THE FOLD
#StartWithOne - closing the investment gap, one conversation at a time
There’s a £600bn gender investment gap in the UK and it is estimated that it will currently take 267 years to close it.
Our brief from luxury workwear brand The Fold was to get more women to start investing, whilst making noise around the brand’s first ever crowdfund.
We ran consumer research which showed that the problem starts with a lack of conversation. We found that 70% of women currently don’t talk about investments, with 60% saying they don’t feel confident in the subject. Our research showed a disproportionate benefit for women in having conversations about investing.
We launched #StartWithOne, a fully integrated campaign putting the issue in the spotlight, as well as offering a solution to encourage more women to open up about their investment journey and get started.
The campaign strategy leant on a community of over 500 female investors, all of whom were asked to share one piece of advice for new investors on how to get started. Female investors were invited to kick-start a conversation on their social channels, sharing their advice alongside a call to action to other women to #StartWithOne. The social response was phenomenal with a reach of 340k and over 40 investors sharing their advice on their social channels, supported by top investors in the field including June Angelides, Maya Moufarek and Karen McCormick.
We launched the #StartWithOne campaign with a tentpole feature in The Times followed by The Evening Standard, Business of Fashion, Maddyness and Sifted.
It was also supported by Female Invest, who offered 100 subscriptions to help novice female investors get started in a community which fosters and facilitates conversation.
Our campaign established The Fold as a leading voice in mobilising female investors and supporting women on their journey to financial independence, with coverage reaching an audience of over 31m. It also supported The Fold in surpassing its crowdfund target within 24 hours, culminating in £1.7m in investment. Importantly, two thirds of the investors who participated in the crowdfund were female, nearly three times higher than the investment platform Crowdcube’s average, and nearly half of them were first time investors.