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JJ Ramberg—host of MSNBC’s Your Business, Co-founder of Goodshop.com and NAWRB Magazine reader and contributor—recently told us about seven incredible female business owners. NAWRB loves to hear about women’s successes because it’s important for women to support other women, recognizing and celebrating each other’s triumphs. Please read JJ’s write-up below:
There’s never been a better time to be a female business owner. Women are founding and running an increasingly large percentage of startups, small businesses and middle-market companies—to the point that last year Forbes declared “A Golden Age for women entrepreneurs has begun.”
Even the shortest sampling of the country’s female small business CEOs bears this out. The following businesses vary in industry, back-story, mission and size (and a few of them are already pushing the bounds of a small business), but what they all share in common is that they were conceptualized and are led by innovative women. If you don’t know these names already, it’s time you learned them. These CEOs have earned themselves a place on the map.
- Tiffany Crenshaw, Intellect Resources
Crenshaw founded her Greensboro, NC-based company—which offers consulting, recruiting and hiring assistance for the healthcare IT industry—in 1999, and it wasn’t until four years later that she hired her first employee. Since then, the business has grown by leaps and bounds, and in 2013, it was named the “Fastest Growing Staffing Firm in North America” and was #39 on the Inc. 500 list. Just before that, its gross revenue skyrocketed from $1.5 million to $30 million. Crenshaw credits the company’s success to its unwavering focus on client satisfaction and its ability to recruit a single hire or deploy a team of hundreds, making the company appeal to a wide range of businesses in its target demographic.
- Jill Donenfeld, The Culinistas
When Jill Donenfeld set out to start a home catering business—then named The Dish’s Dish—she was a recent graduate of Columbia University with a business plan, $5,000 of her own money and a determination to succeed. And succeed she has. Her company has served the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Neil Patrick Harris and the Kardashians, and it’s grown from having one locale to offering weekly home catering services in Los Angeles, Malibu, New York City, the Hamptons and Chicago. Culinistas’ highly trained chefs report to families and professionals who desire home-cooked meals but lack the time or know-how to make them on their own. In addition to providing these services through her business, Donenfeld has also written two books and is branching into catered events and dinner parties.
- Jennifer Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman, Rent the Runway
Co-founders Fleiss and Hyman are used to taking meetings together. They met at Harvard Business School, where they had a standing weekly lunch date to brainstorm startup ideas. From those meetings arose the idea for a “Netflix for dresses”—and the rest, as they say, is history. In a few short years, the duo has grown their company from an abstract concept to a 125-person, multi-million-dollar company. By reinventing how the world thinks about retail (e.g. by bringing mobile to the fashion experience and making designer labels accessible to more women) the women hope to align the fashion industry with the way today’s contemporary fashionistas live their lives. The idea has teeth: Already the company has been described by Forbes as “Tech’s Next Billion Dollar Star.”
- Casey Gheen, Ecocentric Mom
Owner Casey Gheen has experienced motherhood in a number of ways: She’s parent to both a 12-year-old stepdaughter and a 17-month-old daughter. As she eased into the role of mother, Gheen was struck by how challenging it can be to figure out what parenting-related products are healthiest for both one’s family and the environment. Ecocentric Mom endeavors to make these decisions easier through a monthly subscription box featuring healthy, ethical brands and products. Subscriptions can be tailored to whatever stage of motherhood the subscriber is in: pregnant, parent to an infant, or mother to older kids. Thanks to its real-life approach to the challenges of motherhood, the brand has earned fans all over the country.
- Jocelyn Leavitt and Samantha John, Hopscotch
“Writing, photography and video have been democratized by the internet. But what about software itself? Programming is a potent form of creative expression, imagine if anyone could do it.” So proclaims the website of Hopscotch, a company that teaches kids and adults alike to code everything from mini-games to generative art and mini-websites through fun, “gamified” lessons. It’s also the first programming language designed for mobile. Since starting the company in 2011, co-founders Jocelyn Leavitt and Samantha John have raised $1.2 million through two rounds of funding. But their biggest success is defined by their mission: To further democratize tech by making coding so easy that even a kid could do it.
- Liz Wessel, WayUp
CEO Wessel co-founded WayUp (then named “Campus Job”) with J.J. Fliegelman in 2014 with the mission of connecting college students to professional development opportunities in the form of part-time employment, summer work, entry-level jobs and/or internships. In the short time since it was founded, the company has already reached half a million students and recent college graduates and reports that they average an additional 10,000 users each week. The company’s growth is partly a result of the co-founders’ graduation from Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that helped build the duo’s skills and enabled them to raise a cool $7.8 million.
- Julia Zhen, Zenni Optical
Zenni Optical’s products may be small—the company sells glasses of all types, from prescription eyeglasses to sunglasses and even goggles—but the company’s mission is anything but. It endeavors to provide people all over the world with glasses that are both aesthetically pleasing and exceptionally affordable. The company started on a shoestring budget—in fact, it was born out of a garage—but these days, Zenni Optical sells thousands of glasses a day.
Driving the company’s vision, mission and growth since its founding in 2003 is now-COO Julia Zhen, who credits the company’s success to its e-commerce approach, its heavy emphasis on consumer satisfaction and its low overhead costs. The company eliminates expensive retail space and “middlemen” with its e-commerce model, and relies on word-of-mouth marketing in order to keep its advertising budgets small.
This list could continue far longer, and, as I believe Forbes to be right, this Golden Age has just begun.