Georgina Wilson looked back on her journey as an entrepreneur and on the early days of her eyewear brand, Sunnies, which was launched back in 2013.
In an interview with Isabelle Daza for DTI's Asenso Pilipino, Georgina relayed that she always wanted to pursue entrepreneurship back then.
"I always knew I wanted a business, and I was actually trying to develop a beauty brand then. And our friend Bea (Dee) approached me and said, 'You always post our glasses and every time you post it, it blows up, so why don't we do this together?'" she recalled.
Georgina emphasized the importance of flexibility in entrepreneurship. "I think that's one thing about entrepreneurship, you have a plan but you never know where it's gonna lead you and you just have to kind of go with it and evolve. This might not be the first idea that you had [but] ay pwede pala 'to," she stated.
She also recalled how she and her co-founders shared a unified vision for the eyewear brand from the beginning. "We wanted to give people the experience you would get in a luxury store but make it affordable and accessible," she said.
The model-entrepreneur went on: "I think we respect and value the customer so much that we wanted to make that experience top-notch but hindi top-notch sa bayad."
Georgina candidly looked back on the brand’s modest beginnings, when she and her partners did much of the work themselves on a limited budget.
"I went to LA [for a photoshoot]. I bought my own ticket, economy. I sat there and I was like, 'Okay this is for a vision.' And then we got there, I was the producer, the model, ako rin nagbayad ng everybody, I had to pay. I was also the driver," she recalled. "It was just the lowest budget but honestly those are some of my favorite photos on Earth."
She stressed that a successful entrepreneur must be hands-on and ready to take on every role. "I guess that's all for the entrepreneur starting, I always think no job is too small or too low for me... Entrepreneurs will have to do everyone's job and now when we employ people, I know their jobs and I know how to talk to them with their jobs because we once did that. We were just once a team of four and now we are a team of over a thousand five hundred people," Georgina highlighted.