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CareersPeople on the move
RETAIL
- Yasmin Yusuf takes charge of M&S "knicker crisis" High street observers expect that Yasmin will redesign M&S's dowdy image and help the company regain its favoured market status. Her track record in the hurly-burly of high street fashion is impeccable, according to trade newspapers. Previously with the Warehouse chain, Yasmin is credited with transforming that company into "the hippest name in the high street" in the late 1990s. She was best known as the managing director who turned that loss-making business into a profitable one. Yasmin holds degrees in textile design from London's Middlesex University and the prestigious Royal College of Art and is , is well-known on the swanky side of fashionwear selling. As well as working for the upmarket Harvey Nichols store, she was a senior buyer and head of womenswear at several chic designer emporia in the eighties.. Yasmin's talent for trend-spotting and turning designs into wearable fashion was the honey pot that attracted her new employer. She is to head the 40-strong M&S central design team and develop new lines for adults and children in M&S's 298 stores. No shrinking violet, she reports directly to Roger Holmes, Managing Director UK Retail, and will sit on the company's board. Though comfortable herself with breaking through the "glass ceiling" that many women of colour face in the retail clothing industry, Yasmin may still have to overcome discriminatory attitudes and practices in a company that is an unremarkable race equality employer. Nevertheless, the style guru's strong management skills, inspirational attitude and intuitive understanding of customer needs, will aid her success at M&S, says Roger Holmes. No stranger to controversy in the cut and thrust of fashion retail politics, Yasmin has called for positive, well-proportioned role models for the fashion industry. "Our customers like curvy , sexy babes they can emulate," she says. A bit more Naomi Campbell-ish and not, presumably, unhealthy too-thin catwalk models like Jodie Kidd. Reversing the fortunes of M&S won't be easy however. If Yasmin wants to make a difference she will have to focus her design efforts not on one mass market, as in M&S's past, but on what best suits shoppers in different local areas in cities and regions around the country. Catering to the clothing tastes of multicultural London, and young, fashion-conscious Black and Asian shoppers, is also essential - because they make up a significant part of the buying public.
WEB
DESIGN - Niche marketer
Michael Morgan
Michael Morgan, former journalist on the Voice black newspaper, has found his perfect niche, he says. It's web design, a career he started recently by turning his mid terrace maisonette into a mini business and community asset. With just his one computer, a zip drive, scanner, and laser printer, his company, I.D. Seven Ltd, provides clients with free e-mail addresses, online search facilities and a chat-line service. "Every month there is also an opportunity to win prizes," says Morgan. The fledgling businessman includes among his clients the Law Society's African Caribbean and Asian Lawyers organisation, and the UK's first website for an African Caribbean Day Nursery. He has helped create an online directory for mp3 enthusiasts, and an e-commerce site for the well known sheet and metal work company, Archways. Morgan reckons that his biggest project to date is the globalgraduates.com website. It aims to train young people and link graduate job seekers with companies and recruitment agencies. Morgan's contact
details are:
BLACK BEAUTY - Miss Ghana UK returns to Africa, with skills
Public relations executive and former Miss Ghana UK, Linda 'Makeba' Boateng, daughter of a well-known Koforidua family, has returned home to help further Ghana's position on the world scene, she says. In Linda's suitcase of skills, honed in London, are her diplomas in public relations, interior design and textiles gained at the London Institute and work experience as account executive for the leading black-owned PR agency, ASAP Communications. Her clients included Revlon Cosmetics, British Telecom, Sony, Black Beauty and Hair Magazine and London's Millennium Dome. Linda, whose Ashanti name is Nana Yaa Pokuaa, has appeared on television and radio, and in countless publications world-wide from the tender age of 14 when she went to Trinidad and Tobago to play the steel pans. Her crowning as Miss Ghana UK in 1993 marked the rise of beauty pageants for the African communities in the United Kingdom. She is proud that "Ghanaians in the UK are among the leading figures in the communication profession - from marketing and promotions to website development and e-commerce." But, the brainy beauty queen adds, "The time has come for those of us who are committed to our roots to make a meaningful contribution to our homeland".
INNOVATOR
- Willard Wigan micro-world artist
Willard Wigan's tiny sculptures - carvings from a speck of wood, on a human eyelash or a fragment of a spider's web - are evidence of his inspired genius. "Maybe one day I'll eventually carve sculptures from individual atoms," he predicts. Wigan, 43, featured in the Telegraph Magazine, "has been creating - one might say inhabiting - a miniature world since he was five years old, when an interest in insect welfare took hold." He remembers growing up tormented for his severe dyslexia and bullied as the only black child at his Birmingham school. Then Willard, son of a British Steel foundryman and one of eight children, learned to quell his fears by making little carvings of his tormentors. "I was made to feel small at school, so I made them look small," he says. Over the years, his therapy became bona fide works of art and widely displayed. His carving of the Statue of Liberty inside the eye of a needle is exhibited at the real building in New York. A homage to the Beckhams - football personality David, Spice Girl Victoria and their child Brooklyn - carved on the end of a cocktail stick is on display at Old Trafford sports ground. He has also worked his way up in scale to life-size woodcarvings - Mike Tyson is said to have paid $20,000 for a wooden effigy of himself. More recently, Willard's micro-art creations have gone on show in Bath at one of the city's main tourist attractions, the Impossible Microworld Museum located at 4 Monmouth Street, Bath BA1 2AJ, telephone 01225-33003.
BANKING - Howard
Brown pied piper
of Halifax
bank
Big, black and bountiful Howard Brown is the Halifax employee featured in the bank's celebrated television advertising campaign. In an amiable manner, Brown, besuited, wellshod and bespectacled, entices viewers to switch to Halifax's new branch-based current account. In tune with the pop video-style presentation, Brown, who works in Birmingham branch, offers 4 per cent to any customer who pays more than £1000 into a current account each month. Halifax's rate is quite attractive compared with competitors offering merely less than one per cent. Behind Brown's speil is money, of course. Halifax's competitors include the four big banks - Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds TSB and NatWest - and former building society-only banks like Halifax, such as Abbey National. And the new Internet banks are promoting higher interest deals worth more than £2 billion to canny customers. But success for Brown's efforts for Halifax, which holds only five per cent of Britain's current account market, will depend on the ease with which customers can switch banks. Given the ferocity of this price war, one is forced to speculate: why has Halifax chosen to have a black figure leading its marketing campaign? Do they know something we don't. For example are black current account holders in the big four banks more likely to switch than other groups? Or, is the Halifax-Brown ad shot riding on the television success of Alvin Hall, a look-a-like African American personal finance guru?
JAZZ FUSION - Novice singer-writer of idyllic and gritty themes
Lawrence J Francis, 34, was born in the East End of London to Antiguan and St Lucian parents and now lives in the country town of Hertford with his English wife, Madeline. His debut CD disc, A Distant Like, evokes themes of a fostered rural childhood and a passion to heal the shattered lives of black urban youth.
How
long did it take you to complete?
What
is your musical background? Who
are your favourite musical personalities? Those
writer-singers deal with the problems of life and social injustice,
is there anything like that in your work? What
about your own life. Do you have any particularly vivid memories from
your childhood?
Were
there any colour problems? What
was growing up like? But I learned to love the arts and architecture. I like sports, particularly running in the local parks and along country lanes. Listening to music is my main cultural pleasure. And I've developed an interest in ancient philosophies and spiritualism. I'm a great traveler as well, and I've been through Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America - in parts of the rain forests and towns of Equador, Venezuela and Brazil that tourists don't often see. How
do you see yourself in social terms?
Your's
are songs of hope...?
And I end Smokin' in the Ghetto with an urgent call for life changes:
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