Fresh from the 2025 Bridge of Excellence Award, the author, mentor and two-continent business owner talks purpose, resilience, and why she insists women name their work as business.

When Onyinye Gift Ejike received the 2025 Bridge of Excellence Award on April 4, she did so not as a newcomer having a moment, but as a woman who had spent more than fifteen years quietly building the case for her profession. The honour — recognising her outstanding leadership, entrepreneurial excellence and contributions to business development and event management — arrived at a point in her career where the applause has finally caught up with the work.

“I have learned to receive recognition with gratitude but hold it lightly,” she says, with the composure of a woman used to running rooms full of moving parts. “An award is a lovely full stop at the end of a very long sentence. The sentence is the work — the early mornings, the vendors who cancel, the budgets that shift, and the women on my team who show up and make magic happen anyway.”

The accountant who fell in love with celebration
Her story does not begin where you might expect. Ejike trained as an accountant at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and spent her first professional years in advertising and banking — worlds of spreadsheets, credit risk and brand strategy, where she managed accounts for brands such as Skye Bank, MoneyGram and PZ Cussons and drove marketing strategy inside one of the country’s commercial banks. It was there, she says, that she learned the discipline that now underpins her creative company.
“People assume events are all glamour and flowers,” she laughs. “But behind every beautiful evening is a profit-and-loss statement, a logistics plan and a hundred decisions that have to be right. My finance background is my secret weapon. It is the reason clients trust me with budgets, and the reason we deliver.”

In 2015 she took the leap many women hesitate over — she bet on herself — and founded The Velvet Expression in Lagos. What began as a boutique planning outfit has grown into a full-service brand and event consultancy operating across Nigeria and, since 2023, the United States, where she runs The Velvet Expression LLC out of Houston, Texas, and grew her client base past fifty organisations in a single year.

“I wanted to build something that outlived any single event — a brand, a standard, a place where young women could learn that this work is serious business.”
Her portfolio spans two continents and several worlds: the FunnyBone Untamed comedy series, the launch of the Mr. Taxi app, a Houston scholarship programme coordinating more than a hundred doctoral students, and a fundraising gala for Nigerian-American nurse anesthetists in Maryland that raised significant funds for community causes. Each, she insists, is a business she runs for a night — with every ounce of the pressure that implies.

Writing the industry into existence
For Ejike, being a woman in a demanding, male-heavy industry came with a particular resolve: to leave a paper trail. In 2023 she published “Metamorphosis,” a book analysing how the event industry survived and reinvented itself through the COVID-19 pandemic. She has co-authored more than thirty academic articles, many focused explicitly on women entrepreneurs, financial standardisation and the strategies that keep small creative businesses alive — a body of scholarship indexed under her name on Google Scholar.
“I write for the girl who is where I was twenty years ago, wondering whether she is even allowed to want this,” she says. “When a woman can point to research, to frameworks, to a book on a shelf, she becomes much harder to dismiss. I want the next generation to inherit knowledge, not just hustle.”

On women, work and refusing to shrink
Ask about the challenges of leading as a woman in her field, and Ejike is candid but never bitter. “There were rooms where I was underestimated before I said a word, and clients who assumed the man beside me was in charge,” she recalls. “I stopped spending energy on being resentful and started spending it on being undeniable. Deliver flawlessly enough times, and the doubt takes care of itself.”
“Structure beats chaos. Preparation beats panic. And a woman who is excellent, consistently, eventually becomes impossible to ignore.”

That philosophy shapes how she runs her company. The Velvet Expression doubles as a training ground, with mentorship programmes that have drawn dozens of young women into the profession. “My definition of success has changed,” she says. “It used to be the next big contract. Now it is watching a young woman I trained land her own client and do it better than I would have. That is legacy. That is the whole point.”

A member of Women in Management, Business and Public Service (WIMBIZ) and several professional bodies, she speaks often about the need for women to claim the language of business — profit, strategy, scale — without apology. “We are conditioned to call our work a passion, or a little something on the side,” she says. “I run a company. I employ people. I pay taxes. Say it plainly. The moment women name their work as business, the world begins to treat it as business.”

The full stop, and the next sentence
The Bridge of Excellence Award joins a shelf that already holds the West African Patriotic Leadership Award and a Leadership Impact Award, among others. But Ejike is already looking past the ceremony. Her plans for the year ahead centre on scale — expanding her mentorship pipeline, helping formalise standards for the industry, and continuing to publish research that lifts every planner who comes after her.

“If this award does anything beyond making my mother proud,” she says with a smile, “I hope it tells one woman somewhere that the thing she is building in the dark is worth building. Keep going. Keep records. Keep your standards high. The recognition, when it comes, is simply the world finally agreeing with what you already knew.”