This post originally appeared on News@Northeastern. It was published by Alena Kazub.
When Natasha Shazana meets her Instagram followers in real life, some can't even recall her name. To them she is @brapreneur, the force behind a new bra company, Soko, whose mission is to bring empowerment and comfort to everyday women in Malaysia.
To launch the bra business in her home country, Shazana, a Northeastern graduate, Class of 2013, quit a private equity job in New York City. But she hasn't regretted the move, she says. In just a year after the launch she has grown her revenue to six figures. She won a 2022 Innovator Award, presented by Northeastern's Women Who Empower, in the experienced alumnae category, and $22,000 in June.
“I am a big extrovert, I derive my energy from other people,” Shazana says. “That is why I love and [am] so excited to be a part of the Women Who Empower supportive community.”
Her old college friend Jessica Pogranyi confirms, “She is super sociable, probably the most sociable person I know.
“She has a lot of energy. She is a go-getter.”
While Pogranyi is preparing herself to launch an environmentally-friendly mezcal brand in Mexico, she and Shazana often discuss their businesses.
“She is a great listener and advice giver,” Pogranyi says. “Every time I message her, she is awake somehow.”
And Shazana does have a lot to share after the last three years of developing a product and launching her business.
“It's hard. It's really hard,” she says. “It's the hardest thing I've done in my life.”
Shazana grew up between Malaysia, Singapore, U.K., Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, while her parents pursued careers in banking. At the age of 17, Shazana came to study at Northeastern's D'Amore-McKim School of Business in Boston, after her prom date told her about the university and its co-op programs.
She maximized every single opportunity at Northeastern, Shazana says, doing two co-ops, two internships, and a semester abroad in Shanghai, China. She majored in marketing and finance.
Surprisingly, unlike a lot of her classmates, she struggled to secure a job before graduating, despite applying to close to 200 companies. She almost started a food truck business to create her own opportunity, before she landed a foreign exchange broker position and moved to New York City.
“I had five computer screens, and I was getting yelled at all the time on the phone,” she laughs. Next, she spent five years working in institutional sales and private equity at Morgan Stanley, which she left in 2019 to move back to Malaysia to pursue her own entrepreneurial idea.
Shazana was ready to try her own business with the support of her future husband, Chris Evans, who also quit his day job and originally acted as Soko's co-founder, providing her with big picture, strategic advice.
Although Shazana has not lived in Malaysia for almost two decades of her life, she felt a pull to go back and try to build a business that would represent real Malaysian women. She ventured into bras because women's empowerment has not reached this industry in Malaysia yet. The existing brands did not reflect values of modern women or what local millennials and Gen Z'ers wanted from them, Shazana says.
“I wanted to drive change and accelerate change in the broad industry in terms of representation, first and foremost,” Shazana says.
As she says, the industry either offered “grandma” bras or pushed oversexualized images of mostly white women, photoshopped and airbrushed, in the ad campaigns. Very rarely one could see a brown skinned model in the ads.
“For me, that's not enough. Like, why do we put up with this?” Shazana says.