Otara Gunewardene: from ODEL to Embark

About Otara Gunewardene: from ODEL to Embark

By the ULTIMATE Sri Lanka Editorial Team

Site Editor: Tara de la Motte

From the catwalk to the car boot of a blue station wagon, and from Sri Lanka’s best-known department store to Embark and the Otara Foundation: the story of Otara Gunewardene.

A Colombo childhood

Otara Del Gunewardene was born in Colombo on 30 August 1964, the youngest child and only daughter of Norman and Delysia Gunewardene, with two older brothers. Family holidays in the wilderness and a house full of animals shaped her early years; at CMS Ladies’ College in Colombo 7 she excelled at athletics and swimming. She went on to study biology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and volunteering at the National Zoo in Dehiwala had her thinking of a career in veterinary science.

The model

Fashion had other plans. From 1987 to 2004 Otara worked as a professional model, for well-known fashion brands, international apparel catalogues, television commercials and on the runway, and became one of the most familiar faces in Sri Lanka. Those years gave her an eye for design and presentation that would shape everything that followed.

It began with a puppy called Niko, found abandoned on a Colombo lane in 2005.

The blue station wagon

In 1989, at 24, she bought a small surplus stock of export clothing and, with no shop to sell it from, sold it from the boot of her blue station wagon, with friends as her first customers. Her own account is that she borrowed 50 dollars each from her mother and her brother to get started, and that her father came up with the name: O for Otara, and Del, her middle name and a tribute to her mother, Delysia.

The first ODEL shop opened in 1990, in a small space on Dickmans Road in Colombo 5. She learned retail by doing it, from visual merchandising to stacking shelves and running the till. Within about five years there were nine stores across Colombo’s malls and hotels, and in the mid-1990s ODEL moved its flagship into a colonial mansion on Alexandra Place in Colombo 7: Odel Unlimited, which her site describes as Sri Lanka’s first fashion and lifestyle department store.

Going public

In 2010 ODEL became the first fashion retailer to list on the Colombo Stock Exchange. Her site records that the offer was oversubscribed 63.8 times, and that she became the first woman entrepreneur in Sri Lanka to take a company public. The same year she was named Best Female Entrepreneur at the Stevie Awards for Women in Business in the United States. In 2012 Parkson Retail Asia took a 41.82% stake in the company, and in 2014, at the height of its success, she sold her entire holding to the Softlogic Group, to the surprise of the business world.

Niko and Embark

The reason was a dog. In 2005 she found an abandoned puppy on Peterson Lane in Colombo; she named him Niko, and he became the first face of Embark, which she launched in 2007. Embark sells clothing and accessories with a playful street-dog spirit, and the brand funds rescue, treatment, sterilisation, vaccination and adoption with aftercare. Showing Embark on the runway at Colombo Fashion Week helped change how many people saw the island’s street dogs: as companions to adopt rather than strays.

Embark’s own figures today run to more than 30,000 sterilisations, more than 34,000 vaccinations, over 51,000 dogs treated and close to 7,000 rehomed.

The Otara Foundation

After the sale she put her energy into the Otara Foundation, a charitable trust whose pilot project is Embark and whose aims are education, environment and enterprise. Care for wildlife runs through her career: ODEL’s animal T-shirts supported conservation, and road signs urging care in the national parks still carry the ODEL name. In 2020 she launched Who We Are, an online platform for products made in Sri Lanka by small businesses.

Recognition

Among her many honours are the Jaycees’ award for the Most Outstanding Young Person in Sri Lanka (2000), Echelon magazine’s Most Powerful Woman in Sri Lanka (2013), selection as one of the Prominent Women of the Country by the Women’s Parliamentarians’ Caucus (2014) and the Women in Management Woman of the Year award (2018). In 2018 she joined the board of Singer Sri Lanka, and in 2019 she was an honorary guest at Rwanda’s Kwita Izina gorilla-naming ceremony and received the Sri Lanka Tamil Women’s Union Women’s Day award for her kindness to animals.

Our advice: when you shop at ODEL, remember that it began with one car boot and one young woman’s eye for style. Look out for Embark’s T-shirts and accessories, a souvenir with a story, and if the island’s street dogs move you, Embark’s website explains how to adopt, sponsor or volunteer.

Timeline

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Otara Gunewardene: from ODEL to Embark before you go.