From the Filing Room to the Helm: Dheshree Chetty’s Second Act in Shipping
The founder and owner of Women In Shipping and Transport Services reflects on starting as a volunteer, rebuilding after business loss, and returning to entrepreneurship with 30 years of experience and a determination to make logistics more personal.
Some careers begin with a carefully mapped route. Dheshree Chetty’s began in a humble filing room.
In 1996, the Durban-born graduate volunteered at Kien Hung Shipping, helping to organise the company’s filing room. Her first pay packet was R1,200. There was no grand title and no shortcut to leadership, just an opportunity to learn an industry from the ground up. Thirty years later, that same willingness to get close to the work sits at the heart of the business she leads today: Women In Shipping and Transport Services (WISTS).
This Women’s Month, Chetty’s journey offers something more meaningful than a polished success story. It is a story about ambition and achievement, certainly, but also about a business that closed, lessons that had to be learned the hard way, and the courage to return to entrepreneurship with a clearer sense of purpose.
Learning the industry from the ground up
Chetty completed a Bachelor of Social Science at the University of Natal in 1995, majoring in Legal Science and Psychology. The following year, she completed Damelin’s flagship business course, graduating in the top three of her class after studying financial and management accounting, strategic decision-making, human resources and business management.
That mix of people insight and commercial discipline became a powerful foundation for a career in shipping. As Kien Hung Shipping was acquired by United Ships Agency and later Hamburg Sud, Chetty kept growing with the business, building experience across operations, customer service, sales and management.
In 2009, she was headhunted by Maersk as a senior sales executive. Three years later, another opportunity took her to Sharaf Shipping, where she became its first Indian female branch manager. In 2013, her leadership was recognised when she received the Business Women’s Association Corporate Category award.
The recognition mattered, but it did not make the next chapter easy. In 2014, Chetty opened Women In Shipping for the first time. The business ran for four years before closing in 2018 after the loss of its largest account.
The courage to begin again
For Chetty, closing the business was a profound disappointment, but it was not the end of the vision. She returned to corporate shipping in August 2018, joining Hapag-Lloyd and taking on senior responsibilities spanning national sales, customer service, minerals and metals, and the customer service transition during the acquisition of DAL Shipping.
Those years added new depth to an already substantial career. She saw client pressures from multiple angles, led teams through change and strengthened the expertise she would later bring back into her own company. In November 2024, she left corporate life once more. By January 2025, she had brought her entrepreneurial vision back to life through WISTS.
“Closing my first business was painful, but it was not the end of my story. I went back into the industry, kept learning and returned to entrepreneurship with more experience, more resilience and a clearer purpose. Reopening Women In Shipping has been my proudest personal achievement. The more you serve, the more you are blessed, and I want WISTS to become the company people think of when they talk about shipping and logistics.” – Dheshree Chetty, founder and owner of WISTS
A more personal way to move business
Today, WISTS delivers responsive, dependable and tailored end-to-end supply chain solutions. The company draws on Chetty’s three decades of experience with leading global shipping lines, including Maersk, Hamburg Sud and Hapag-Lloyd, while offering clients something she believes has become increasingly rare: personal attention from people who understand both the cargo and the business behind it.
Her leadership philosophy is equally direct. Chetty describes herself as a leader rather than a manager. She wants clients to feel that WISTS is in their corner, taking ownership of queries, documentation and negotiations, and developing solutions around their needs rather than pushing them through a generic process. WISTS’ mining-sector work predominantly involves facilitating chrome and fluorspar exports. The company also coordinates project cargo movements, bringing the same hands-on planning and accountability to complex loads.
That approach reflects the wider purpose behind the WISTS name. The business exists to keep companies moving while creating opportunity, developing talent and increasing women’s participation across shipping and transport. For Chetty, Women’s Month is not only about celebrating how far women have come. It is also a reminder to make the path wider for those still coming through.
Leadership rooted in service
Chetty credits her father as the greatest influence on her life, while describing her own career as driven by self-motivation and ambition. Yet the principle at the centre of both her life and leadership is service: “The more you serve, the more you will be blessed.”
It is a philosophy lived beyond the workplace. Each week, she and her husband, Yugen, serve through the Rivers Foundation, making sandwiches for schoolchildren who would otherwise go without food. It is quiet, practical work, and perhaps the clearest expression of the woman behind the business: success is valuable, but service gives it meaning.
Away from shipping, Chetty enjoys padel, 1980s and 1990s R&B, and a Sunday afternoon spent binge-watching a good series. She has watched Dirty Dancing around ten times and even danced to its theme song at her wedding. Those personal details reveal the warmth behind a leader whose professional story has demanded determination in abundance.
Her journey has not been a straight line, but logistics rarely is. When the route changed, Chetty recalculated. She began again with more knowledge, greater resilience and a business shaped by everything the first attempt taught her.
From a volunteer organising a filing room to the founder of a growing logistics business, Dheshree Chetty has spent 30 years moving cargo, businesses and boundaries. With WISTS, she is now moving her own vision forward: experience behind her, service at the centre, and a firm belief that the strongest comeback is the one that creates a better way forward for others too.
