Introducing The Stack World — The post-pandemic evolution for our beauty community.
The year 2020 was a tumultuous year for most, and our beauty community (along with other hospitality and service industries) was hit especially hard. As I’m writing this from my flat in London, we have been closed for 9 Months, are presently in our third national lockdown, and (like our beauty industry peers) are unable to operate in an industry which relies precariously on consistent, seasonal sales. But during that year, we were there for you.
From the very beginning we created events and content to keep our community engaged, motivated, and productive. We paid Pros as mechanical turks for data labelling, we organised virtual beauty classes, we held weekly briefings to decipher the government’s various mandates.
Most importantly, we held a campaign to remind said government that we actually existed.
But by the end of 2020, very little had changed in terms of the pandemic. In fact, it had apparently gotten worse, and sadly Covid-19 still looms large over society and our health service continues to be overwhelmed. I don’t believe things will truly change for a while. That said, so much has changed for us at Beautystack. We realised our role in the community was more than just booking software. We realised that our most engaged users were the ones who were the most ambitious, resilient, and open to learning. Our most engaged users also came to us for everything beauty related and much more. Over the last year our community has evolved into a network of information covering everything from how to start a tech company to negotiating a commercial shop lease to how to pitch for funding. It was at this point that we realised that for 2021 we needed to go beyond beauty. And so, we introduce The Stack World.
The Stack World is our evolution of Beautystack. A new media platform for members covering topics across Beauty / Wellness / Business / Culture and Society. We lead with these five content pillars and serve up events and articles to meet the needs of our audience.
Our user tends to be city-based women with a desire for change, whether that’s personal, political, career or otherwise. They’re seeking higher ground and look to us for recommendations. This is the first time in my 15 year plus career that I am openly serving the whole woman, speaking to all of her needs across these categories.
This week we launch with the virtual events program. Since we launched our events feature on Beautystack in December, we have seen thousands of bookings across our curated and community-hosted events in just a matter of weeks. The Stack World begins with a membership subscription, allowing Members to access unlimited events, curated by our in-house team. My events always aim to educate and inform. The inspiration is the cherry on the cake. Expect regular talks, panels and round tables of thoughtful discourse about women’s experiences and ambitions. Join the conversation here.
In March, we launch the editorial arm of The Stack World. We want to add to the women's media landscape by including Business and Political (Society) content and having dedicated categories for these, not burying it in between celebs and shopping. We have engaged a stellar team to take this forward and I’ll be announcing more in due course.
The Stack World is the evolution of our business, but this is also a personal evolution for me, and one that brings me full circle. As a child, I was obsessed with news and chat shows, and as a teenager, I would take the Sunday papers home from my waitressing job and spread them on the floor while my mom watched Oprah reruns. I bought my first magazine, Sugar, aged 11 and quickly upgraded to Vogue, Elle, NME and The Face, i-D and Dazed. After a while, I was reading Bloomberg Businessweek and The Economist. I then went on to do a degree in the topic, studying BA (Hons) Fashion Communication at Central St Martins and made my first magazine, WAH, in 2006 while still studying. A fanzine to promote women in hip hop as an antidote to the misogyny pervading the hip hop scene.
After graduating and while still doing my Sportswear Editor role at Arena Homme +, I continued to work on my zine. WAH Magazine became WAH Nails, which became Beautystack, which now becomes The Stack. On top of this, my first ever women’s event was in 2008, the WAH Power Lunch at the ICA Gallery, where I hosted a simple panel of 5 women talking to the audience about how they got their job.
I continued to host community events for another decade, culminating in 2016 with Future Girl Corp, creating space for women to rethink the scale of their business.
I also had a weekly AMA business column in The Guardian Magazine for a year.
None of this is to do with beauty, but beauty was and continues to be an incredibly powerful vehicle to bring women together to do the thing I enjoy the most, which is to talk and share experiences. Looking good is simply a by-product of a game-changing service. It seems that after all these years, I have finally realised my Founder Market Fit.
It is a pleasure to take you on this journey with the next iteration of my thinking. It will be a small and gentle start for our most committed users. Starting a new venture during the pandemic has been challenging (especially because I love face-to-face brainstorming), but we made it happen, and I’m excited to see how it develops. I also would love to hear from any journalists who are writing about our subject topics and would love to contribute to a new platform.
The Stack is about achieving higher ground and higher purpose. We are creating spaces for intelligent, ambitious women who see themselves as infinite learners with insatiable curiosities. Connecting you to a network of like-minded women, The Stack aims to spark your curiosity and start a fire, merging culture and current affairs with business and social impact. My priority has always been about gender equality and I believe media, technology and business are powerful tools to do that. Today is just the start.
