Our Story
We're Katie and Kim, sisters and co-founders of Shop Female Founded.
Who We Are
Kim at 11 days old.
Katie is Vice President at an ecommerce agency, and mom of two toddlers who lives in New Jersey, and has spent her career working directly with brands on how they grow online. She finds out about things by reading industry coverage, talking to clients, and paying attention to what's actually moving in the market.
Kim lives in Charleston, works in advertising sales, and finds out about things through her feed, her friends, and what's showing up organically in her life. When a brand has made it into Kim's world, it's usually been through the kind of organic word-of-mouth that no paid ad can replicate.
We were born six years apart, so we don't share a social media ecosystem. We don't communicate with our friends the same way. We don't even necessarily discover the same brands through the same channels.
There are tons of female founded brands that we both buy from. If it works for a brand on both of us across different cities, different stages of life, and different styles - it is a pretty good signal that it works. And what doesn't make it through that filter usually tells us something too.
Together we research, vet, and write about female-founded brands we genuinely believe in. That's the whole business.
Katie brings the operational knowledge: how ecommerce actually works, what good brand fundamentals look like, what the affiliate landscape is doing. Kim brings the cultural read: what's landing with a female audience, what feels authentic versus manufactured, what's worth your attention and what's just noise.
How This Started
Katie, Mom, and Kim.
The idea came out of a pattern Katie kept noticing at work.
As a VP at Acadaca, a digital ecommerce agency, she's spent her career working directly with brands on how they grow online. What she kept coming back to: the female-founded brands in the client roster seemed to operate differently. More considered. A clearer sense of who the customer was, often because the founder was the customer. Products that solved real problems because the person who built them had actually lived them.
She started paying closer attention. And the more she looked, the more she started mentioning these brands to Kim.
Kim lives in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina not too far from Charleston's shopping mecca - King Street. As Katie started naming brands she'd been excited about, Kim kept saying some version of: I know that one. They have a store here. A handful of the female-founded brands that had caught Katie's attention through the industry side had independently found their way to the same stretch of the same street in the same city where Kim lives.
The convergence of industry signal meeting real-world presence felt like something worth paying attention to. This site is what happened when we decided to.
What We're Trying To Do
The simple version: we research and spotlight female-founded brands so you don't have to. Every brand on this site has a founder we respect, a product we believe in, and a story worth knowing.
The longer version is a little more personal.
Anyone who has worked in a company, or tried to build one, knows how hard it is to make the operational side match the values you say you have. The tension between ambitious work and the rest of life - school pickups, summers, the general reality of households where everyone is working - doesn't have an obvious solution. We're not pretending it does.
But we think some companies are figuring it out. And we want to find them.
Part of what draws us to female-founded brands specifically is that the founders often started from a real problem. Something that wasn't working in their own life, for their own body, in their own industry, and they built backward from there. We're curious whether that same instinct is showing up in how some of these companies are structured. Schedules that account for school hours. Summers that exist. Workplaces that were designed with the whole person in mind rather than just the hours they're available.
We don't know exactly who those companies are yet. That's part of what we're here to figure out. When we find them, we'll say so. When something isn't working the way it's presented, we'll say that too.
The curation here is intentional and the opinions are our own. We're genuinely interested in brands that are building things well — the product, the business, and how they treat the people inside it.