Fabricating The Future

While Sarah Chessis is passionate about fashion and design, the ceo of sewsew you is also aware the industry is broken. She’s aiming to fix it using extraordinary technology that will turn business on its head.

- Wendy Kay

Sarah Chessis admits she was more of an “accidental” stockbroker working in the cutthroat world of finance for nearly 20 years. The SewSew You CEO’s career forged in the industry was never a deliberate path, revealed on her first morning as a filing clerk at Barings in London. “The guy who ran the trading desk asked me if I knew what an ‘equity’ was,” she says, laughing. “I didn’t have a clue. But he assured me I’d learn.”

And learn she did. Sarah was quickly promoted while blitzing her stockbroking exams. She soon became the company’s number one salesperson on the desk and was charged with setting up an office in Hong Kong.

Despite her success in finance, art and fashion have always been Sarah’s real passions; subjects she enjoyed at school, but outlets that weren’t encouraged.

“My artwork was all over the school,” she remembers. “But at a parent-teacher evening, the teacher told my mum, ‘Sarah’s good, but she’s not good enough.’ In those days, if that’s what the teacher said, you just accepted it. So I basically left school and took a job in recruitment, which is how I came across the job at Barings.”

Reflecting over the years, Sarah believes that huge wave of success she rode in finance only served to carry her to exactly where she really wanted to be: in the world of fashion.