Benefiting from the many facets of beauty

A jewellery start-up is challenging empowerment and agency.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

Three women stand, two lean into each other sharing a joke, while the other laughs too.

Members of Zena's Launch Pad team, Kamuli, Uganda.

Zena.

I have a conundrum. I’ve started and re-started this article four times now. And I’m surprised that I’ve settled on this opening. But alas, I have a deadline to adhere to and a cold coffee to warm back up. So, this will have to do. I’m struggling with this opening paragraph because when it comes to writing about Zena - the female-led, non-profit, environmentally friendly jewellery and accessory brand - I simply do not know where to begin.

There are too many facets of Zena that deserve to sit front and centre in this article; too many details to revel in, too many stories to tell, too much success to pick at and analyse.

Where do I possibly start?

How about with the delightful fact that the brand is named after a beloved pet goat who makes appearances on their TikTok? You know, kick things off on an endearing note. Or perhaps the fact that there are playlists curated for all occasions, dance challenges, and even a recipe for tequila lollipops on their website? That would certainly alert people to how seriously this team takes the art of having fun. Or maybe I should open with the fact that they’ve both challenged and refined how I perceive empowerment and agency. I could explain how they have alerted me to the importance of investing in female entrepreneurs as a means of tackling extreme poverty and profound gender inequality.

Yes. I think that’s it. Let’s start there and work our way backwards, shall we?

These women are not beneficiaries, they are benefactors – and that’s an important, not to mention beautiful, distinction.

In which case, here’s the heartbeat of Zena, here’s what you need to know in order to understand everything else about them: women living in rural poverty are currently facing two major barriers when it comes to business opportunity and entrepreneurship, and Zena are tackling both head on.

Firstly, female entrepreneurs in these settings have little to no capital with which to launch their business ventures. To combat this, every single product offered by Zena, whose HQ is in Kamuli (Uganda), is hand-crafted by women who were previously living below the poverty line. Through the Zena apprenticeships, these women are able to support themselves and their families while also earning/saving the capital they need to launch their own businesses once the short-term apprenticeship comes to an end. These women are not beneficiaries, they are benefactors – and that’s an important, not to mention beautiful, distinction.

Secondly, as well as a lack of capital, these women are battling a lack of education. And so, through a multi-phase entrepreneurship programme (The Zena Launch Pad), Zena are giving their apprentices both the theoretical and practical tools that they need to launch and sustain their own businesses. Women are graduating from this programme with literacy and numeracy skills, a viable business plan, industry-specific knowledge and skills, as well as leadership and development.

Because here’s the bottom-line, the foundation upon which Zena stands, the deep conviction of both Caragh and Loren, the co-founders and CEOs; agency matters. Widening one’s understanding of success to encompass these women’s agency, for better or for worse, matters. Empowering these women to earn their own capital, to see the unfolding of their own ideas, to know that their decisions matter, it makes all the difference. No dependence, no hand-outs, and no debt. Just the kind of empowerment that is laced with agency.

It’s bold. But it’s working.

There was utter delight in her eyes when she explained how good generates more good and creation generates more creation.

So far, time-stamped at this moment in time, Zena’s hybrid and holistic approach has led to 67 female entrepreneurs, over 150 children in school, and nearly 500 lives lived above the poverty line. Women are hiring other women, businesses are birthing more businesses, education is generating more education.

Pretty special, isn’t it? Pretty Jesus-like too.

I had the immense joy of chatting to Caragh, one of the co-founders and CEOs of Zena; she reminded me that multiplication is one of Jesus’ most classic moves. Just as the people sitting around Jesus with wide eyes and numb backsides witnessed one humble lunch feed tens-of-thousands of mouths, so are Caragh and her team witnessing jaw-dropping multiplication happen before their very eyes. There was utter delight in her eyes when she explained how good generates more good and creation generates more creation. Compassion is contagious and innovation spreads. Although Zena is by no means an enterprise that squeezes itself into a religious box (empowering women of all faiths and none), it is easy to see how Caragh and Loren’s faith in a God who wrote generative goodness into the fabric of reality, informs their mission to write it into their business model.

Something else that is woven into the DNA of Zena, much to my delight, is an unabashed celebration of the female consumer. 2023 may well be remembered as the year when an economic earthquake was caused by Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Barbie. According to Forbes, it is likely to be regarded as the year where people began to take seriously and analyse the power of 'the female dollar'. And Zena, with their penchant for all things pink and glittery, have been sitting ahead of the curve for a little while. Their products, as seen in Vogue, Marie Claire, and Harvey Nicholls (as well as embellishing the looks of numerous celebrities), seem to have been made with this cultural moment in sight. Their aesthetic perfectly encapsulates the resurgence of female playfulness and the reclaiming of ‘girliness’ as something to embrace and revel in. As I have already referenced, joy is something that this team take incredibly seriously.

The celebration of women infiltrates every layer of Zena’s existence, that much is clear. While their products delight the female gaze, their profits sow into female entrepreneurship. Both of which display how working toward gender equality, particularly in contexts such as Kamuli, is a means by which we can wage a war on extreme poverty.

Women serving women, who are serving women, who are serving women. And on it goes – so beautifully circular. So intriguingly God-inspired.

Article

Ageing

Care

Change

31 January 2025

5 min read

Delicate, fragile, frail: how we cope when we age

The insights and analogies that help.

Helen Cowan

Helen is a registered nurse and freelance writer, writing for audiences ranging from the general public to practitioners and scientists.

An old woman wearing a shawl looks pensive.

Valentin Balan on Unsplash.

“Who could dissect a portion of the human frame without marvelling at its delicacy, and trembling at its frailty?” mused preacher Charles Spurgeon in the nineteenth century. Songwriters, artists, authors and surgeons alike are fascinated by frailty. Within, beneath and beyond that fragile frame though, could there be a deeper reality, waiting to arise – and endure?

Fragile Lives is the ‘heart-stopping memoir’, operation by operation, of heart surgeon Professor Stephen Westaby. “The finest of margins,” he writes, “separates life from death, triumph from defeat, hope from despair – a few more dead muscle cells, a fraction more lactic acid in the blood, a little extra swelling of the brain. Grim Reaper perches on every surgeon’s shoulder.”

To what shall we compare this fragility of frame? - which means we can shatter sudden as glass, our “breath becoming air” in the blink of an eye? (Paul Kalanithi, a young neurosurgeon, called his memoir When Breath Becomes Air as he fought his own battle with cancer). A snowflake? A spider’s web? A butterfly wing? In Dutch still life paintings, the transience of life is variously depicted in dry, fallen withering petals, rotting fruit, and a glass vessel, like a vase. At some funeral services, it is said that we are made from dust, and to dust we shall return. Elsewhere in the Bible, we are likened to a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes, or to a flower that withers away, a fleeting shadow that does not endure. Our days are a mere handbreadth, our life but a breath, writes one Bible songwriter.

Medics talk more commonly of frailty than fragility – and it’s not just a byword for old age. According to the British Geriatrics Society, not all old people live with frailty; not all people living with frailty are old, though age is a recognised risk factor, with nearly 40 per cent of adults aged 85-90 being frail. Described as a vulnerability to external stressors which can result in sudden marked deterioration in function, frailty might feature as a combination of falls, immobility, delirium, incontinence, and increased side effects of medications, suggesting the body is struggling to cope. “A minor infection or minor surgery results in a striking and disproportionate change in health state – from independent to dependent, mobile to immobile, or lucid to delirious,” writes a team of doctors in The Lancet.

Frailty is a sign of advanced biological rather than chronological age. Often, it’s an unwelcome term, with consultant physician Patricia Cantley noting that, “from a patient or relative’s point of view, the word frailty seems to be at best somewhat vague and at worst, derogatory and demotivating”. She prefers to talk in terms of paper boats. Picturing young healthy patients as little tugboats of wood and steel, built to withstand storms, she likens the frail patient’s clinical situation to a paper boat, which can sail the sunny seas, but is soon buffeted and may be brought down by ‘medical winds’.

Encompassing also psychological and cognitive symptoms alongside the physical, frailty is not a fixed state, nor is decline in mind and body inevitable once frailty begins. Seen increasingly as a dynamic spectrum, reversal of frailty is sometimes possible; the paper boat being, to a degree, storm proofed and made to chart a different course. According to Dr John Travers, professor of public health at Trinity College, Dublin, twenty minutes of daily exercise can reverse physical frailty and build resilience in over 65-year-olds, while others suggest that movement based mind-body therapies such as tai-chi and yoga can strengthen both mind and body. Could there also be something of a spiritual strengthening in the frail patient? As the body decays and declines, could the soul, the spiritual self, enlarge, emerge and ultimately endure as life ebbs away? This was certainly the sentiment of Paul, one of the early church leaders, in the Bible, who, after much suffering, wrote: “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day…we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was seen on our television screens to diminish physically in her last days, her purple hands, tiny frame and walking cane causing concern among viewers. She was, at her funeral, described simply as “our sister Elizabeth”, her small coffin dwarfed by pageantry and a crowd of 2,000 including presidents and kings. And yet, the former Moderator of the Church of Scotland has revealed that she talked much of her Christian faith in her dying days, while her funeral was an explosion of scripture, hymns and sermons that expressed the strength of her personal faith. “It was her way of eloquently, beautifully and powerfully speaking to me and 4.1 billion other people of her Christian faith,” writes Pastor Skip Heitzig. For me, the funeral brought to mind the tides (continuing with the theme of the sea). As the tide recedes, the waters move away from the shore, in what is known as an ebb current. As the tide rises, water moves toward the shore in a flood current. As our Queen’s life ebbed away physically, her spiritual self arose, roaring like a mighty flood. Ocean motion, in currents, waves and tides, is driven by the sun, moon and the planets. Our late Queen also looked upwards, to her God, for spiritual succour that would turn life’s ebb to a soul-flood.

Hymnwriter Timothy Dudley-Smith sought a similar exchange, from the physical to the spiritual, the mortal to the immortal, in yet more words about boats, in his hymn “My boat so small”, based on the Breton Fisherman’s Prayer.

“Adrift when strength and courage fail, O Spirit, breathe to fill my sail”

And, happily, he trusts a safe voyage, finishing with - “My voyage done, all trouble past, to haven bring my soul at last.”

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