🤝 The brand making millions from collabs, small biz grants, Kim Kardashian's new line

Hey, welcome to Female Founder World, the place to meet your business besties online and IRL. This is our newsletter for small business owners.

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👇 Today we're covering

• 🎟 Launch Lab: Community sampling workshop

• 🔗 Resource roundup

• 🗞️ Skim the headlines

• 🤝 Paid partnerships helped Little Words Project hit $20 million

• 🎧 What to do when your first product flips with Rooshy Roy, founder of AAVRANI

Search TikTok for ‘GORGIE’. No, really. Do it!

See how your feed fills with videos of regular people recommending bright cans of a new kind of energy drink for women? It’s no accident.

The GORGIE team figured out that no one’s really buying from celeb influencers anymore (actually, research shows less than 3% of us are truly influenced by these folks). So, they engineered a community sampling strategy so perfect, 83% of the people gifted posted about the brand and tagged them.

In the final week of Female Founder World’s Launch Lab workshop series presented by TikTok, Madi Lieber, one of the brains behind GORGIE, is showing us step-by-step how to copy-and-paste their exact blueprint in your own business. And it’s happening TONIGHT!

When we say this information is priceless, it’s for real a money-can’t-buy kind of tactical workshop. You know what to do.👇

Missed the first five weeks of Launch Lab? No worries. Recordings are available for paid Business Bestie members here.

• Liquid Death is worth $700 million, but they’re using the same ecommerce apps and tools any small business can afford. 🔗 Tell me more

• If business accounting jargon gives you ick, well, same. This quick post clearly explains the finance phrases you need to know as a business owner. 🔗 Tell me more

• Don’t dry up your personal savings to fund your business, win one of these grants instead. 🔗 Tell me more

• Big thanks to the law firm that published these free resources for founders—it’s essentially a legal FAQ for biz builders. 🔗 Tell me more

• Our Business Bestie, Sock Candy, just dropped a collab with Katy Perry’s shoe brand! The founder said Female Founder World’s free partnership idea doc kicked off the collab. 🔗 Tell me more

• Here are the top 50 fastest growing fashion brands on TikTok (we were surprised by some of these, besties). 🔗 Tell me more

• This TikTok-famous social media recently taught our Female Founder World community how to show up on social media as the face of your brand in a free workshop. Now she has created a free download just for us. 🔗 Tell me more

MONEY: A pretty dismal 2% of venture capital funding goes to women, but now investors in California will have to publicly share the diversity of the founders they’re backing. The new law will go into effect next year with the goal of getting more funding to diverse founders. Here’s hoping! 🤞

BEAUTY: Ulta announced their 2023 MUSE Accelerator cohort. Major congrats to DEON LIBRA, OOLI Beauty, Dream Girls Hair, Octavia Morgan, Preserve Hair, Skwalwen Botanicals, The Vida Bars, and Finesse Your Claws. The program goes for 10 weeks and gets BIPOC brands ready for retail.

ECONOMY: For the last three decades, China’s economy has been on an upswing, but a new Business Insider article ‘The era of China’s global dominance is over’ dives into why that time is done. TLDR; Small business owners should expect a period of instability in supply chain and sourcing.

KARDASHIANS: Skims, Kim Kardashian’s $4 billion shapewear and clothing brand, just released a mens line.

SHOPIFY: Shopify 🤝 Faire is a partnership every ecomm brand needs to know. Faire is a huge marketplace connecting brands and indie retailers, and the new Shopify partnership means you can now simplify wholesale distribution and in-person selling. The new features look super practical and useful.

INFLUENCERS: $2 billion–that's how much we're going to spend on influencer marketing as business owners in the United States next year. New data shows that the amount brands are spending on social media ads is slowing, but that we are incorporating social media ads into influencer campaigns—90% of influencer marketing campaigns now include paid ad spend, American Influencer Council reported.

LAUNCHES TO KNOW:

• Charli and Dixie D’Amelio started a new popcorn brand, Be Happy Snacks.

• Issa Rae launched Viarae Proseccco, her own prosecco line.

• Kourney Kardashian’s supplement brand Lemme has dropped a new prenatal vitamin, Lemme Mama.

• Little Words Project released a delicate jewelry line, Little Layers.

• Our fave better-for-you snack brand DEUX dropped a donut collab with Chamberlain Coffee.

• Business Bestie, Mary Gui, jumped into the Female Founder World group chat this week to announce her brand’s collaboration with Katy Perry. Go team!

• Chillhouse launched a collab with PF Flyers shoes.

When Adriana Carrig was in college, she started beading bracelets with feel-good messages. She wanted to make the world a kinder place. Over the next decade her brand, Little Words Project became a collaboration engine, co-creating products with Barbie and Dunkin. Last year the business made $20 million and this year is on track to hit $35 million.

That’s a lot of bracelets, besties.

Two types of partnerships help drive revenue and brand awareness for Little Words Project: bracelet-making events and co-created product collabs. They have popped up IRL with bracelet-making activations at Nike Women’s Summit and Camp Poosh, and dropped collabs with Dunkin, Barbie and most recently ‘Mean Girls’ for the nostalgic millennial girlies. Read on for Adriana’s partnership marketing tips.

Adriana’s partnerships tips:

• Align on goals from the beginning with all parties. Adriana’s team asks partners what success looks like for them to make sure it’s something Little Words Project can deliver.

• Build a community and brand that companies will pay to align with. As well as product collabs, Little Words Project brings bracelet-making to events and charges the brand partner.

• Share a brand deck with potential partners that explains your X factor, why someone would want to partner with you, your story, past partners, plus celebrity or influencer endorsements.

Listen to Adriana on the Female Founder World podcast to hear her full story.

🎧 New podcast episode: What To Do When Your Product Flops with AAVRANI Founder, Rooshy Roy