Female Founder Lab

Laura ter Meer couldn't find a dumbbell that was both beautiful and heavy enough to lift with, so she designed her own. Lifting the Mood was born, but first she had to figure out how to actually make it: sourcing, sampling and vetting a manufacturer in China with zero prior experience.

In part 1 of our conversation with Laura we'll talk about the details of starting a company no one tells you about. How Laura found and compared suppliers, what to look for when you walk a factory floor, and why she bootstrapped the first order herself.

www.liftingthemood.com - Adjustable Dumbbells for women 

Kathryn Bricken started making gluten-free cookie dough in her kitchen for friends. Today Doughlicious is in more than 6,000 stores worldwide: Whole Foods, Target, Costco. Kathryn just moved to the US for a year to run the next phase herself.

This episode is filled with practical lessons on scaling a consumer brand across borders: why she pulled out of Australia after moving too fast, the tiny packaging change that cost a fortune in the US, why Kathryn now says "go deep, not wide," and how she thinks about raising money and giving away equity.

This podcast is brought to you by TABS, assisting companies to successfully expand to the US market.
Guest: Kathryn Bricken, CEO & Founder of Doughlicious

In this episode we sit down in Barcelona with Natalie Batlle. Natalie is the founder of Juno House and brand strategist, helping brands expand to the US market. In this episode she gets specific about the expensive mistakes she watches brands make. The $20k PR agency nobody needed, the whole budget burned on a single trade show, and what to do instead. 

We get into how to choose the right first US city (it's not always New York), the mindset shift that's needed, and why American consumers behave differently from Europeans when a new brand enters the market.

This episode is brought to you by www.tabsinc.com.
Today's guest: Natalie Batlle - www.nataliebatlle.com.

Amy Maxwell is raising $500K to open Oracley's first studio in New York, with five more planned after that. This episode is the middle of it; the raise, the leases, and the costs she didn't see coming. She walks us through how she chose New York over the West Coast, what a US lease demands from a foreign founder with no credit score, and why she stopped chasing VCs and went looking for a different kind of investor entirely.

Amy Maxwell, founder of Oracley - www.oracleyspace.com
Find more details on the crowdfunding here: www.oracleyspace.com/invest
This episode is sponsored by TABS - www.tabsinc.com

In this panel conversation recorded in Amsterdam, we sit down with Marthe de Groot (Marie Marie) and Gwen van de Pas (Bloom & Wolf) to talk about the messy and exciting reality of building a business from scratch and scaling it internationally. We get into supply chain nightmares and how to fix them, raising money as a female founder, the art of saying yes without breaking your operations, and expanding to the US market.

Madeleine zag iets wat de hele watersportindustrie over het hoofd had gezien: alles werd gemaakt voor mannen. Samen met haar broer richtte ze Wallien op, een watersportmerk speciaal voor vrouwen. Zes jaar later liggen hun producten wereldwijd in winkels en is Amerika de volgende grote stap. In deze aflevering praten we over hoe je een niche markt verovert, een ambassador community opbouwt en wat je moet weten voordat je de Amerikaanse markt betreedt.

Maaike Koster startte Stellar Whispers twee jaar geleden vanuit een reis naar Zuid-Afrika. Wat begon als een idee voor stijlvolle edelstenen sieraden, groeide snel uit tot een internationaal merk met klanten in Amerika. We praten over adverteren in een nieuwe markt, ondernemen met eigen kapitaal en wat haar dreef om toch een warehouse in de VS te openen.

In deze aflevering spreek ik met Danielle Heeren, founder van Approved by Fritz.

Tijdens de lockdown in New York begon zij met het ontwerpen van stijlvolle hondenaccessoires. Vijf jaar later ligt haar merk in meer dan 350 winkels wereldwijd. We praten over hoe ze haar eerste fabrikant vond, hoe het merk onverwacht snel groeide via retailers en wat ze leerde van ondernemen in Amerika. 

In deze aflevering hoor je hoe Wildride uitgroeide van een eigen behoefte tot een internationaal toddlermerk, met retail in de VS bij Target en Nordstrom. We praten over lean bouwen, community-first marketing en slim opschalen over de grens.

Female Founder Lab is a podcast about female founders building and scaling businesses internationally.