Black Friday. Small Business Saturday. Cyber-Monday…and now women have their very own Women Owned Wednesday (Wednesday, November 25), getting a jump on the holiday shopping season.
Welcome to Women-owned Wednesday!
Giving credit where it is due, WOWDay is the brainchild of Corielle Heath and LiftUpLife.com, a marketplace for products from women-owned businesses. We heard about it in the Chicago Tribune and Lioness Magazine and can’t stop saying WOW, what a great idea! From the LiftUpLife website: Share photos and links to great gifts in your online store using #WOWDay. There’s only one rule: Every time you post a promo, share another woman’s promo! Read here to learn more about WOWDay or LiftUpLIft.
WOWday is just getting started but we predict it will be a definite trending topic if we can all get the word out. We all know that Visibility = Opportunity, and in this case, women helping each other will certainly be an opportunity for numerous small businesses run by women. And, if you miss it, try again on Small Business Saturday where you will undoubtedly also find a number of women-owned businesses to support.
And why is that?
According to an article in The Atlantic earlier this year, “a report from the Institute of Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) shows that women are steadily increasing their presence in the world of small-business ownership.” Twenty-nine percent of the US’s businesses are owned by women, up from 26 percent in 1997.
But women-owned businesses generally make only a quarter of what men’s businesses make. One reason may be that women lack access to capital (see the Diana Project report from Babson and are forced into a focus on smaller, less-capital intensive businesses. With this gap, women necessarily focus on businesses that aren’t attractive to investors, perpetuating the cycle.
Wouldn’t it be great to see more women focusing on high-growth, capital intensive businesses and breaking out of the cycle? Yeah. We thought so too.
Meanwhile support WOWDay and Small Business Saturday. It’s a good thing.
