💸 Fix your personal finances, impact grants, Emma Grede's new biz

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Here’s what you need to know today. 👇

• Resource roundup

• 2025 goals from the founders of Poppi, Crown Affair, Parke and Range Beauty

• Skim the headlines

• 🔒 New workshop: Personal finance for founders (paid Business Bestie members)

• 🎧 New podcast: Marketing ideas from the woman making mushrooms mainstream (Charlotte Cruze, Alice Mushrooms)

• We’ve officially kicked off Female Founder World’s Retail Bootcamp! If wholesale is a part of your 2025 roadmap, don’t miss. 🔗Tell me more

• Dreams of being acquired by a big, publicly traded company? This free tool can help you deep dive on any public company and their strategy. 🔗Tell me more

• Express Checkout is a newsletter and platform that keeps you up to date on everything CPG, retail and ecom. 🔗Tell me more

• This ad expert shared the triggers impacting conversion rates the most (#1 surprised us). 🔗Tell me more

• Applications are open for this impact-based grant program. 🔗Tell me more

• Loved this Reddit thread on unconventional startup tips from an industry vet. 🔗Tell me more

• Reminder: Paid Business Bestie members get direct access to chat with Female Founder World’s founder Jasmine Garnsworthy in this members-only chat. Share your decks for feedback, PR pitch angles, content ideas, brainstorm marketing ideas and more! I can’t wait to chat with you. 🔗Tell me more

2025 goal-setting with the founders of Poppi, Crown Affair, Parke and Range Beauty

We asked Dianna Cohen (Crown Affair), Allison Ellsworth (Poppi), Chelsea Kramer (Parke), and Alicia Scott (Range Beauty) how they’re planning and prepping for 2025. If you need some direction and inspo for the year ahead, start here.

Female Founder World: How do you and your team plan for the year? Any templates or tools you love?

Diana Cohen (Crown Affair): Our whole team loves Asana. It keeps us on track and is such an easy way to communicate and keep things moving as we have a hybrid work-from-home/office culture. 

Allison Ellsworth (Poppi): While we’re known for moving at the speed of culture, you might be surprised by the thoughtful planning behind it all. Our internal culture calendar is our guide, but our greatest asset is our team! We have the best team of brilliant minds, constantly collaborating to shape how and where we make an impact.

Chelsea Kramer (Parke): Our planning process at Parke is different from that of traditional fashion brands. Rather than planning seasonally, we follow our own launch calendar that aligns perfectly with our customers' needs. This approach has helped us map our 2025 calendar while maintaining our strong brand identity. 

Alicia Scott (Range Beauty): Before the new year started, I had a meeting with my brand manager who laid out a 12-month calendar. We discussed goals, any gaps, things we are missing out on as a brand and plug away at ideas. She is brilliant and, my favorite trait, also highly organized! Two of my favorite tools for planning and ideas are Notion and Claude.ai. I prefer Claude over Chatgpt because to me, it gives me a warmer, "human" like approach, and it's been fun to watch it learn our brand voice, inspo, community etc. 

Female Founder World: What's something new you're trying for the business in 2025?

Diana: Leaning into the future of retail—activating more in-person to connect with our customers and community IRL.

Allison: Don’t laugh... but I’m trying to use my walking pad more. I’m a mom of 3, a founder, and run the Creative team at Poppi, so my time to work out is limited. I bought a walking pad for my office last year, and used it twice. Here’s to using it weekly in 2025!

Chelsea: We're introducing a new monthly restock program launching on the first of each month. This initiative will feature our best-selling items from previous collections, allowing us to bring back customer favorites regularly without incorporating them into our new releases. This approach helps us better serve our loyal customers who love our classic pieces while maintaining the freshness and exclusivity of our new collections.

Alicia: This year brings a variety of in-person activations ranging from pop-ups to garden tours to movie nights. We are also using more tools for this including platforms like TYB and the broadcast channel on Instagram. We started a channel called The Hot Spot where we release exclusive news, opportunities, and events to the members first before anywhere else. Now that we have incredible new team members, we're able to get offline and have more IRL connections. 

Female Founder World: Any business goals you can share for 2025?

Diana: We're focused on our expansion with Sephora into more doors this spring! We're also always focused on deepening our relationship with our DTC customers and bringing them more unique offerings. 

Allison: Personally, I am taking my professional development to the next level. What drives me is the opportunity to empower others. By focusing on my professional growth as a founder and leader, I can create a more meaningful impact for my team, family and our community.

Chelsea: My primary focus is driving Parke's continued expansion while building on our significant growth from the previous year. I'm excited about implementing new creative initiatives and developing fresh styles that resonate with our customers.

Alicia: Expanding community and brand awareness, having a successful launch of our newest product later this year (it's so good and fun!), and knocking it out the park at Sephora. This partnership means so much to me so ensuring we show up and meet the needs of our audience and partner is crucial. 

Make 2025 the year you figure out your personal finances. This live workshop, ‘Personal Finance for Founders’ is happening at 5pm ET on Tuesday, 14 January just for our paid Business Bestie members (yep, you’ll get a recording in your Bestie Dashboard if you can’t make it).

• SEPHORA ACCELERATE: The 2025 cohort of Sephora Accelerate winners has been announced. It looks like the trends of science-backed beauty and fragrance are here to stay.

  RANGE BEAUTY X SEPHORA: A 2023 Sephora accelerate alumni, Range Beauty officially launched at Sephora! Huge congrats to founder Alicia Scott and the team.  

• LUXURY ACQUISITION: Saks completed their acquisition of Neiman Marcus for a total value of $2.7M. 

• EMMA GREDE: Emma Grede (co-founder of Good American) and Kristin Juszczyk (the designer you might remember from Taylor Swift’s viral jacket) partnered up to launch Off Season. They’re making cooler and more elevated merch for sports fans. Smart idea.

• BEVERAGE: Poppi launched a limited edition flavor and dropped merch in Target. Their designer shared the BTS on a very cool website to go along with the launch, too. The devil works hard, but the Poppi team works harder.

• BIG BEAUTY: Mac teased their new launch by “leaking nudes”. Clever.

💬 In the group chat this week

If you haven’t jumped into the group chat this week, just know that your business besties have been sharing strategies to reach celebs for partnerships, how to avoid going on “autopilot” as a founder in 2025, ways to reduce shipping fees, and scrappy ways to get press coverage for your business. I love it here!!

Not in the group chat yet? Download our app and meet your business besties.