and Penguin-published author who helps organisations turn gender equity from an HR commitment into a commercial and entrepreneurial strategy.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Sharmadean Reid
- She has built three businesses from scratch, WAH Nails, Beautystack and The Stack World, and raised venture capital as one of a small number of Black women globally to close a seven-figure seed round.
- Her work on the gender wealth gap is operational, not rhetorical: The Stack World is a paid community and financial education platform with over 20,000 members, not a campaign or content brand.
- Penguin Life published her first book, New Methods for Women, in June 2024, giving her a coherent and citable thesis on independence and economic agency that buyers can hand to their teams.
- She speaks from inside the founder experience that most corporate diversity programmes are trying to influence, with credibility on capital access, community building and brand creation that few other speakers in this category carry.
- UAL conferred an Honorary Fellowship at Central Saint Martins in 2024, recognising her contribution to creative entrepreneurship and community.
Biography highlights
- Founder, The Stack World, a community and financial education platform with a global membership focused on women’s wealth building.
- Founder of Beautystack (2017), an image-based booking platform for beauty professionals that raised over £1m in seed funding in 2018.
- Founder of WAH Nails (2009), the Dalston-born salon that built a global cultural brand and a product line distributed through Boots.
- MBE for services to the nail and beauty industry, 2015 Queen’s Birthday Honours.
- Author of New Methods for Women: A Manifesto for Independence, Penguin Life, 2024.
- Honorary Fellow, University of the Arts London, 2024; graduate of Central Saint Martins, BA Fashion Communication and Promotion.
Biography
Few women raise seven-figure seed rounds in the UK. Fewer Black women do. Sharmadean Reid did it in 2018 for Beautystack, the image-based booking platform she founded after a decade running WAH Nails, the Dalston salon that turned a youth-culture zine into a cult retail brand and a product line in Boots.
That trajectory matters because it gives her something most speakers on women’s leadership do not have: lived experience of the operating constraints, from access to capital to brand building to customer acquisition, that determine whether women actually end up running and owning businesses at scale. Her work is rooted in commercial reality, not advocacy.
The Stack World, which she founded in 2021, is the logical next step. It is a paid community and financial education platform with more than 20,000 members, designed to close the gender wealth gap through literacy, networks and collective investment rather than corporate sponsorship. The thesis is published: Penguin Life released her book, New Methods for Women: A Manifesto for Independence, in June 2024.
Her credentials sit behind the argument, not in front of it. MBE in 2015 for services to the nail and beauty industry. Honorary Fellowship from University of the Arts London in 2024, conferred at her alma mater Central Saint Martins. For organisations serious about moving gender equity from policy into commercial outcome, she is the rare voice who can speak to founders, executives and policy audiences from the same body of work.
Key speaking topics
- The gender wealth gap and women’s economic empowerment
- Entrepreneurship, founder journeys and raising venture capital
- Community as a commercial strategy
- Building and scaling consumer brands
- Closing the gender leadership gap
- Creative entrepreneurship and the creator economy
Ideal for
- CHROs, DEI leads and chief sustainability officers translating gender commitments into measurable outcomes
- Founders, investors and venture teams focused on backing women-led businesses
- Marketing, brand and customer leaders building community-led growth models
- Boards and executive committees setting policy on women’s progression and supplier diversity
Audience outcomes
- A clear-eyed account of what it takes to fund, build and scale a venture-backed business as a woman founder
- A working definition of the gender wealth gap, and the levers organisations can pull on it
- Concrete examples of community as a commercial mechanism, not a marketing layer
- A more honest internal language for discussing gender equity beyond pipeline metrics
Talks
A direct account of why women remain underrepresented at the top of organisations and what changes the picture.
Key takeaways:
- The structural barriers behind the leadership gap, from capital access to network effects
- What organisations can actually do beyond mentoring and target-setting
- The link between gender equity in leadership and commercial performance
Lessons from building three community-led businesses on what makes a community commercially durable.
Key takeaways:
- The difference between an audience, a network and a community
- How community translates into retention, pricing power and brand equity
- Practical models for online and offline community design
The case for treating economic empowerment, not just leadership representation, as the core gender equity challenge for organisations.
Key takeaways:
- Why income alone does not close the wealth gap
- What employers, investors and platforms can change
- How financial literacy and ownership shift career trajectories