Meg Enerson

What does your company do?

Fempreneurs is a low-cost, multi-vendor e-commerce marketplace and community that connects women SME owners across South Africa to digital selling opportunities. The platform provides a shared online environment where women entrepreneurs can market and sell their products while engaging with peers through a supportive community network. Fempreneurs partners with women-focused NPOs and incubators to extend digital market access to a broader base of underserved entrepreneurs.

What is your biggest success?

My greatest achievement has been conceptualising and self-funding South Africa's first multi-vendor e-commerce marketplace dedicated to women entrepreneurs, entirely as a part-time founder. While working full-time in a demanding remote role, I led the development of a complex, fully functional digital platform that allows multiple women-owned businesses to host their stores, manage inventory, receive payments, integrate with a courier partner and reach online customers in a shared ecosystem. I'm most proud of the achievement of creating this platform from scratch and coordinating the technology, branding, onboarding, and partnerships in my spare time.

What has been your biggest hurdle?

My biggest hurdle has been building a fully functional, bootstrapped multi-vendor e-commerce marketplace in South Africa without funding, limited technical advice, or full-time capacity. Multi-vendor platforms are complex by nature. They require layered functionality for different user types, secure payment systems, vendor dashboards, product management tools, logistics integration, and customer support—all running seamlessly in one ecosystem. Doing this with limited resources and no external investment while working full-time (and being a mum and wife) has been an enormous challenge. In addition to the technical hurdles, building this kind of infrastructure in South Africa meant navigating unreliable service providers, limited access to affordable, scalable digital tools, and the need to localise everything—from payment methods to user experience—for a market that includes women with varying levels of digital literacy. There were moments when the vision felt bigger than the means, but staying focused on the mission—to create market access for women entrepreneurs—pushed me through the setbacks.