As the founder of a creative agency based in Clapham, southwest London, Annie Bartley is usually coming up with ideas and concepts rather than taking centre stage herself.
That all changed last week when Bartley, 37, founder and creative director of I Am Female, became one of 14 female founders to take part in a campaign aimed at inspiring a new generation of women to start and grow businesses. Their pictures, alongside the slogan “You’ve got what it takes”, are currently appearing across 62 outdoor advertising sites including billboards, bus stops and gyms in London and Birmingham.
It was the brainchild of Emmie Faust, who runs Female Founders Rise, a networking group for women. In the summer, she posted a picture on LinkedIn which mocked up a billboard featuring a stat from the Rose review into female entrepreneurship, which found that £250 billion could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled businesses at the same rate as men.
The post attracted hundreds of likes and prompted Clare Benson-Geddes, managing director and co-founder of YeahNice Studio, a branding agency, to get in touch to say she wanted to help make an outdoor advertising campaign featuring female founders a reality.
Faust, 46, said: “We wanted to empower more women to start a business by showcasing lots of women doing lots of different things.
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“I wanted to run a positive campaign because there is so much written about how difficult it is being a female founder that it can become self-fulfilling. [Women can think] ‘There’s so much negative news about how difficult it is for female founders to get funding, why should I bother even trying?’”
Research has previously highlighted the issue of a lack of female role models in the start-up world. A survey from Santander, the high street bank, found that 81 per cent of 11 to 18-year-olds were unable to name a single female entrepreneur.
Emmie Faust, who runs Female Founders Rise, had the idea for the campaign
Bartley said the reason she agreed to take part is because “it’s really important to show a diverse range of women — the representation that isn’t out there for queer women and women more generally in the creative world. Just 1 per cent of agencies are run by women and I want to try and help change that.”
She added that she was “proud” to see the “huge” billboard in Shoreditch, east London, because of “what it represents and the conversations it can start”.
Other women featured in the billboard campaign include Dr Dupe Burgess, founder of Bloomful, which provides women with advice on reproductive health; Victoria Peppiatt, co-founder of Hey Savi, a fashion matchmaker; and Siddhi Mittal and Henin Zhang, the co-founders of yhangry, a site for booking private chefs.
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All of the founders featured in the campaign gave up their time for free and the creative assets were produced pro bono by YeahNice. The advertising space owned by JCDecaux and Glooh, which will be seen by millions of people and is worth tens of thousands of pounds, was also gifted.
Faust is now looking for partners to help her to take the campaign nationwide. “I want to see it in all the cities around the UK,” she said.
