The Nike ambassador who started a sportswear brand for Muslim women

Shazia Hossen speaks to​ Hazel Sheffield about making women feel confident, breaking stigma and proving to her brother that she could do push-ups

Since 2017, Hossen has been Nike’s first UK hijab ambassador

Shazia Hossen started wearing a hijab in the summer of 2015. She was 19, a self-described “sneakerhead” with a part-time job in Footlocker and an obsession with matching her outfit with her trainers. She was also a big fan of working out at the gym, where she would do strength training and resistance, partly to prove to her brother that she could do press-ups. Wearing the hijab provided a new challenge: “I didn’t know how to do my headscarves in general, let alone at the gym!”

A lack of choice online led Hossen to start her own clothing brand called SH Athletics in October 2015, making modest, comfortable clothing for workouts that didn’t look completely shapeless. But it was only when she started seeing articles referring to her as an entrepreneur that Hossen realised she was one. “I thought, ‘oh, that’s what I am!’” she says. “I was just doing what needed to be done, but I think that’s how a lot of businesses start out.”

Since 2017, Hossen has also been Nike’s first hijab ambassador in the UK, a post invented to promote the brand’s Pro Hijab. This October, Hossen will take part in the Red Bull ​Amaphiko UK Academy to work with other social entrepreneurs who want to make a difference within their communities.

Hossen’s work – from her day job as a personal trainer to her business manufacturing sports clothes – is united by a common theme of helping others to feel confident in their pursuits. “The most common thing I hear from women is that they are afraid of being stared at,” she says. She says women too often feel like they don’t belong in a gym. “All it takes is for someone to say how long have you got left, and often, even if they’re not finished they will give it over rather than say, ‘no,’ because they feel like it’s not their piece of equipment.”

When Hossen first meets a client, often after they have approached her on Instagram, she starts with exercises that build their confidence and assert their right to train. She bases her lifting workshop in a “proper bodybuilder gym with proper rusty weights”. “I tell them if you can train in this gym you can train in any gym,” she says.

Hossen starts by reassuring clients that most people in the gym are minding their own business, but she also helps them find words to stand up to people who interfere: “For people who put their nose in, it’s about developing the confidence to stand up to them and say, ‘I do know what I am doing,’ and leave it at that.”

But she knows from personal experience that developing that confidence takes time. Hossen started training at 15 as a way to blow off steam from secondary school. “It helps me to have an outlet, to have that scheduled time to move,” she says. The gym that Hossen began training at was in a leisure centre in north London that charged the tiny concession price of £1.60 to train. But it only had a small gym with a section for resistance weights and cardio and a floor section for abs work.

There was also a weights room, but this was sectioned off. Hossen remembers it “smelling of man”. Just like her clients before her, she decided not to go inside, choosing the resistance machines instead. “There wasn’t a thought process, but there were all the men in there, and little old me, and I’m still quite small.”

Going to the gym was always about improving her strength, rather than her appearance. “I was a teenager and I wanted to get strong,” she remembers. “I didn’t realise that it wasn’t normal. I thought, if I can’t do a push-up, I can train to do a push-up – as opposed to let me grow my bum.”

Even now, she rails against the idea that women should stay away from weight training because it’s not attractive to men. “There’s this whole stigma that we shouldn’t be weight training or strength training because it’s not attractive to men,” she says. “I was just doing what I wanted.”

SH Athletics was founded when Hossen realised that if she couldn’t find clothes that made her feel comfortable and confident, then other women must also be struggling. “I looked around and there was stuff in Malaysia, Turkey and Singapore, but there was nothing in Europe,” she remembers. “I thought that I probably needed a custom-made gym outfit for myself.”

She got talking to a friend who had started her own clothing line: “She said that starting a sports brand is quite easy because it’s just jeggings, and then you decide what kind of material, either cotton or lycra, and the style. But with what I wanted, it had to be designed from scratch.”

Hossen had a few hundred pounds saved from her part-time job. With help from a friend who had trained as a designer, she created some drawings that she paid to have made into her first line of clothes. These included training dresses, cut long in the body and with a flattering bias hem, high-waisted jogging bottoms and long-sleeved T-shirts. When the website launched in October 2015, Hossen watched excitedly as the first order came through from the US a few minutes later. “That was so cool!” she remembers.

SH Athletics is now in a research phase. Hossen plans to relaunch the brand in 2020 with new lines and fabrics. She is still self-funding the business, but thinking about crowdfunding to raise investment to take it to the next level.

One of the biggest challenges of being a young designer with a low budget, she says, is finding manufacturers willing to make clothes in small batches. “The quantities I’m after are not industrial,” she says. “Because my designs are so unique, I need someone I can work with who understands. I really want a manufacturer that I can grow a relationship with and who understands my brand.”

In October, Hossen will run fitness classes at the first Red Bull Amaphiko Academy in the UK, an event for aspiring entrepreneurs. Her best advice for entrepreneurs is something that could just as easily be applied in a workout: “Start where you are with what you have,” she says. “A lot of the time a lot of what stops us from starting is thinking that we have to have everything now, instead of making baby steps. Then reach out to see if other people can help.”