Female-owned creative businesses – Life in the 0.1% ?

Jessica Walsh, the new founder of her own agency &Walsh and previous half of the infamous Sagmeister&Walsh, recently cited that only 0.1% of creative businesses are owned by women.

No, I didn’t write that wrong. 0.1%.

If you’re reading this it’s likely you’ve come across many other figures like this one around lack of representation in our industry; be it based on race, gender, orientation, ability or many other factors of privilege. Whilst I’m far from lacking privileges of my own and have done very little to becoming an activist for changing on this, this figure did stick with me. And has made me think about how and why I was part of this rather small team.

It’s hard to do this — talk about myself that is — without sounding full of it. I generally eye roll at this kind of thing before running far, far away. To go one step further and write it down with the belief that anyone will care to read it is therefore well beyond my usual, but one #girlboss and nudge from my team later, here I am.

Building HexStudio is the result of my passion for design. Yawn and same-same for sure, but how can any business owner not say that. However, what pushed me to jump from employed to the employer was a result of the bad and frankly ugly experiences I’ve had as a woman in the creative industry. From the small yet regular belittling in my junior days of being ‘just a young girl’ to all-out being shouted out and called “a f*cking c*nt” — yeh, these business owners actually exist outside of Mad Men — I’ve always known the sort of place and culture I wanted HexStudio to be. And so when I took the scary step of moving from freelancer to hiring my first full-time employee 3 years ago, I wanted it to be somewhere my past-self would want to work and feel like a valued part of.

Skip to now, and particularly as we expand again, I’m proud I have a women-strong team, and that they too care about trying our best to build an inclusive workplace. We have much more work we can do but our sights are set on making it happen; starting by ensuring the pipeline to the top jobs — senior and team lead positions — are available to those outside Club Dave (of FTSE 100 fame) and that the drop off of women in these roles in the 30+ age group won’t happen at HexStudio simply because of a lack of flexibility to continue with their career as well as being a parent.