Ep.12 Zamiha Desai | Building communities & being authentic

In this episode, I'm with Zamiha Desai, Director of RecommendAsian Ltd. Zamiha is the founder of The Facebook group RecommendAsian and Professional Asian. Today the group stands at 70,000 people on the ladies RecommendAsian group and 75,000 people on the ProfessionalAsian group. In 2016 Zamiha was working for the Argos Head Office and living a very ordinary life. A new management structure and subsequent redundancies left her miserable and dreading going to work. In April of that year Zamiha had started a Facebook group called RecommendAsian - it was 219 of her friends and she had been recommended a sari pleater that she thought was amazing and she wanted to share it with her friends. Not knowing how to do this, she created a group, Recommend Asian, which quickly grew. In this episode, we talk about how the group grew, starting as women only. We speak about losing passion and enjoyment in her work and how creating communities allowed her to regain it, the challenges of working from home (even before COVID) and staying productive and learning to charge for her time/business. Zamiha has some pillars when it comes to building communities online which she shares with me. With a real focus on authenticity which leads us onto the topic of her newer, more humorous group on Facebook which is also quickly gaining traction. To connect with Zamiha online, find her on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/zam.des.3 And learn about Recommend Asian and Professional Asian here: https://www.facebook.com/recommendasian https://www.facebook.com/groups/ProfessionalAsian