Seven Years In, The Female Founder Collective Remains A Cornerstone For Women Business Owners In A Rapidly Shifting Market
In 2018, Alison Wyatt reached a turning point in her career.
Working at a Girlboss, she was helping create programming and educational content for ambitious women trying to succeed within the corporate world, but Wyatt noticed a trend at their events.
"At each Girlboss Rally, we held an event for founders called the Startup Studio, and every year, it would sell out within 30 seconds," Wyatt says. "This was at a time when the number of female founders starting their own businesses was rising every single year to the point where almost 2,000 women started a business per day in the United States."
At the same time, Wyatt was considering having another child but was concerned about how to fit a newborn in with her demanding career.
"I didn't want to be at my desk from 8-5 without feeding them or going to their sports games," she says. "Like a lot of these women, the whole notion of the corporate world no longer seemed to fit for me."
Countless women at these events shared Wyatt's concerns. They were creating their own businesses after corporate glass ceilings pushed them to do so. But through the process, they found ways to build wealth while prioritizing work-life balance and redefining success on their own terms.
'They all had the ability to create the future we all wanted to see,' Wyatt says. 'This was the way women were going to get richer faster - not by waiting for that predicted 100 year time horizon to reach gender parity in the workplace.'
Around the same time, Wyatt vividly remembers watching fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff walk off the stage at Cannes Lions, directly into the bathroom of the Female Quotient Lounge. Minkoff sat down on the floor and began unapologetically pumping milk for her newborn.
'I remember thinking it was such a power move,' Wyatt says. 'It made me realize we can design the life we want to have.'
It was that moment of inspiration that led Wyatt to reach out to Minkoff. In September 2018, they created The Female Founder Collective, a powerful, high-impact network and education platform designed to help women build wealth, scale their businesses, and offer access to content, learning and capital.
Renowned for her eponymous fashion brand, Minkoff recognized the challenges of navigating the fashion industry as a woman founder herself. But her drive to create the Female Founder Collective was born from another motivation.
"The fashion industry is lonely as a founder. It's not known for people wanting to support each other,' she says. 'Plus, I wanted to expand beyond fashion. Getting to know other founders and bonding over the nuanced nature of being a woman in business selling something, there needed to be a community for these people.'
The Female Founders Collective launched during Fashion Week in September 2018. The next day, Minkoff was shocked to find more than 3,000 membership applications on the website.
The overwhelming response confirmed what she had sensed all along: an incredibly strong demand for a community to support women entrepreneurs across a wide range of industries.
Teaming up with Wyatt, the duo was able to create the community Minkoff wished she'd had when initially starting her own business, with the goal of giving new founders access to the resources she lacked in the early days of her career.
Today, the FFC has grown into a thriving community of 25,000 founders, spanning industries from beauty to healthcare to tech. Most of their early supporters, including prominent founders Aurora James, Zanna Roberts Rassi, Michelle Cordeiro Grant and others, are still part of the network today.
'I remember that first year, seeing (the FFC) logo stuck to every window and on every website of a female led business,' says Cordeiro Grant. 'It was just so beautiful and we were so hopeful about where the world was heading.'
'Fast forward to today, and women like myself now on our second startup up,' she continues, 'Now we're able to share the hardest and most fulfilling elements of what we do, from building businesses from concepts to ones that are now having a true impact on the world. It signals how much more change is yet to come.'
Despite their many successes, the recognition, and the thousands of satisfied members, the journey hasn't always been easy.
Originally, the organization was able to offer a free membership model sustained by brand partnerships with companies like Visa, SAP, UBS, Capital One and others.
'We tried to live on brand partnerships,' says Minkoff. 'And then Covid hit.'
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a steep decline in partnership and brand dollars. To keep the company afloat, Wyatt and Minkoff were forced to shift to a paid membership structure.
'Transitioning the message from 'this is free' to 'you need to pay for this' was scary,' says Wyatt. 'It went smoothly but didn't scale fast.'
At the time, they charged members $500 a year to join their paid networking community: The 10th House. Since then, membership costs haven't increased much, now at $695 per year.
Now, the 10th House has 2,000 paid members with the broader Female Founders Collective community at around 25,000.
The duo has also been forced to navigate shifting cultural sentiment like the rise and fall of the 'Girl Boss,' the backlash to calling women business owners 'female founders' and more.
Throughout it all, Wyatt and Minkoff have remained committed to their original mission: helping women grow their businesses, keeping members engaged and delivering impactful programming.
In 2024, Allison Pellerano-Rendon made the decision to leave her corporate role and launch design & creative agency The Collection Atelier. She says joining The 10th House helped her connect with women who were, 'navigating similar entrepreneurial challenges with unwavering support and genuine camaraderie.'
Pellaro-Rendon cites the weekly opportunities for connection through small group events, interactive webinar-style chats with executives and more established founders as the specific resources that have been invaluable to her agency's growth.
Legacy planner Noelle McEntree explains that joining the group finally gave her the confidence to finally put the word 'founder' in her LinkedIn profile after creating her company, Legado.
'It was nice to have a community where we could commiserate about the over-glamorization of VC capital and women's infuriating lack of access to it,' McEntree says.
Her frustrations are warranted. Women-owned businesses in the U.S. still receive less than 2% of venture capital funding, a number that has remained stagnant over the past decade.
That's one of the reasons why, in November 2023, the FFC introduced an annual retreat, The NETTE, tailored for founders focused on venture capital. The event focuses on education around securing growth-stage capital, navigating business exits, board management, organizational development and more.
The Nette Retreat 2024
Next month, they plan to expand this group by introducing The CabiNETTE for mature founders that are further along in their journeys. The group is designed to support those who generate $5 million or more in revenue or have raised the equivalent in venture capital.
'The NETTE is like your cabinet of advisors,' Minkoff explains. 'It also means your safety net. So you don't have to be nervous about failing because there will be people here to catch you.'
Minkoff and Wyatt still host their marquee event, Female Founders Day, every year, which is open to members and non-members alike. This year's event, held on March 13, had over 500 attendees.
While big-name speakers like keynote Sarah Blakely (of Spanx and Sneex fame) delivered inspiration on the mainstage, the core programming focused on practical workshops, covering everything from mastering PR and media outreach to optimizing CRM platforms.
'We want to make sure attendees walk away with the skills and tools they need,' says Minkoff. 'They get to choose their own path and programming throughout the entire day. It's also a great reminder of what we offer our members, whether they're part of the free community, a paying member or part of this new group of founders farther along in their journey.'
Cynthia Kalfa attended her first Female Founders Day this year. As she prepares to launch Ondine, a new line of stylish sun protective apparel, she says the summit made her feel more connected to other women founders who, like her, are just getting started.
"Entrepreneurship can feel isolating especially when you are a solo founder, but events like this remind me that there's an incredible network of women who truly want to support each other,' she says. 'The connections I've made here go beyond business. I love hearing not only about people's wins, but their struggles and strategies. It's refreshing.'
Through their unwavering commitment, relentless drive, ability to pivot and a deep belief in the power of community, Minkoff and Wyatt have not only stayed true to their original mission, they've sparked a movement.
Wyatt still remembers those early conversations from her former corporate life, the ones she had with women leaving the stability of the corporate world to find new ways to build wealth and create their own success. That's why, seven years later, she and Minkoff remain committed to continuously redefining what's possible for women business owners, creating a future where inclusion, equity, and opportunity aren't the exception, but the rule.
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