Meet International queen maker Lee-Ann Naidoo

There is a version of Lee-Ann Naidoo’s life that fits neatly on a sash: baker turned beauty queen turned pageant director. It is true, and it is also the short version. The long version starts in Morningside, Durban, in a household run by a father who owned restaurants and believed, with a stubbornness his daughter would later inherit, that his girls were built for a stage. Naidoo trained from the age of seven with a modelling academy he enrolled her in, sitting through etiquette classes and drama lessons she says she often resisted. “Though I often resisted, he remained firm in his belief that his daughters were destined for the world stage,” she has said of him. It would be decades before she agreed, and by the time she did, she had already lived through the chapter that made the crown mean something.

The pageantry came only after a first marriage that ended in violence. “I walked away from a marriage with a fractured jaw, with nothing but my two kids,” Naidoo has said. “But I refused to let that define me.” What she built instead was a business: Indulge Sweet Treats, founded in 2021, built on a skill she taught herself from nothing. “I taught myself how to make macarons, opened a business, and made a success of my life.” She describes herself as a professionally trained pastry chef with “a deep love for food editorials,” a description that undersells the range of the work.

She ran full catering, supplied restaurants and private clients with specialised bakes, and worked as a food editor for magazines, tracing the instinct back to her father’s restaurants and a childhood spent around food as both craft and livelihood. “Baking has always been a passion,” she told The Post in 2024. “Baking was a skill that allowed me to show my creativity.” Of that period she has said, “The fact that I started with nothing after Covid-19 and created the life I have today shows that with tenacity and courage, we can face every challenge as an opportunity to learn, grow and evolve.”

The stage her father had predicted finally arrived in 2023, when Mrs Grand South Africa became the first pageant Naidoo entered, and won, becoming, in her words, its “founding queen.” The same year she was crowned Woman of the Universe Sub-Saharan Africa, sending her to Istanbul to compete internationally for the first time. She was in her forties by then, a fact she treats as part of the point rather than a footnote. “At 42, I finally stepped into the dream he had planted decades earlier,” she has said.

The bigger title came in 2025, when Naidoo took the national Mrs Supranational South Africa crown and then travelled to Yangon, Myanmar, where on 12 July she was named Mrs Supranational Tourism Queen Ambassador Worldwide 2025, reportedly the first Indian South African woman to hold the title. Her talent piece was Shakira’s “Waka Waka,” chosen, she said, for its themes of unity and empowerment. Winning did not feel real straight away. “Honestly, it took me about six hours before the reality of my win truly sank in.”

The title sat on top of a platform she had already built for herself. Naidoo is a gender-based violence survivor and has made that history central to her advocacy rather than something she keeps offstage. “I am also a survivor of gender-based violence, a role that fuels my advocacy and purpose,” she has said. She works with the Emerge Foundation, Warriors with a Purpose, and Jason’s Angels, and runs a monthly sanitary pad drive as part of her fight against period poverty.

Sometime after the Yangon win, that platform turned into a title of a different kind: Naidoo became National Director of Mrs Supranational South Africa, the national pageant for single, divorced and married women and mothers, a role distinct from the country’s Mrs Supranational franchise. No dated announcement marks the handover; the earliest public sign of her running the organisation is a casting call she posted to her own page for the 2026 season. What is documented is the result. On 20 June 2026, at Vodacom World in Midrand, Naidoo crowned her first queen as director, Samantha Carelse, with Linet Odera as first runner-up and Wendy van den Berg as tourism ambassador.

The pageant is explicit about what it is trying to do differently. “We revolutionise beauty pageants by celebrating the depth, accomplishments, and dreams of women with rich life experiences,” its mission reads, “fostering self-empowerment and a culture of giving.” Judging weights a contestant’s community impact and personal story at 70 percent, stage presence at 30, built to reward exactly the kind of story Naidoo herself has: the fracture, the recovery, the reinvention, in that order.

It would be easy to read her story as a straight line, kitchen to catwalk to boardroom, each chapter neater than the last. It has not been that. It has been a woman who was hurt, who taught herself macarons because she needed to feed her children, who let a father’s decades-old insistence turn out to be right, and who now spends her Saturdays deciding, on behalf of an entire pageant, whose story gets to be told next. “My journey has taken me from the kitchen to the crown,” she has said. “A baker turned beauty queen.” And, of the women she now crowns: “My purpose is not to empower women, but to take empowered women and make them impactful.” On 20 June 2026, under the lights at Vodacom World, that purpose had a name on the programme, and it was hers.