Bre Cruickshank knows firsthand how difficult it can be being a woman entrepreneur.
That’s why she started Radical Girl Gang, an online marketplace to shop emerging woman-owned brands.
“Women-owned businesses have grown 58% in the last 11 years,” the founder and CEO said. “We’re seeing a lot of women enter entrepreneurship. However, there are still a lot of barriers that women in business face.”
Largely that barrier is funding. Fortune magazine reported that in 2019, startups founded only by women received only 2.7% of total venture capital investment in the United States.
“That just gives us a picture of how far we have to go,” Cruickshank said. “Women make incredible entrepreneurs. We’re visionaries. We really need to create ecosystems that are designed by and for women if we want to tackle some of these statistics.”
Radical Girl Gang curates women-owned brands in clothing, accessories, home goods and wellness.
Launched in November 2019, the company features about 50 brands and expects to onboard about 500 brands in the next 18 months. Brands may apply on Radical Girl Gang’s website to be included on the platform. Radical Girl Gang takes 20% to 30% commission on each transaction on its platform and also has its own in-house brand.
“We give them tools to grow. We give them a platform that is specifically tailored for them,” she said.
Cruickshank started her career at Nike in product line management. She later led digital merchandising strategy at Outdoor Voices when it was in its early startup stages.
“It was a fantastic way to learn the ins and outs of doing business on a global scale,” Cruickshank said of working at Nike.
Outdoor Voices brought the Oregon native to Texas.
Cruickshank graduated from the Founder Institute, which bills itself the world’s largest pre-seed accelerator.
Throughout 2020, Radical Girl Gang was 100% bootstrapped, she said.
The company’s first angel investor was Beth Goff-McMillan, CEO of SKG, Cruickshank said. Radical Girl Gang started raising $500,000 in November and is about a fifth of the way there. Beam Angel Network also selected Radical Girl Gang as one of 15 Austin companies to help fund.
“Being an entrepreneur is incredibly challenging. Being a woman entrepreneur is harder. I am actively going up against that trying to raise money. In order to even access VC money and start pursuing institutional money, we have to be at that $1 million revenue mark. For this round, we’re focused on angel investors.”
Radical Girl Gang focuses on customers ages 18 to 34.
When considering new brands, Cruickshank said she asks “Is this a product that she (the customer) will love? Is it a gap in our assortment that we need to fill? We want to be really strategic about filling gaps about what our consumers want. We focus a lot on the brand itself and the founder behind it.”
Cruickshank said she has a personal conversation with every brand Radical Girl Gang brings onboard.
“We want to work with (founders who) are passionate about building successful brands,” she said. “It is incredible what these women are doing. We want to see them creating successful sustainable businesses that can stand the test of time.”
