Honoured for services to the British Asian community, Zamiha Desai’s journey from a 200-member online group to a 200,000-strong national network reveals what happens when minority women founders stop waiting for representation and build it themselves
BY FRANCESCA RAPISARDA
Last November, at Windsor Castle, Zamiha Desai received her MBE for services to the British Asian community, a rare and powerful moment of recognition within a founder landscape where representation remains low.
In a country where 99.8% of businesses are small or medium-sized, only 15% are women-led, and just 7% are led by people from minority ethnic backgrounds, according to the Government’s latest Small Business Survey. To sit at the intersection of both is to feel what Desai called “the double gap” almost immediately.
Yet her story is not one of limitation, it is one of design.
When Desai began in 2016, there was no grand launch strategy. There was no investor deck. There was simply a small Facebook group of just over 200 friends and family, a space to share recommendations, opportunities, and support within the British Asian community.
“I could see that British Asian women were constantly sharing advice and contacts in private,” she said. “But there wasn’t a safe, visible space where that could happen openly.”
From that simple observation grew three platforms: ProfessionalAsian, RecommendAsian and Hey Gorgeous. What started as a digital gathering has evolved into a national ecosystem approaching 200,000 members, entrepreneurs, creatives, and professionals who uplift one another, trade with one another, and build visibility together.
Desai attributed the community’s loyalty to trust. “These aren’t passive audiences,” she explained. “They’re real women and businesses supporting each other. We celebrate success, and we talk honestly about challenges. The spaces are moderated, respectful, and genuinely supportive.”
That sense of psychological safety, so often missing for minority women founders navigating mainstream business spaces, has become the movement’s foundation.
Desai spoke candidly about what it feels like to build within statistics that do not favour you.
“You walk into rooms where you’re not the expected founder,” she said. “Sometimes your work is seen as community-based rather than commercially serious, even when the numbers tell a different story.”
Visibility and credibility remain recurring barriers for minority women entrepreneurs. There is also the more subtle exhaustion of code-switching, the feeling of having to dilute parts of yourself to fit professional expectations.
Rather than waiting for systemic change, Desai built her own infrastructure.
“If the spaces don’t exist,” she said, “sometimes the only option is to create them yourself, and bring other women along with you.”
Her platforms now offer both online and in-person events, shopping experiences through Hey Gorgeous, and learning opportunities that enable members to access customers, collaborators and mentors. More than 40% of businesses within the ecosystem have taken part in events or collaborations through the network.
When Desai learned she had been awarded an MBE, she said she felt “genuinely shocked.”
“I never expected recognition for what I do. I started all this because I saw a gap and wanted to help.”
The honour is deeply personal, particularly for her family, but it also represents something broader. “So much of what women do happens quietly behind the scenes,” she reflected. “The MBE feels like a moment where that kind of work is being seen and valued.”
Community-building, especially within minority groups, often exists outside traditional definitions of entrepreneurship. It is emotional labour. It is cultural stewardship. It is unpaid mentoring. It is invisible infrastructure.
To see it acknowledged at Windsor Castle carries symbolic weight far beyond the ceremony itself.
Desai often quoted management thinker Peter Drucker: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
It is a philosophy she embodies.
Her vision for the next chapter remains grounded rather than grandiose. More spaces, online and offline, where women can show up fully as themselves. More opportunities to learn, connect, and do business, grow, but not at the expense of the community.
There is also humour and humanity behind the public persona. On Instagram, she occasionally shares light-hearted reflections under the blog title “Taking The Pesab,” a reminder that leadership can coexist with warmth and wit. Following the loss of her husband, she stepped back, but the voice remains part of her story: resilient, evolving, real.
Within a founder landscape where minority-led businesses account for just 7%, Zamiha Desai’s MBE marked more than personal achievement.
From 200 women in a private group to a 200,000-strong ecosystem, her work proved that economic empowerment can begin with something deceptively simple: connection.
On 26 November, as she walked through the gates of Windsor Castle, she carried not only an honour but the momentum of thousands of women who found visibility and possibility because she decided to create the space herself.
And in doing so, she quietly shifted the landscape.
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