Victoria Myers

Victoria Myers is the founder of the Small Retailer Network, the UAE’s leading membership community for product-based business owners.

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Hosted by

Hilmarie Hutchison

Victoria Myers

Founder of Small Retailer Network

Victoria Myers is the founder of the Small Retailer Network, the UAE’s leading membership community for product-based business owners. With a two-decade career in the UK retail industry, she worked her way up from the shop floor to managing 13 stores across Scotland and Northern England for major fashion and accessories brands, including Radley and Karen Millen.

Her experience spans customer experience, trading cycles, sales leadership, store operations, and head-office strategy. After relocating to the UAE, Victoria shifted from corporate retail to consultancy, eventually creating a community-driven network that now supports more than 350 small business owners through training, mentorship, and collaboration.

Her mission is to bring big-brand structure, strategy, and trading knowledge to small independent brands while creating a space where founders, especially women, can learn, connect, and grow without isolation or competition.

About this Episode

Victoria shares her journey from teenage retail assistant to leading one of the UAE’s most influential communities for product entrepreneurs. She talks about the early lessons she learned selling bed linen at 16, why the customer’s needs go far beyond the product in their hands, and how working across multiple UK brands taught her that behind every successful retailer lies the same set of systems, planning rhythms, and trading strategies.

We explore the pivotal moments that shaped her career, not the promotions she earned, but the ones she didn’t. Victoria explains how rejection pushed her to seek new opportunities, how tough feedback became a catalyst for growth, and why success often follows our most painful setbacks.
She walks us through her UAE chapter, from a single coffee morning where no one showed up to a thriving membership with hundreds of founders. Victoria unpacks why collaboration beats competition, how knowledge-sharing accelerates progress, and why small businesses have advantages, like agility, direct customer connection, and service flexibility, that big brands can’t match.

Victoria also highlights the biggest gaps she sees in small businesses, especially around trading patterns and planning, and the incredible transformations she’s witnessed: members doubling revenue, quitting full-time jobs, and finally stepping into their businesses with confidence.
She offers practical advice for new founders, from validating ideas to building brand identity, and addresses the fears that stop people from starting. Her guidance is simple but powerful: everyone feels fear, the key is to move anyway, and surround yourself with people who show what’s possible.

We also talk about the future of the Small Retailer Network, from platform upgrades to ambitious plans to grow across the GCC. Victoria shares how she helps product founders through structured support at every stage and how anyone interested can join the community or attend monthly coffee mornings.

“- It’s very easy to exceed customer expectations and go above and beyond and really delight them when you listen to them and understand what it is that they need. ”

Victoria Myers

“I always want people to tell me what they think, so that I can improve myself and continue to progress.”
Victoria Myers

Show highlights

Working together and collaborating just brings success for everybody across the board, and it just makes the journey so much easier. -Victoria Myers Click To Tweet

“Feedback, and sometimes it can feel scary to ask because sometimes people don’t say what you want to hear. Honest feedback is always positive in the long term. You just need to make sure that you don’t take it too personally and see it as the learning opportunity that it is. ”

Victoria Myers

“Find some support, find some help, start talking to other people about what advice they can give you.”

Victoria Myers