Okeden Equine
Following a Modern Languages Degree and Postgraduate studies in European Marketing, Joanne Alexander-Sefre worked for almost 10 years in export sales for Smith + Nephew healthcare and pharmaceuticals. A couple of years followed, exporting fresh and frozen bakery goods for British Bakeries (RHM now Premier Foods). In 1994 Sefrex was set up initially distributing bakery goods to France then all over Europe, leading to over £1M turnover by 1997.
Business expanded into also agency and consultancy services (including for 15 years for UK Trade & Investment as Export Communications Consultant). Joanne has business fluency in German, Spanish, French and Italian as well as conversational Dutch and Farsi. Joanne has also worked since 2000 with French partners Bellimpex within Food sans Frontières.
Joanne has always helped her mother Dr June Alexander with the running of the Okeden Stud, specialising in Welsh Section D’s and Purebred Arabians, including exporting many top class breeding stock around the world, including to the USA, Middle East and Scandinavia. Joanne took over the stud in 2006 on the death of Dr June. With now 5 horses, down from 13, after sales and the sad loss of 2 since late 2014 (including the wonderful Okeden Meurig left aged 25), Joanne has built up a really great group of horse-riders for this small herd and fans locally, nationally and even internationally with an Okeden Horses facebook page.
Okeden Equine as a business division follows an ever-increasing range of projects for equine-related companies in Sales and Marketing (import, export and within the UK) as well as handling multi-lingual translation projects and consultancy. We are currently working on a number of exciting new projects.
