Winnie Awa Keynote Speaker

Founded Carra, AI-powered textured-hair platform (2020)
Innovate UK Women in Innovation Award winner (2022)
Hair Care Judge, Pure Beauty Global Awards (2025)

Winnie Awa's Biography

Winnie Awa is a creative visionary and storyteller based in London. Her multi-disciplinary practice sits at the intersection of beauty, technology, community-led design, and cultural intelligence, crafting products and narratives that feel as human as they are technologically advanced.

Winnie’s work is informed by a career spanning global corporations, luxury brands, and early-stage startups, giving her a rare insight into how ideas scale, where they break, and how culture makes them resonate. Winnie’s professional journey includes LVMH, Net-a-Porter, ASOS, Ernst & Young, and IBM, where she developed a rare ability to bridge technology, culture, and creativity across fashion, beauty, and art.

She has built and launched award-winning tech products from scratch, steered multimillion-pound digital transformations for luxury brands, and led cross-functional teams to deliver complex AI, personalisation, and e-commerce innovations that shift markets. Her latest venture – Carra Labs, is a multicultural intelligence platform that melds consumer behaviour with real-world data, powering global beauty brands with culturally relevant insights to transform innovation.

Winnie is a recognised authority on inclusive innovation, she is a Women in Innovation UK award recipient and Sunday Times Style Disruptor shortlisted. Her insights have been featured by BBC, Vogue Business, Harper’s Bazaar, Sunday Times Style, WWD, Stylist Magazine, and more.

Her upcoming book, Global Hair Cultures (2027), published by a leading international publisher, explores the social, political, and aesthetic histories of global beauty practices and draws on her lived experience across Nigeria, UK, France, Colombia, and UAE.

For global beauty brands and cultural institutions, Winnie plays both a strategic and creative role both as a multicultural consumer expert and strategist, dedicated to sparking original thinking and helping brands create culturally relevant products and solutions.

Winnie is an expert in inclusive innovation and multicultural beauty. She has held several advisory positions across the beauty ecosystem as co-chair of the British Beauty Council diversity committee, Glamour Power List honouree, and Pure Beauty Awards Judge, and Stylus 2024 Changemakers.

Winnie thrives in bringing together human centred approaches with her unique artistic gaze.

Why your taste matters

In a world where everyone has access to the same tools, your aesthetic judgment, cultural intuition, and ability to trust what you find compelling becomes the deciding factor. This talk explores why creativity, intuition, and taste are the next frontier of competitive advantage.

When beauty met algorithms

Beauty isn't just personal—it's political, cultural, inherited. This talk reveals why the most successful beauty innovations keep humans in the loop, how to build culturally intelligent products (not just "diverse" ones). This talk gives a whole different context to beauty trends, from ingredients to technology.

Designing products people want

This talk is a compelling spin on consumer insight, exploring the new rules of product development, community-led growth, and inclusive innovation. Learn how to listen deeper, build with (not for) your community, and treat consumers as co-creators.

Rituals > Routines

We dismiss beauty rituals as vanity. From my research across global hair cultures, I've discovered that rituals create meaning, signal identity, and offer moments of control in chaotic lives. How global beauty practices shape identity, culture, politics and why they matter for brands today.

She operates at the intersection of beauty, technology and cultural intelligence, helping leaders understand how identity, community and data are reshaping what consumers expect from brands.
She brings rare end-to-end product experience, having built award-winning tech from scratch and led multimillion-pound digital transformations for global luxury and e-commerce businesses.
She translates multicultural consumer behaviour into practical innovation strategy, enabling teams to design products and experiences that feel culturally relevant and commercially scalable.
She advises organisations on inclusive innovation across the beauty ecosystem, drawing on leadership roles with the British Beauty Council and judging positions that keep her close to industry change.
She delivers sharp, story-driven briefings that blend human-centred design and creative insight, equipping audiences to make smarter decisions on AI, personalisation and future-facing customer experience.