Winnie Tan, the CEO and founder of digital media for travel, TripZilla.com, is the winner of our ‘Empowered Women in SME’. MARKETECH APAC’s Empowered Women Awards 2023 is its first-ever dedicated awarding initiative to laud outstanding women marketing leaders in the industry.
Winnie has always been a passionate traveller and this led her to building Travelogy.com, even before she founded the well-renowned industry digital media platform, TripZilla. The former is the foundation for the latter, where Travelogy.com builds travel portals and tools for travellers in Southeast Asia.
Prior to being the entrepreneur that she is today, Winnie boasts a diverse experience, serving several companies within the capacity of sales and partnerships.
Picking up the broken pieces of ‘travel’ from the pandemic
Winnie’s passion for travel and media led her to build the TripZilla platform, but little did everyone would know in the industry that brands would be hitting a massive roadblock and have everything collapse.
In 2022, two years after the global pandemic and when everything is slowly going back to normal, Winnie found herself rolling up her sleeves again and putting back the pieces of TripZilla she once built from scratch in 2010.
With endurance and resilience, Winnie directed her team to rebuild the products that were once removed from the digital travel media during the pandemic.
Even more so, with a reach of over 20 million monthly, TripZilla wanted to take an active role in the resumption of travel. Winnie managed to expand the team, revive processes and grow sales numbers, and eventually, steered the company back into profitability by the end of the year.
Tenacity at a time of unpredictable industry pivots
Winnie has always been a tenacious leader, but the catastrophic events over the last three years demanded more of this grit from the woman leader.
She is determined to keep the team together and things going regardless of the circumstances. Even from the very beginning, Winnie did not sit through the changes despite the fear in uncertainty, but instead, had adopted a bias towards action.
The digital media had four localised websites, namely for TripZilla Philippines, TripZilla Indonesia, TripZilla Malaysia, and TripZilla Singapore. As early as February 2020, Winnie pivoted the editorial direction of each of the platforms. These media properties focused on ‘Culture’ and ‘Domestic Experiences’, where the team also bravely innovated to work with brands, even outside travel.
Under Winnie’s leadership, TripZilla adapted quickly as the situation evolved and as a result, had a greater range of clients now both from Travel and non-Travel.
Learn-master-teach
As a leader, Winnie operates by the principle of ‘Learn-master-teach’. Even more so within oneself, she believes that effective leaders must make the effort to spread the wisdom of this approach as well as one’s other learnings from being in a position of leadership.
Being at the helm of her own founded business, she uses her experience and knowledge to ‘mentor’ both on an audience-level and personal scale.
Winnie is a welcomed speaker at conferences and is often asked to comment on issues related to travel, marketing, and entrepreneurship. As a startup founder and experienced technopreneur herself, Winnie is a mentor at hackathons at events like WebinTravel Startup Pitch and Startup Weekend Singapore.
She purposefully carves time and space to do these as she believes access to a mentor is important for those with aspirations to progress to leadership roles. In today’s time where there continues to be a glass ceiling to be broken, women in business especially need role models to guide them and be their sounding boards.
“There is a glaring underrepresentation of women at the C-level. It is time to create a change and companies must actively empower women to assume executive roles,” Winnie remarked.
Aside from Winnie, check out who else made it to Empowered Women Awards 2023 Winners’ list.
