Marta Eleniak, MD & Story Creator - June 2009

Marta Eleniak aged 37, became a fully fledged online retailer with the launch of onceuponabelt.com in June 2009 using her well honed Internet skills to sell something she is really excited about and wants to inspire others with – beautiful belts for women. She is a true afficionado of ladies accessories and a great quality leather belt in an understated elegant design sets her pulse racing. Marta is an evangelist of using belts to get the most from your wardrobe and investing in high quality ladies belts as you would with other ladies accessories - the importance of which can often be overlooked leaving women looking as if they are missing that special ingredient that completes the look. To stay on top of her game and also maintain an income while the new venture becomes established, she also works as a Web Usability Consultant. This is something she has been doing off and on through her limited company Meleniak since 2002. She recently returned from three days in Strasbourg helping a global FMCG design some of their intranet applications.

Her career got off to an interesting start after graduating, being fired from her first job and made redundant from the second as a casualty of the economic downturn in 1996. This turn of events led her to temp her way into the ad agency job she had dreamt of and prepared for by studying 'Design and Media Management'. She was an Account Manager for USP Advertising based in Bournemouth for nearly 2 years and here she was plunged into the early days of the digital world, coming out an expert in the then new field of web.

Marta then worked client side heading up online activities encompassing websites, intranets and marketing for the likes of Virgin Media, RAC and Mars. Her specialist skill is usability and information architecture, bringing logic and structure to everything she touches - even shop displays she's passing. She has devised user friendly interfaces that have doubled ecommerce sales and tripled intranet usage.

In a previous life she taught English as a foreign language working in Madrid, Warsaw, Sydney and Ealing while a student there running her own mini language school. She even had a short spell as private tutor to the daughter of the President of Kazakhstan and has taught at the Polish parliament. It is no wonder her favourite past time is travel but she also writes, photographs, paints and is planning to make some movies if she can ever find the time between work and being a love coach to her friends.

OUAB is located in beautiful Bournemouth, wretchedly close to the beach when the sun is glistening on the sea but Marta has to be attached to her MacBook all day. It has not all been smooth sailing towards a new self-employed life by the coast. In May 2008, just after she resigned from a 'proper job' with all the security working for a corporate brings, she got posterior vitreous detachment and could not see out of her left eye for the constant flashing but her determination has helped her brain adjust quickly so that she can drive again and use a computer. She lives with her partner Andrew, who is in charge of the day-to-day operations of OUAB, and their ‘bulimic supermodel’ cat Ophelia who likes to be close to the action and often sits on the back of Marta’s chair in pirate’s parrot fashion. That’s fine – Marta loves all fashion.

Read about how onceuponabelt.com got started and find out more about belts.