Coco Chanel is an entrepreneur because her ventures processed four key points that distinguished her from not solely being a small business owner. These four differences are:
1) Amount of Wealth Created
2) Speed of Wealth Created
3) Risk
4) Innovation
For Chanel, the amount of wealth she created and speed of which she created that wealth are connected. She is the epitome of a “rags to riches” success story. Coco Chanel may not have made several million dollars as the definition for amount of wealth created states, however, at the time of her rapid success, her profits were of entrepreneurial standards. Also, not only did Coco make money, and rise from a poor seamstress to a famed fashion designer, she made her wealth in an extremely short time frame. After four years of being in business, Chanel was able to fully reimburse her investor, Chapel, all of the capital he had given her to start two boutiques. As with the first two points, risk and innovation are also connected in Chanel’s case. Her major risk was being innovative. Coco made clothes based on her own love of non-traditional, menswear inspired, women’s apparel. This was risky because cultural norms were very important in her early designing era. She was innovative because she was the first designer to liberate women from the constraints of corsets and satin dresses. Coco Chanel continued to take risks all through her career and she will forever be known as not only a strong female role model, but an iconic entrepreneur as well.
Information on Coco Chanel taken from this article
