About Tamera Marie Szijarto

Ms. Tamera Szijarto is a beauty queen and entrepreneur in the Philippines. She started as a model in 2003. She won as Mutya ng Cavite Tourism 2003, where she represented her municipality of Kawit. In 2004 she won as Ms. Lyceum of the Philippines University and later in May 2004, Ms. Philippines Earth. She went on to represent the Philippines in the Ms. Earth 2004 pageant where she became the first Philippine representative to make it as one of the top 8 finalists. After her pageant stints, she continued on with college where she was a partial scholar and dean’s lister. She graduated with a bachelor of science in Computer Engineering in 2006. Analyzing and investing in stocks and forex came next. In 2006 she established a business to assist hog farmers by providing hog feeds on loan, to be repayed after the farmers have earned from their harvests. However, her passion for beauty and technology prompted her to start her own retail cosmetics business. Combining her skills in computer technology and beauty, she put up tameraonline.com, the Philippines' first online cosmetics store complete with shopping cart and payment system. The website eliminated the 'manual' ordering system where the customers have to contact the merchant. Most if not all 'online' stores in the Philippines at this time did not have these functions due to the technology not being readily available to online merchants in the Philippines. Tameraonline was launched in March 16, 2009. The goal of tameraonline is to offer most of the internationally popular brands of cosmetics not available in the Philippines. Author: Melissa Barangas