Meet Samantha Araujo Harding

We recently connected with Samantha Araujo Harding and have shared our conversation below.

Samantha Araujo, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

I get my resilience from my parents, especially my mom. She’s really a strong woman and my dad, he’s a strong hard-working figure too. So my resilience, it was brought down to me from my parents, from the way they taught me from a kid to still nowadays, they still teach me a lot. So my resilience will definitely come from them and also all the experiences I’ve had throughout my life!

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

So originally I’m a fashion designer, but during the course of my life I became a businesswoman, creating my own business when I was 21, and I still have it running until today. My business is all about community and giving back to the community, even though it’s fashion, whereas all the fashion products that we create is designed by me, of course, but manufactured in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. We focus on small family-run businesses and we do everything with small companies, so we kind of build a really, really strong community base. So every time you buy from our brand, you’re supporting a family, you’re supporting a community which actually needs to be supported, which I feel that are left out of the spotlight most of the time.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

So looking back on my whole process of becoming a businesswoman slash fashion designer, where I feel that I was born with that talent, would definitely be organization. I am super organized so I can deal with a lot of things at the same time and I cannot let other things overrun other projects. So definitely organization is my number one quality skill. Number two would be persistence. I will not give up until I have managed to complete what I have to do. And if I can’t, I’ll find a way around to get as close to that factor or target as possible. And the last one is that I’m very empathetic. So basically building a community-based company, you have to be empathetic to other people and people around you and you have to care about them as if they were one of your own. So basically those three qualities would definitely be very impactful and brought me to where I am today.

Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?

Definitely the main person who has been most helpful with me in my whole process is definitely my father. He is a very, very strong man and very business-minded and he has always kept me with my feet on the ground. He has helped me in many different ways within the business and without him I’m sure nothing of this could be possible.

Also, I have to give a big merit to my mom, which she is the same as my dad. She gave me a lot of resilience, she gave me a lot of persistence, she made me be who I am today, being a very, very strong woman and going after what I can get, and also teaching me not to take any b*llsh*t from anybody.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.saharbysamanthaharding.com
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