WOMAN OF THE FUTURE
CARA SAVEN Cara Saven Wall Design carasaven.com
IN 2006, Cara Saven was working as a retail buyer for Woolworths when she fell pregnant with her first child. ‘At the time I fully intended to come back to work, but once my child had been born, I knew I couldn’t.’ So she cashed in her pension and spent a year ‘learning to be a mom’ before she had to look at bringing in some money again. Initially, Cara ran a small photography business, but an exciting decor trend at the time really piqued her interest. ‘Large-format wallpaper printing had just come into play, and I loved the medium and scale.’ Initially, she couldn’t give her business everything she knew it needed. As a full-time mother, she had to hold herself back for a while. ‘It was only when my eldest daughter was 10 that I took my foot off the proverbial brake.’
Officially launched in 2016, Cara Saven Wall Design has since gone on to produce and install wall art for some of South Africa’s finest hotels, homes and corporate spaces, and has become a leading name in bespoke wall designs, canvases, framed prints and vinyl wall art.
Today, her business has branches in the Netherlands, the US, Dubai and Australia. ‘The hope is that in three years you’ll be able to find Cara Saven Wall Design in 20 regions globally.’
Cara says skills she learnt while working in retail have helped her to create designs that she knows will sell, and to manage a team. Her team is mostly made up of working moms, so they’re always busy, but the pressures they share enable them to work together efficiently.
For Cara, being awarded the Woman of the Future title makes all the hard work juggling being a mother and an entrepreneur worth it. ‘I always felt conflicted about having to put my business goals on ice for the years when my kids were small,’ she says. ‘But now I know it was all worth the sacrifice, the hard work, the gut feeling that I had something big that I was sitting on. I just needed the time to grow it.’
Cara understands that wallpaper has the ability to transform a space, and when you do that, an added benefit is that the people living or working there also feel a shift. ‘That’s what I hope to leave behind: beautiful and exciting spaces that have been transformed using our wallcoverings. I’d also like to leave a legacy of having built up a business while still being there for my kids – one of the hardest challenges out there.’
I always felt conflicted about having to put my business goals on ice for the years when my kids were small.