Pursuing a passion never goes out of style

The fashion has interested her since she was a child. At the age of six Wijden El Ouni used to create paper clothes with sheets and markers and as a teenager she began to dream of being a stylist.  

Despite the objections of her mother, who would have preferred that her daughter finds a more secure job, Wijden enrolled an art school specialising in fashion, doing modelling and photo jobs on the side to accumulate knowledge and experience.  

Just two weeks after finishing her studies, she found employment in a knitwear factory in the Prato area as assistant to the Head of the style office. Prato is one of the three famous industrial districts specialized in knitwear (together with Como and Biella), with 80% of the clients coming from abroad. But her dream has always been to design and create her own clothing line.   

Microfinance supports women entrepreneurs  

Wijden was born in Sicily and lived in Tunisia, where her family comes from, before settling in Tuscany. As a budding entrepreneur, she is in many ways a typical client of PerMicro, the first Italian microcredit provider operating across the country: a determined woman of migrant origin, with a clear business idea and a passion.  

PerMicro combines a business management approach with social goals and giving complementary technical support to its clients, both directly and through partner associations.  According to its social impact report published in 2020, 44% of its business clients are women and 24% are migrants. What is different about Wijden, however, is that she started her entrepreneurial journey in the midst of a global pandemic that upended thousands of small businesses in Italy and elsewehere.  

In early 2020, at a friend’s invitation, Wijden decided to quit her job and move to Spain to start her independent career as a stylist. Not an easy decision to forego stability and jump into the unknown, but Wijden knew this was her vocation.  

What she could not know was that COVID-19 would break out imminently, shattering her plans to move, closing her business before it even properly took off and despite the agreements already made with the buyers.  

Global pandemic: an opportunity?  

Wijden decided to move forward and use the lockdown as an opportunity to develop her business idea. She transformed her room into a laboratory in which she studied the market, identified the gaps, and began designing her own style line consisting of 14 clothes and accessories aimed at a medium-high range market, for women who need a dress to wear on special occasions.  

To transform the ideas into a viable business her start-up needed liquidity and her bank directed her to PerMicro, a microfinance provider that lends money to young entrepreneurs who want to start their own business.  

PerMicro advisors welcomed Wijden, listened to her ideas, analysed her project, looked at her drawings. They helped her draw up the business plan to outline the economic feasibility of the project, the investments needed and expected revenue over time. At the end of the process her idea was assessed as sustainable idea and she was given a loan.  

Wijden says: "PerMicro gave me 360 ​​degrees credit, not only provided me with the financing, which at 24 seemed like a huge thing to me, but it strengthened my belief in what I was doing."  

Long-term partnership  

CEB and PerMicro have been working together on projects with high social impact since 2013. Following a fully disbursed €6 million loan in 2013 the CEB’s Administrative Council approved another loan operation in 2018 for an amount of €7 million.  

In January 2021 the Administrative Council approved a third loan to PerMicro  totaling €3.6 million. This Programme Loan will target the financial and social inclusion of low-income and vulnerable persons, with a focus on employment for women and female entrepreneurs, through the provision of financing to small businesses and families.  

“We have been supporting women's life projects for 14 years. Over the past 10 years, 55% of our funding has been allocated to women. The road to gender equality and the full recognition of merit for women is underway, but much remains to be done.  

Moreover, at PerMicro, the majority of employees are women: much of the value we produce is due to their professional and human skills for which we are extremely grateful,” said Benigno Imbriano, CEO of PerMicro.

“In more than eight years of cooperation, PerMicro and CEB have managed together to achieve important results for the financial inclusion of the most vulnerable," commented Lucia Bucciareli Ducci, Country Manager for Italy. 

"We are proud to support some  of the worthy initiatives that are implemented by PerMicro, one of them being its efforts to gender equality, which is also the focus of the project recently approved by CEB in favour of PerMicro.” 

This story is part of the Council of Europe Development Bank’s social media campaign, Women Mean Business, to mark the International Women’s Day on 8 March 2021