About Melanie Perkins

Melanie Perkins was born in Perth, Western Australia. She is the daughter of an Australian-born teacher and a Malaysian engineer of Filipino and Sri Lankan descent. Melanie Perkins is an Australian technology entrepreneur who is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Canva. It took Melanie Perkins 100+ rejections over 3 years (& some faith!) to give life to design platform Canva. Perkins is one of the youngest female CEO’s of a tech start-up valued over A$1 billion. As of 2020 Perkins was the third richest women in Australia.

FOOTSTEPS

Secondary Education

She attended Sacred Heart College, a secondary school located in the northern Perth suburb of Sorrento. At high school, Perkins had aspirations of becoming a professional figure skater and would routinely wake up at 4:30 am to train.

Age 14

By the age of fourteen, she had started her first business, selling handmade scarves at shops and markets throughout Perth. She credits this experience with developing her entrepreneurial drive as ‘she never forgot the freedom and excitement from building a business.'

IN COLLEGE / UNIVERSITY

After high school, Perkins enrolled at the University of Western Australia, majoring in communications, psychology and commerce. At this time, Perkins was also a private tutor for students learning graphic design. She noticed the difficulties students had in learning design programs such as Adobe Photoshop, where it would often take students a semester at university to be introduced to basic features of these complex design programs. Perkins thought there was a business opportunity in making the design process easier. Her idea was to make a design platform where no technical experience was required. She dropped out of university at age 19 to pursue her first business with Obrecht, Fusion Books.

Age 19

At the age of 19, Melanie worked as multimedia centre technical assistant and tutor and provided technical support and tuition to students, using software such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Flash and iMovie.