Joy Ajlouny

Joy Ajlouny, who never married and is single, feels that it is important to make a difference in the world apart from becoming a mother and raising children. Being born to refugee parents, she has pledged to give all her life's earnings to help refugees.

In an interview, she mentioned that her journey actually started with someone making her feel that she was not "smart enough, good enough, pretty enough, accomplished enough", which she was determined to proved wrong. She also mentioned that her younger self used to worry too much about what other people thought of her rather than focusing on her own dreams.

She is vehemently opposed to the "ridiculous Kim Kardashian generation" of women who are too obsessed about what they look like and how many likes they get on Instagram and Facebook. She thinks that women should feel good about they have accomplished in the world, rather than "photoshop pictures" that earn likes on social media.

Joy Ajlouny was raised in the US by Palestinian parents in a business family and witnessed "endless breakfasts" where everyone was reading the New York Times and discussing world events and business ideas. She feels that she comes from a very serious family which was always interested in business and politics and "never talked about sports and trivial things".

According to her, the mentality to succeed with good education and hard work was in her DNA, like in most Palestinian refugee families, which made studying finance in college the natural choice for her. She attended The George Washington University, from where she completed her BBA degree in Finance and Economics.

While Joy Ajlouny came from a finance and economic background, she has been passionate about fashion from an early age. She decided to combine e-commerce and fashion and took up fashion related ventures during her early career.

One of her first jobs was at Fox's, a retail chain with sixteen locations on the East Coast for women's off-price designer clothing. She joined the retail company to initially work in the changing room of a clothing store, which was "not fun at all" according to her.

She soon worked her way up and was promoted to the position of a Senior Buyer, which she held from 1987 to 1990. Her responsibilities there included selecting products and identifying potential brands, developing merchandising strategies by staying current on customer purchasing and product movement trends, building direct relationships with key suppliers, and driving sales margin improvements.

In 1991, she founded her own local chain of women's off-price designer clothing, Joy's, based in New York. Till May 2002, she managed over 20 employees, led all efforts for merchandising, product development, design and distribution, as well as created and maintained relationships with other retailers and buyers in the Middle East.

In November 2011, she founded Bonfaire, an e-commerce discovery platform for luxury footwear and accessories. It was an accessories-only platform for emerging designers that provided a white space for sophisticated consumers seeking the out-of-the ordinary designs.

Joy Ajlouny became the first entrepreneur to raise $11million fund for a start-up venture in the Middle East from one of the top venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. According to her, this is her biggest accomplishment not only as an Arab woman, but as a woman in general because only "1 per cent of all women have ever achieved that".