Deniz Yılmaz

Deniz Yılmaz was born in Istanbul on July 29^th, 1998. She completed her primary and secondary school education at Hisar Schools. Deniz Yılmaz, who is still a 12^th grade student at Robert College, enjoys horse riding, yoga, reading and cooking. Deniz, who turned her greatest passion, cooking into a product, published a book titled “Youngster’s Kitchen” in the recent months. She also has a foodblog under the name of “youngsterskitchen.com”. Deniz’s goals include helping make inclusive and social businesses more prevalent in Turkey and increasing the private sector’s involvement in such projects. In this sense, Deniz Yılmaz worked as a research assistant in Professor Zeynep Gurhan Canli’s UNDP supported research, “Inclusive Business: A New, Sustainable and Innovative Private Sector” in the summer of 2015, and in order to deepen her involvement in this field, she interned at the Yunus Center of Bangladesh, founded by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus in the summer of 2016. Deniz Yılmaz came up with her idea of an inclusive-business clothing line at a social service project that she attended in Bayburt- a city in Northeastern Turkey. The “El Emegi” (“Hand Made”) project took root from her observations there. She used her family company, Koton, as a channel to put her idea to life. Koton partnered with ÇATOM (Multi-Purpose Social Centers), a joint venture of UNDP the government. The clothes, which are designed by the design team of Koton within the scope of Koton Hand Made Project, are embroidered by 350 women living in Soma, Şanlıurfa, Gaziantep, Mardin, Adıyaman and Batman, and offered to millions of Koton customers in 45 stores. In 2016, the pilot phase of the project successfully came to an end, as the project became one of Koton’s official clothing lines. The “Hand Made” project will be sold in 200 stores in the winter season of 2016, reaching almost 10,000 women.