The ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton New York was a sea of blazers on Friday morning. Padded shoulders in tans, whites, greys, burgundies and even red plaid brushed against one another as attendees of the Women’s Power Breakfast shook hands, filled up on coffee and shopped around the event marketplace.
“Look around this room,” Dayssi Olarte de Kanavos, co-founder of the Women’s Power Series, told attendees in the hotel’s purple ballroom. “You’re proof that when women unite, we don’t just participate. We lead, we disrupt, we redefine what’s possible. In a world that still too often unvalues our contributions, we’re here to flip the script—through the connections that we will forge today.”
Friday’s event marked the hometown debut for the Women’s Power Breakfast, a cross-industry business conference hosted by Dayssi Olarte de Kanavos and Sophia Kanavos.
Over the course of the morning, hundreds of women listened to leading voices in AI and tech, in health and wellness and in venture capital and finance, all while munching on bites of fruit carpaccio, quiche and smoked salmon tartines.
“My journey in luxury real estate has taught me that true power isn’t in the buildings that we erect. It’s in the lives that we touch, the doors that we open and the legacies that we create across generations,” Dayssi said in her opening remarks.
Author Joan Kuhl echoed those words in her keynote speech as she recalled her mom’s career path from public school teacher to air traffic controller. Kuhl told the room that inspired by her upbringing, she went on to get her own pilot’s license. As she reflected on her past, she concluded that we never know “who is learning from the risks that you’re taking.”
“Who in this room is waiting for your courage to spark their own?” she asked.
The Kanavoses have previously hosted industry-specific events in New York City, but for the last two and a half years, their annual multi-sector conferences have been held exclusively in Miami.
“We felt that as women in business, we wanted to do more than just celebrate women,” Dayssi told Newsweek ahead of their inaugural NYC event. “We wanted to help level the playing field out in the business world, because we found that the barriers to entry for a lot of these conferences are very high… To even get to listen to [these] founders, you have to have a certain number of revenue or sales or employees. You have to already be very successful just to attend.”
“A lot of the business conferences that take place over an entire weekend. They’re upwards of $2,500 a ticket, and both the panelists and attendees are usually 80 to 90 percent men,” Sophia added. “That’s not a good representation of the business world and of the different industries and roles [that exist].”
Dayssi and Sophia set off to reimagine what a women-focused business conference could look like after they learned that the Ritz-Carlton in South Beach, Miami—one of the many properties under Dayssi’s portfolio—wasn’t being used on International Women’s Day. Dayssi is the president and CEO of Flag Luxury Group, a New York-based real estate development company that she co-founded with her husband and Sophia’s dad, Paul.
“‘We thought, why not come together, leverage our network and our community of women that we’ve grown ourselves and try to put together something special?'” Sophia recalled. “It just kind of took off.”
At the Kanavos’ first-ever event in 2023, 450 women showed up. They partnered and raised $10,000 for Women of Tomorrow, a local nonprofit that mentors and empowers young women from under-resourced communities.
When they realized that their hotel in New York was available this year, Sophia and her mom thought, “What better place to bring this conference than to our own city?”
Sitting in the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton, Nicoline Roth, the CEO of NRTHRN Strong, told Newsweek that she was particularly excited to hear from her “role model,” Tracy Anderson, who served as a panelist for the health and wellness discussion, and to learn more about AI. Friday’s event is Roth’s second Women’s Power Series event. Last November, she attended the organization’s “The Business of Wellness” panel discussion.
“People really come with the same positive attitude of wanting to get to know each other, to know what line of work they’re in and to know how they can support each other,” Roth, a native of Copenhagen, Denmark, said.
Roth, who will be opening her first fitness studio in New York City next week, added that these gatherings have been instrumental in bringing her business from Europe to the U.S.
“I spent one year purely on networking, so whenever I had a chance, I would fly over,” she said.
Friday’s ticket sales were donated entirely to Women of Tomorrow and The Brave House, a nonprofit that provides safe housing and support for survivors of human trafficking.
“It’s interesting because I think [me and my mom] had a similar goal but two different visions of execution and how we were going to get there,” Sophia told Newsweek ahead of the event. “What Women’s Power Series has become is a sort of seamless blend between the two.”
“I’m laughing because we butt heads all the time, have disagreements, but her perspective and her generational [vantage point] is really not how I feel,” she smiled.
Sophia said that while her mom grew up in a “more entrepreneurial time” when women “really had to hustle to get [themselves] where [they] wanted to be,” especially in male-dominated fields, she would describe her professional timing as more “institutional,” a world with more defined paths to leadership.
“People love the dynamic between the two of us,” Sophia said. “To be able to create something where you can easily see the difference between the two but also create a bridge for people to connect has been really meaningful and very rewarding.”
As the programming wound down, attendees moved into the marketplace area to shop women-owned brands and to network with one another. Sophia told Newsweek that while Friday’s event space held a much smaller crowd than Miami’s, the New York City event allowed attendees to be “more thoughtful and meaningful about the connections [they] made.”
“I noticed so many more women were taking notes on their programs, on their phones [than in Miami],” Sophia said. “I felt like instead of just sharing stories, speakers were giving succinct takeaways and nuggets that can be used easily in daily life, which is what we want to provide the women in our audience.”
“Synergistically, today felt really special,” she said.
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