Nicky Clement, Founder of Willow & Rowe, on what it means to become part of a movement built to make women founders impossible to overlook.

Most of the milestones in building a business happen - a supplier finally says yes or a spreadsheet finally balances - without any form of ceremony! But when something arrives with a proper opportunity attached, it lands differently. Being accepted into Buy Women Built is one of those moments for us!

Buy Women Built began life as a tweet, retweeted by Coffee Republic founder Sahar Hashemi OBE during lockdown: not everyone can invest in a female founder, not everyone can mentor one, but everyone can buy from one. Buy Women Built has since become a proper consumer movement, complete with a recognisable kitemark, high-profile retail takeovers, and a stated ambition to make “Buy Women Built” as instantly understood as “Fairtrade” or “Vegan.” What I find compelling about it isn't the scale (though the scale is impressive), it's the argument underneath it - that visibility is not a nice-to-have for women in business, it's the mechanism by which everything else changes.

That argument happens to be much of the life-blood of Willow & Rowe.

I haven't set out to build a platform that champions female-founded brands - we're not exclusively doing that. But I believe, more than ever, that women in business need to be championed. When I audited our portfolio earlier this year for an award entry, the numbers spoke for themselves: the overwhelming majority of the brands we stock are British, female-founded and independently owned - the vast majority are also micro businesses. Those weren't targets we hit. They are the reason for starting this business in the first place.

The gap Buy Women Built is working to close is well documented and still stubbornly wide. Women remain significantly underrepresented among UK business owners, and the value left on the table because of it runs into the billions. But the more interesting problem sits slightly upstream of the economics: many people cannot name a woman who built the brand they're holding - not because she isn't there, but because retail has rarely bothered to tell them. Fix the visibility and the rest tends to follow.

That's the gap we will try to close one gift at a time. Behind every candle, soap bar and hand-thrown ceramic piece on our site is a woman who took a risk many will never take. Our customers don't always see her name on the label, but choosing to shop with us means choosing her business over a larger, more anonymous one. Joining Buy Women Built gives us insight and a sharper way to make that choice visible and deliberate, rather than something customers have to take on trust.

There's also a less quantifiable benefit to joining a community like this: the company of people who understand a particular kind of graft. Building something alone, without outside investment, often around school runs and the rest of ordinary life, is a specific experience, and one that's easier to carry when you're not the only person doing it. That's reason enough on its own to want a seat at this table.

In practical terms, expect to see this show up in how we talk about the brands we stock: more of the founders themselves, more of the decisions and risks behind each product, and a sharper edit of the female-founded brands we already champion.

If Willow & Rowe can do its small part to make it ordinary, rather than exceptional, to know exactly whose business you're supporting with a gift, that's the job done. Explore our Female-Founded edit to discover some of the brands we carry (some of them are also Buy Women Built brands), and if you know a founder-led brand that belongs at Willow & Rowe, we'd like to hear about it.