Tell us about your childhood

I grew up in Rotterdam with my brother, mother and grandmother. As a child, I wouldn’t say I was shy but I was certainly a little afraid of the world. I would always be on the side-line. For instance If I went to an birthday party and everyone else was having fun playing outdoor survival games, I would be the kid in the corner crying and saying I was scared. I wasn’t sad, just shy. When I was about 16, I realised how fed up I was of watching everyone else live their life so I kind of pulled myself together and finally started doing things on my own!

Why did you choose to settle in Rotterdam?

After studying in Finland, France, Poland and Spain, I thought I’d never go back to The Netherlands and Rotterdam. I thought I was going to travel the world forever, but after so many years of living abroad, it really felt like it was time to come home and unpack my suitcases. Funnily enough, for the moment, I can’t see myself living anywhere else.

Where does your passion for mountains come from?

I’ve always loved being outdoors and climbing a mountain makes everything so relatable. When you reach your destination, there is an incredible feeling of victory and a sensation that you can take on the world. I went all the way to Everest Basecamp (5,364m) on my own, because even when you are alone, there is always a strong feeling of camaraderie in the mountains; everyone helps each other. You can be suffering from altitude sickness but the scenery is breathtaking and uplifting. I definitely learned about determination during my four months in the Himalayas in Nepal and Tibet.

How did you manage your return to the “real world”?

It was a big reality check. I realised I’d run out of money so work was the only option! The economic crisis was in full swing and companies weren’t hiring. I was told I was over-qualified and had too many diplomas; recruiters weren’t interested in me. Then I landed a great job at Trust, a huge electronics company here in The Netherlands where I worked as a purchaser for two and a half years. This meant a lot of traveling to China, negotiating prices and learning about the whole purchasing process. Then, when I wasn’t looking for it, a new opportunity came my way with the Dutch company XD Design. They had been selling mostly promotional gifts and wanted to grow the retail side of the business, selling to consumers instead of only doing giveaways.
I started working for XD’s almost non-existent retail department. I came in as a replacement to the one person who had set it up but was moving on. They gave me a desk and wished me luck. I ended up setting the whole retail network of agents and distributors in more than 50 countries. It was an old-school way of selling but an amazing learning curve. Then I tackled the e-commerce strategy, which ended up being bigger than anyone had anticipated with a web shop in 52 countries, three warehouses globally and marketplaces all over the world. Our famous kick-starter campaign really got us noticed; we had one prototype, one idea, one story, but we sold over $1 million in one month. That was pretty crazy. Today, XD Design is one of the biggest suppliers here in Europe.

Tell us about the anti-theft backpacks; was the Bobby your idea?

We have a very talented design studio in Shanghai and I worked closely with them. They were trying to solve the problems people encounter on public transport, especially in big cities like Shanghai or Paris. Everyone carries their backpack in front of them like a baby because they’re terrified of pickpockets. We heard stories about people in France and Italy whose bags were being cut open and the contents stolen. I came in on the later stage for the look and feel of the backpack, the colouring and some of the smaller details. The great thing about a kick-starter campaign is that we actually got to co-create our bag with the consumers. The bag was about 90% finished but we really needed the end users to tell us what they were missing or what they needed. We did polls on whether to have extra pockets or a different colour for example, people would reply and we just changed the design and manufacturing. Co-creating with consumers was one of my favourite parts of the process. The bag that you see today is actually third generation.

Calling the bags Bobby was my idea; I have to take credit for that one! It comes from the round helmets of the London police bobbies as our backpack has the same shape. It’s meant to remind you of safety and police officers!

I remember in the first years after the bag came out, whenever I saw one – in Japan, Switzerland, the USA, anywhere – I would go up to the owners and ask if I could take selfies with them.

I spent nine years at XD so it has been the biggest chunk of my professional career so far. In November 2021, I made the decision to leave the company.

You sound as though you were very happy at XD Design, what made you leave?

Yes I was happy there! If I were still at XD, I think that making the brand more of a household name would still be one of my goals.

However, I’ve always had the urge and the drive to be an entrepreneur. I think in some ways at XD, I was already an entrepreneur, it just wasn’t my own company. I built up my own team, developed my own products and did almost everything you do when you have your own company. But it wasn’t my own company and a little voice inside me had started saying “Shirley, if you don’t do it now, you never will”. So after nine years, I made the decision to quit, and I started two companies, one in consultancy and one in e-commerce.

Can you tell us more about your two companies?

One of my activities is consulting. I realised that whenever I went to tradeshows, other brands and entrepreneurs would ask me how to do a kick-starter campaign or how to set up an e-commerce landscape for example. So today, I advise other brands on e-commerce strategies, creating fully automated processes with multiple warehouses or multiple platforms, multiple websites, etc. I also develop marketplace strategies because that is still what some brands don’t fully understand or don’t get the full potential from. You cannot ignore the Amazons of this world, but how do you work with them without getting your prices cut or ruining your brand? Another big chunk is crowdfunding because a lot of brands are either afraid of doing it or really want to do it but don’t know how.

My other activity is my e-commerce business. I did purchasing and sales for so many years that it was quite natural for me to develop my own beauty brand and sell it on marketplaces and in my own web shops.

How did you identify the products to develop under your own brand?

Throughout my career, I’ve tended to go with the flow and see how things pan out. I love everything related to beauty – mainly products and gadgets – so I started my own beauty line. This morning I actually got an order from the USA, so by next week, there’s a store in New York that will be selling my beauty products!

My strategy is to look for gaps. I’m quite a geek and I love doing keyword searches. I try to identify what people are searching for and the gaps where the supply isn’t too high. I also need to have a positive vibe about the product and I won’t sell anything I don’t like or don’t understand. A product has to have a connection to something in my life. I for instance do a lot of dog products too, inspired by my own dog and her needs (I can see my dog staring at me as we chat).

Tell us about your family background

My father was (and still is) an academic -a mathematician- and my mother is a paediatrician. When my sister and I were growing up in Baku, the house was constantly full of my father’s colleagues from across the world all speaking different languages. The richness and diversity of his colleagues’ backgrounds and the pervading intercultural atmosphere shaped my childhood and made for some fascinating dinnertime conversations. My parents instilled strong values into their children and we grew up believing that we should always strive to be good people.

I didn’t really have any specific memories of what I was like as a child, but since the birth of my first daughter, some of them have certainly floated back up to the surface. My older daughter is now 5 years old and whenever she is cheeky or misbehaves, my mother reminds me that she gets it from me. I think on the whole though I was quite a well-behaved child, but you’ll have to check with my mother on that one as she may say that I was a bit hard to handle! I do remember being quite studious at some point though and finding school lessons interesting. I definitely developed a thirst for learning which has never left me.

What are your memories from when the Republic of Azerbaijan became independent in 1991?

I was only 6 years old when the Soviet Union fell apart and the transition towards independence took place. As a young boy in 1991, I have a distinct memory of being in our living room with my parents physically protecting my sister and me as the Soviet army drove their tanks past our front door and shots were fired. It was a time of uncertainty, of alternating bouts of fear and optimism with differing experiences depending on the generation you belonged to. As the country lurched from border crisis to financial crisis and back, the value chains fell apart and everything had to be re-organised from logistics to social services and more. For purely economic reasons, my father held down several jobs at the same time just to support the family. We all had the task of reinventing ourselves, but we got through it.

How did your time in the USA have an impact on you?

In my early school days, I spent 6 weeks in the US on a programme that was filled with visits to big cities including New York and Philadelphia. This first experience inspired me to apply for the Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX) programme, a competitive, merit-based scholarship programme funded by the US Department of State. Although its initial philosophy was to enable young people from ex-Soviet countries to learn about the US by spending a year in America with a host family and attending a US high school, the programme still continues today. After multiple rounds of testing and interviews, I left Baku – population several million, to arrive in Mason City Iowa – population less than 30,000.

Apart from the lack of diversity that I had always been accustomed to back home (no-one in Mason City spoke anything else but English or had much international experience), the biggest surprise was the independence of my teenage American peers. They all had weekend jobs, did community service, paid their way through university and left home as soon as they were able to support themselves. In Azerbaijan, you tend to focus on your studies, live with your parents until you are ready to get married and look after your family first and foremost. Discovering this different approach to life definitely made its mark on me and was a huge game changer.

Although my American host mom has sadly passed away, I still have close ties with my host dad who even made the journey to visit us in Geneva in 2018.

What were the highlights of your experience at Audencia?

To be honest, and I’m not just saying this to flatter the School, it was one of the best years of my life! I was lucky to have applied for and obtained a full scholarship from a joint venture between SOCAR and Total and I arrived in Nantes full of curiosity about France in general and Nantes in particular.

It was reassuring having a fellow student from Azerbaijan on the programme too. We got our accommodation sorted together, explored Nantes together and by the end of the first month, we went halves on the cost of buying a car: a 1-litre, 2-door Opel Corsa. It was tiny but boy did we enjoy driving it. As football fans, we managed to drive to some great matches as far afield as Madrid! That little car did us proud and I’m sure that quite a few of my Audencia classmates will remember squeezing into the back to go places!

The structure of the programme at Audencia was a wake-up call in more ways than one. Back in Azerbaijan, I was used to having classes in the morning and spending the afternoon working on assignments and coursework. At Audencia, we had to be in class by 08.30 and only finished by about 18.00, it took a while getting used to! However, I would still say that the biggest take home of my year at Audencia was the value of teamwork. It may sound corny but being in a class with 13 or 14 nationalities was a real test of how interconnected you are or can become. We worked together, had fun together and created lasting relationships.

Tell us more about the crêperie venture!

I think I must have tasted crêpes from all the crêperies in Nantes. I discovered them in Nantes and developed a serious passion for them. When we had to write a business plan for our International Business class at Audencia, my classmate Nariman and I wrote one for setting up a crêperie back home. A few years after we returned to Azerbaijan, we really did open a crêperie in Baku and it was a success! We had 4 people working for us and we were not only the proprietors but (very) regular customers. The venture lasted for nearly 4 years until I was posted to Switzerland and Nariman to Turkey, but we were able to sell it on as a viable business.

How would your crêperie associate and former classmate describe you?

I think he would say that I am a good and trustworthy friend. He might also say that I have a tendency to be a bit pushy, but I hope that he would add that it’s in a balanced way and not to the detriment of anyone else. I guess that people generally see me as determined and quite driven and ambitious. I have often quoted a saying that if you can’t run towards your goal, you walk to it, and if you can’t walk then you crawl and if you can’t crawl then you lie with your head in that direction.