Face of Flanders: Nathalie Sintobin
This year's Womed Award for female entrepreneurship has gone to Nathalie Sintobin who turned a small online gift shop into an international management service.
A passion for enterprise
Frucon² manages the e-commerce of businesses both large and small, from marketing to warehousing to shipping. Although its international clients now include Godiva and Samsonite, Frucon² has its roots in the old-fashioned market stall.
“My passion for enterprise started at a pretty young age, at about six years, let’s say,” Sintobin, 42, explained. Her parents ran a stall selling fresh produce at the market, and she and her siblings “were recruited to help as soon as we could read and write”. Her responsibilities ran the gamut, “from buying, selling, organisation, dealing with customers, you name it”.
Fresh produce, she reasoned, could be used to make up gift boxes just as well as flowers or chocolates, so that’s what she started offering. She opened a shop for innovative and creative gift packages featuring mainly fruit.
In 1999, she began selling and delivering gift packages online, just when e-commerce was breaking through to the market. “My idea seemed to find a public,” she says, “because it wasn’t long before I was suffering growing pains from a lack of capacity and logistical problems.”
Vlerick found a business angel to invest in and support Sintobin’s company, which expanded to take on outside clients. And the rest is history.
Her business philosophy revolves around concentrating on her own strengths and allowing the key people around her to concentrate on theirs. “I’ve found that people blossom if the employer sketches out a broad strategy and leaves people enough room to manoeuvre. You see them grow, and if they’re making progress, so is the business.”
The Markant award for the most promising young woman entrepreneur of the year, meanwhile, went to Laurentine Van Landeghem of Clouds of Fashion. Van Landeghem opened the Antwerp outlet, which offers affordable fashion and lifestyle products, as a pop-up store when she was only 21.
And the Womed Award Zuid for women entrepreneurs from developing countries went to Nènè Hadh Cherif, chair of an agricultural collective in Guinea.
Photo credit: Courtesy Unizo
About the author
