I worked on: launching an ethical fashion label.

I started my career in 2003 as a graduate trainee in the finance function of Uniqema, a division of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in north-east England. My academic background was actually in hospitality and tourism, so I chose to take the CIMA qualification because it would give me more of a business focus. When Uniqema was acquired by rival firm Croda I moved to ICI's headquarters in London.

I worked there as a transition manager, outsourcing finance back-office operations to centres of excellence worldwide. This involved a lot of travel and taught me a great deal about how people deal with change and how crucial it is to plan projects carefully to ensure that they meet their objectives. My CIMA training was particularly handy at this point. What I was dealing with was not purely finance - I really had to know each business.

As the project approached completion in 2008, ICI was acquired by AkzoNobel. The new management team didn't want an outsourced finance department and was planning to decentralise it all again. It felt wrong to unravel everything that I'd been working on for more than two years, so I left for Lloyds TSB.

I started there as a finance business partner - just as the financial crisis was starting in earnest. The bank took over HBOS in early 2009, which proved a great opportunity for me to apply my experience of change management. The cultural transformations required were huge and it struck me just how vulnerable we are as employees when external factors and profit-focused objectives dictate corporate behaviour.

By the summer of 2010 I felt the urge to align my personal values with my professional life, so I left to establish a consultancy focusing on the themes of environmental, social and economic sustainability. In 2013 I decided that I needed to find an additional way of engaging people with sustainability issues, so I set up my own womenswear label: Niultemyr. I believe that real change can happen only when people get emotionally involved with it. The clothing industry causes vast ecological damage and, as our relationship with clothes is often an emotional one, taking a new approach here made sense to me. Having spent...

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