Hatch Enterprise’s Female Founders programme supports women from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds who run their own businesses. Founders join in cohorts at one of three stages: Launchpad for women with a business idea, Incubator for businesses that are already trading, and Accelerator for women-led businesses that want to raise funding and scale. Along the way they work through sessions from experts in areas such as legal, cash flow, sales and pitching.
Brand is where we came in. Each stage needs something different from a brand session: a first answer to who the customer is and why they should care, a sharper message for a business that is already selling, or a brand strong enough to carry a company through growth. The sessions had to be practical enough that every founder left with work done on their own business, not just notes.
We started in 2020 by planning a brand session and a marketing session for each stage, drawing on our Brandscape framework. The brand session works through the same four questions every time. Who are you talking to? What value do you give them? Why are you really doing it? How do you speak to them? The marketing session then puts those answers to work.
Every workshop mixes short talks with hands-on exercises, and the content steps up with the stage. Launchpad covers audience, competitors, value, a founder story and a first pitch. Incubator adds brand equity, pitch practice and organic social content. Accelerator goes further into brand values, trust, customer needs and growing a community on social media.
Each workshop came with a handout founders filled in as they went. The exercises take them from primary and secondary customers to gain creators and pain relievers, then condense it all into a one line USP: “Our ___ is the only ___ that ___”. A brand audit has them score their knowledge, preference and financial equity out of 150. Voice exercises set a boundary for each trait, such as “informative but not patronising”, rhetoric and objection exercises sharpen the pitch, and later exercises turn customer interests into content pillars, stories and post ideas.
The material kept developing with the programme. After a review of the first round at the end of 2020, Hatch invited us back to run more branding and marketing workshops in 2021. In December 2021 we ran a dedicated brand workshop for the Incubator, with its own deck, exercises and handout.
We also designed the artwork that framed the programme. The welcome illustration for new Female Founders cohorts gives each stage its own rocket under an Outfly × Hatch lockup: on the launch pad for Launchpad, lifting off for Incubator and climbing clear for Accelerator.
For a members-only Ask Me Anything with Hatch, planned for April 2021 in Hatch’s Slack, where founders could bring questions on strategy, branding, websites, pitch decks, social media and more straight to our team, we illustrated the letters A, M and A, filled with marketing icons, a rocket launch and a chess game, and animated them into a short promo.
Outfly, a London brand, marketing and product agency, designed and ran brand and marketing workshops for the Launchpad, Incubator and Accelerator stages of Hatch Enterprise’s Female Founders programme from 2020.
A programme that supports women from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds who run their own businesses, in cohorts at three stages: Launchpad for a business idea, Incubator for a business that is already trading, and Accelerator for women-led businesses ready to raise funding and scale.
Ours works through who the customer is, the value you give them, why you do it and how you speak to them, with exercises for a one line USP, a brand audit scored out of 150, brand voice, rhetoric for pitching, objections and content pillars.
Fill-in handouts for each workshop, a welcome illustration for new Female Founders cohorts with a rocket for each stage, and an illustrated, animated promo for a members-only Ask Me Anything in Hatch’s Slack.
