Miss Fashion Week: A Franchising Model with Nonprofit Mission

by Elizabeth Denham

A New Take on Beauty

Nothing makes Yinghua Vera Wang, who goes by “Vera,” happier than hearing a bunch of little girls running around her events saying, “I am enough!”

“I want to transform people’s lives in how we see beauty,” Wang said. “I owned a fashion manufacturing company and had a lot of success, but I wasn’t fulfilled. I have always struggled with body image. I always told myself I was fat and ugly even when I was a size 2 or 4. The fashion industry didn’t help. I knew I could create a platform to change the way we see beauty, and that is how Miss Fashion Week was born.”

Her “You Are Enough” campaign is a part of Miss Fashion Week which bridges modeling competitions with pageants. As a nonprofit, the purpose of the platform is to empower women by using fashion as their media and the runway as their platform to raise generations of strong daughters.

You are beautiful enough, you are skinny enough, you are intelligent enough to go pursue whatever dream you have. You are enough!

Wang said, “We tell our girls, ‘You are beautiful enough, you are skinny enough, you are intelligent enough to go pursue whatever dream you have. You are enough!’”

Debunking the Thigh Gap

“Beauty is defined by fashion and the models in the industry,” she said. “So, we are taking a platform that is the heart of fashion to redefine beauty by focusing on body positivity, validating all body types and meeting women where they are to encourage them to take the runway.”

Wang sees the tide turning in how beauty is defined.

“Five years ago, this campaign was something to be mocked,” she noted. “And now, the social landscape is changing. We are doing our part to impact that change, and we are now seeing a lot of body positivity influencers in social media.”

Why It Matters

According to Wang’s website, statistics show that 80 percent of 10-year-olds are afraid of being fat, at least 30 million Americans suffer from eating disorders and body image challenges damages women’s self-esteem and divert women from focusing on building skillsets.

“The universal standard of beauty is to be skinny,” Wang lamented.

“I want to change the dogma that you have to fit into a certain size to be beautiful. We need to get inside the root causes of self-esteem issues and change it from the inside out.”

The Business Model

Miss Fashion Week focuses on good health and wellbeing and gender equality which are numbers three and five of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The business model follows a franchise-style template. It offers partners a low-cost, high yield, flexible investment that offers multiple revenue streams and 80 percent of the profits.

“This is the perfect opportunity for someone who wants a business with a purpose,” Wang said. “We have a brand that embraces diversity and has strong training, support and branding.”

She Marketplace

She Marketplace is powered by Miss Fashion Week as a platform to empower women. On this platform, there are tools and resources to help women achieve mental health, physical health and financial health.

Products are curated to keep the empowerment of women top of mind, and all products are created by women or are women-owned. Ten percent of the profit goes to MFW Foundation, and every purchase empowers women across the globe.

If you would like to learn more about partnering with Miss Fashion Week or about membership or sponsorship, please visit: https://missfw.com/. To learn more about She Marketplace, visit: https://shemarketplace.com/