Building a worldwide membership platform in 11+ countries

The Coven Girl Gang (more often known as The Coven) was launched in June 2018. It came about after I had a pain point of my own, I was feeling isolated and alone running my flower studio.

I spent lots of hours by myself, making floral arrangements, sending emails, going to the flower market or waiting for a delivery at 3am, driving to venues, building installations and dismantling them after an event or wedding was over... pretty much always by myself. I really enjoyed the pressure of running a business but I was struggling to be alone so much and have no one to share the high's and the low's of being self-employed.

There were many physical events in London and other big cities but I was too busy making flowers to be able to spend 5 or 6 hours travelling to, attending and getting home from an event. I needed people closer than that.

From my market research I discovered lots of other people felt the same too, they liked working for themselves but struggled to find people to hang out with and talk too who understood what it was like.

So, The Coven was born. An online membership platform and support network for female-founders. It didn't matter if you lived out in the sticks or in a city, whether you had lots of free time around your business or not much at all. As long as you had access to the internet you could be a part of the membership and meet hundreds of other founders who all felt just like you!

I grew The Coven from the ground, everything was built as I went along. I didn't have any investment or loans to put into it so we needed to be profitable from day one and I had to work hard (aka smart) to ensure that I didn't do anything that we couldn't afford until the money had landed in my account.

I worked on building the business, creating a brand, designing a website, growing an audience on social media, conducting market research and getting the platform ready to run smoothly for eight months before we finally opened our virtual doors and began charging for our services.

Once we opened thanks to our social media presence we were able to grow extremely quickly, we began on launch day with around 250 members and quickly grew to other a 1,000 members in 11+ countries with 2,500 people on our waiting list.

We've been lucky enough to be featured in The Evening Standard, Forbes, The Times, The Huffington Post, The Financial Times, Stylist, Glamour, Courier Magazine, The Telegraph, Badass Women's Hour, Marie Claire and more. As well as countless online mentions and podcast features.

I owe all of our growth to our marketing and our Instagram presence. This is predominantly how I grew the brand, got press features and had people adding themselves to the waitlist.

Instagram has been a powerful tool for me to harness in order to grow my digital business. It also allowed me to expand our services into physical products such as merchandise and our annual print magazine.