People Helping People

Sheila Fuentes spoke on the mindset lessons she learned while building her sustainable retail brand, SI'LO. Sheila is based in the Philippines, and pivoted her career from banking with an economics background to the fashion industry. One of the leading concerns for SI'LO is sustainability, but Sheila also mentioned the issue of unethical labors. Adopting new mindsets would help her in situations like the pandemic, when the business model needed to be revised. Overthinking a problem can lead to overcomplicated solutions. Sustainable fashion contains a lot of moving parts, such as supply chain partners, which leads to unexpected problems scattering an entrepreneur’s attention. Shiela expressed her approach as specifying the problem and having clarity of the main goal. She explained that it’s okay to start without having a perfect process set in place. Attention should be placed on finding a clear goal for a set issue. Sheila gave it a simple order: “One problem to solve, and then clarity of your vision.”