/ Meet community builder extraordinaire Sarah Vee: the founder of Women of Hong Kong and partner to Muay Thai champ Jeferson Oliveira believes women are stronger together
- The Filipino entrepreneur suffered from impostor syndrome and a lack of self-confidence until she decided to work smarter not harder, and build a community of women to help each other
- Vee wears her favourite IWC Pilot watch, featured in Tom Cruise film Vanilla Sky, to remind herself to dream but stay present, and says that sometimes the biggest challenge is ‘being yourself’
“I didn’t like myself five years ago,” Sarah Vee says starkly. “I would never have sat with myself five years ago for dinner, for a drink or even for breakfast.” It’s an odd sentiment for someone who founded an empowering networking initiative whose membership now numbers in the thousands.
But for Vee it has always been about the journey rather than the destination. With the Women of Hong Kong, she brings to bear all of the tools and knowledge she has gained from past stints as a nightlife event promoter, as well as from being a mother.
“I don’t think I knew exactly what I wanted, I just knew it was more than what I had right now,” she admits, looking further back to the days she managed raising her son alongside working as marketing and events manager at Central nightclub Play. “I was a young mum, I had my son at 21 and that doubled up what I wanted out of life, not just for me but for him too. I worked harder, I looked for more opportunities, I said yes to everything and I do remember burning out.”
Despite being born and raised in the city, Vee initially saw herself as an outsider. The comparison game was on from the start, with large parts of her professional and personal social groups drawn from international schools and affluent family backgrounds. “I saw that they had better curriculums than us, or they had more opportunities to go camp or go on exchange trips,” she remembers, “but that was when I realised I wasn’t one of those people who are born to watch other people get to good places without trying myself.”
Initially, her solution was starting the largely social Girls of Hong Kong in 2014, which served as a reason for women to get together simply to celebrate one another’s company. “At the time it was somewhat awkward to just go for a drink with a girlfriend because there might be unwanted advances or competitiveness about who looks better.
“When we opened the door to drinking together,” Vee continues, “we felt more confident to pull out that sparkly dress because they knew there were six more women who were going to dress to the skies, not for any man but for ourselves. We had such a good time and it stemmed from wanting to feel good in our own skin.”
The Girls of Hong Kong Facebook group had about 2,000 members at the time, but even though Vee wanted to grow the group more, there were personal struggles to overcome first.
“Half of me was thinking that people weren’t going to take me seriously and that’s what I understood later to be impostor syndrome,” adds the Filipino entrepreneur.