Latest news with #FemaleFounderWorld
Forbes
24-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How Athletic Brand Set Active Made $1 Million In One Hour
Set Active focuses on creating athletic and athleisure matching sets, priced between $50 and $100 ... More per top and bottom. Perfecting a social media launch campaign is always a moving target, but one brand has honed a formula that has helped define its overall sales strategy. Set Active, a self-funded seven-year-old athletic brand, has developed a drop strategy that recently netted the brand $1 million in sales in just one hour for its first-ever resort collection, which launched in early May. Set Active earns approximately $20 million in annual revenue, according to an Instagram post from Female Founder World. The brand focuses on creating athletic and athleisure matching sets, priced between $50 and $100 per top and bottom. It's partly because of the bootstrapped nature of the brand that the team has to be more clever with the tools and opportunities in front of them, and more focused on cultivating a grassroots digital community compared to higher-end brands that sell affluence, which requires the allure of distance. Today, Set Active has approximately 40,000 rewards members, 475,000 Instagram followers and 8,000 followers between its Instagram broadcast channel and its founder's. Its core customers are women between 25 and 34-years-old, followed by women 18 to 24-years-old. Nearly 50% of the recent $1 million sales figure was earned within a 15-minute early access period for reward members and Instagram broadcast channel followers. Furthermore, 72% of customers had previously purchased from the brand in the last 12 months. According to Kira Jackson, chief brand officer of Set Active, the brand has earned $1 million from its drop model before, but the fast pace of sales for the resort collection was unprecedented. 'That [sales figure] is a huge testament to the community that's been built around the brand,' she said. As of 2023, the value of the global sportswear industry is close to $395 billion at retail value selling price, with local and niche brands gaining market share, according to a 2024 S&P Global report. Notably, e-commerce penetration accounted for about 30% of the sportswear market. The first-ever resort collection and photoshoot sought to evoke the feeling of a vacation. Like almost every brand, Set Active teases its upcoming product launches on social media and in marketing emails. The team uses special links on its social media that remind customers of upcoming launches, and the team can see how many opt in for reminders. Typically, the brand receives a few hundred sign-ups, which is viewed internally as strong interest, but the resort collection saw thousands of sign-ups, said Lindsey Carter, founder and CEO of Set Active. The limited-edition collection featured trendy pieces like butter yellow sweat pants and crew necks, contrast color tops and bottoms in pinks, blues and olive tones. For the brand's various social channels like Instagram, Instagram Broadcast, Pinterest and TikTok, the primary goal is to create different content opportunities within each channel that a consumer might otherwise not get from any other Set Active social channel. To achieve this, the team has to produce or commission hundreds of pieces of content for any given rollout, said Jackson. The in-house creative team consists of two graphic designers, a creative manager and a creative coordinator who manages photoshoots and other responsibilities. Carter's own Instagram broadcast channel sees more intimate behind-the-scenes content related to product development meetings, photoshoots and other daily founder and CEO life moments. 'That's the No. 1 most important tactic from a community and brand-building perspective; making sure that the creative [assets] match the platform that they're being produced for, instead of just being cross-leveraged on [social],' said Jackson. From an influencer perspective, Set Active has an in-house manager to oversee more manual and one-on-one relationships and opportunities, and uses the ShopMy platform for influencer gifting. But the team goes beyond influencers to gift products to rabid Set Active fans and followers who might not fall under the traditional influencer label. Because Set Active often features user-generated content on its social channels, marketing emails and occasional product detail pages for its e-commerce site, the team sees gifting to fans as a way to build a more dedicated online community. Gifting to community members and influencers alike happens before a product launch, in order to help build interest and momentum. Because this type of gifting is outside the bounds of traditional influencers, the key performance indicators 'go out the window,' said Jackson. Instead, the Set Active team focuses on the most engaged followers. These can be the names they recognize because they comment so much on Set Active social posts or create unpaid social posts on TikTok, for example. As long as it remains profitable for the business, the program will continue, she said. 'Consumers are bombarded with choices when shopping for active wear. So from day one, our approach has been to create genuine relationships rather than just a transaction,' said Carter. 'Consumers want to feel connected to something, and the more you can give that to your consumer, the more they're going to be brought into your brand.' It was that well-honed execution on all business and product fronts that led to the outsized success of the resort collection launch. Following every launch the team has a post-mortem to discuss which styles sold the best, what worked or didn't from a social and marketing perspective and anything else that can be learned from the experience. Carter said one major discussion point was that some resort styles, such as a butter yellow set, sold out during the early access period, meaning other customers were unable to purchase them and how to resolve that for the future. 'It's a balance of knowing how to speak to a customer now through a modern marketing lens, and understanding where the consumer is headed,' said Jackson.
Forbes
12-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
From Group Chat To Global Platform: Female Founder World
Jasmine Garnsworthy always knew she wanted to run her own business. What she didn't expect was that she'd end up building an entire universe to help other women do the same. Her platform, Female Founder World, has become a go-to community and content hub for women building consumer brands. With a mission to support entrepreneurs 'from idea to launch and beyond,' it offers tactical resources, founder-led advice, and a sense of solidarity that's often missing in the startup space. Female Founder World is leveling up, starting with a new partnership alongside Adobe Express designed to supercharge its mission and expand access to creative tools for the next generation of founders. 'Our community is hungry for specific, tactical content to help move them towards their goals, and they want to learn from real-world founders and operators,' says Garnsworthy. 'This partnership with Adobe Express will span four new, live workshops on the topics our community is asking for — turning real experiences into actionable courses.' What started as a casual group Zoom call has evolved into a full-fledged movement. Today, Female Founder World is powered by a chart-topping podcast, a global group chat with nearly 4,000 founders, and a high-engagement Instagram presence that reached over 11 million users last year. Its sold-out Female Founder World Summit in New York City drew over 700 attendees in 2024, and this year, that number is expected to top 1,000. But before Garnsworthy built a brand that resonates with thousands, she built one that didn't scale. 'I didn't have one big idea. I had a lot of small ones. I started side hustles, ran a mini PR agency when I was still in school, tried blogging… I was always experimenting,' she shares with me over Zoom. It's also worth noting that before becoming a founder herself, Garnsworthy was a fashion and beauty editor and writer, working for publications like Popsugar, StyleCaster, Refinery29, Byrdie, and Allure. That's what inspired her to launch her own skincare brand and it's what makes her skilled at podcast interviews and storytelling. She is also a former consultant to UN Women, further cementing her commitment to supporting women at every stage of their entrepreneurial journeys. The common throughline in her work? Giving women the tools — and the mic — to tell their own stories. In 2016, Garnsworthy launched The Buff, a personalized skincare brand born from the Glossier-era beauty boom. She studied organic skincare formulation, launched with a few hero oils, and leaned into customization. But the backend, everything from manufacturing and fulfillment to cash flow, proved to be a steep learning curve. 'It was 2020. Sales had plateaued, and I couldn't crack the logistics. I didn't have the capital to fulfill larger orders. I was tired, overwhelmed and it just wasn't giving me enough back to keep going,' she says. That moment — go all in or let it go — became a turning point for Garnsworthy. 'Letting go gave me distance. The space to reflect. One of the biggest lessons I learned was: you have to protect what makes your brand special, and also trust other people to help you scale it. I didn't know how to do that when I was 27.' That same vulnerability is what makes Female Founder World work well. She's not afraid to talk about what didn't work and founders are craving more of that honesty. 'There's a fine line in how much you want to share, but the storytelling that resonates the most is always the honest stuff,' she says. 'When I was building my skincare brand, I told that story through the lens of my own skin journey. Now, with Female Founder World, I speak to the small business owner experience because I've lived it.' What began as casual founder Zooms during lockdown became the early blueprint for Female Founder World. 'At first, they were super casual. I had no plan. I'd just invite people from Instagram or my network to join. But quickly, I saw how needed it was.' Determined to build with intention, she recorded over 50 podcast episodes before publishing a single one. 'I needed to prove to myself that I'd follow through.' Eventually, the podcast and Instagram account launched simultaneously, giving the project a name and a foundation to build from. A few months later came the first group chat, which quickly became the heartbeat of the community. Today, Female Founder World has built several ways to offer members (and non-members) resources, such as live virtual 'Mentor Sessions' with notable female founders and executives, as well as downloads like a list of editors to pitch to. So what's next for Female Founder World? 'We're relaunching our membership platform in January with re-filmed resources and refreshed tools,' Garnsworthy shares. 'Next year is about refinement. Doing what we already know works, but better. And we'll be scaling our events thoughtfully. It's not about doing more, it's about doing it right.' That sense of focus — of slowing down to build with clarity and conviction — is one Garnsworthy has earned the hard way. After shutting down The Buff, she spent time unpacking what she wanted her next chapter to look like, not just professionally, but energetically. 'The business can't grow faster than I can,' she says. 'So I invest in myself, with coaches, mindset work, inner development. It's non-negotiable.' Garnsworthy credits tools like Lacy Phillips' To Be Magnetic manifestation work with helping her rewire her sense of worth and possibility. 'I had to shift a lot of subconscious beliefs. That I had to hustle constantly to be worthy. That things had to be hard. The more I did that inner work, the more aligned opportunities started showing up. It wasn't magic — it was clarity.' That blend of strategy and soul now threads through Female Founder World. It's why the brand resonates so deeply with thousands of female founders, because it doesn't just share success stories. It demystifies them. Which is exactly what makes its new partnership with Adobe Express such a natural fit. 'Creativity is one of the most powerful tools an entrepreneur can have, but too often it can be limited by time or out-of-reach tools. This partnership is about changing that. By bringing Adobe Express to such a community driven by entrepreneurs, we're empowering more founders to design smarter and move faster," shared Elise Swopes, Senior Adobe Evangelist and Community Advocate. The partnership launches with Launch Lab, a free four-part digital workshop series that brings tactical education to life, kicking off on July 1 with the topic, 'How I Secure Six-Figure Sponsors: Secrets Behind FFW's Success,' hosted by Garnsworthy. 'In this workshop I'll be teaching the partnership strategy and pitch process that's working in our business, and walk the community through how to use tools like Adobe Express to build a beautiful and impactful deck that can sell your vision," she shared. 'We asked our community what they needed help with — pitching, content creation, sponsorships — and built the series around that. These aren't coaches. These are founders who've actually done it.' Garnsworthy's hope? 'Confidence. Practical skills. Templates. And a reminder that good storytelling, paired with the right tools, can open a lot of doors.' What started as one founder's group chat has become a movement and a mentorship loop for a new generation of women in business. And as Garnsworthy says: 'There's no one path to success. Just your own.'
