We’re really excited to officially introduce one of Hatch’s new partners and expert workshop leaders: the team at Outfly.
In June, Outfly reached out to us to ask if they could lend their skills to support our founders. They’re a design innovation agency whose mission is to support disrupters and do-gooders, and they wanted to find a way to lend their skills pro-bono to support more women and ethnic minority founders.
Of course, we said yes!
So for the past six months, we’ve been designing and delivering workshops with Outfly across our Female Founders Accelerator, Incubator and Launchpad programmes. The Outfly team have also been offering 121 Office Hours with members of each cohort, diving into more detail on their strategy, branding and marketing.
We’ve loved working with Paul, Joe, Ian and Georgina to craft these workshops, and our founders have been so impressed with the level of detail involved – including the 29-page interactive activities handout shared with our Incubator cohort!
Outfly also featured four of our founders on their social media channels, telling their stories about inspiration and representation.
“My meeting with Paul was great,” said Sarah, founder of an ethical children’s clothing boutique. “The whole session was full of creative ideas and questions that made me look at my business from a completely different perspective. He helped me see how the purpose of my business is related to my future customers, and why was it important for me to start it. He gave me great ideas of how to turn my business into a real social mission.”
“I really enjoyed the way the guys encouraged me to think outside of the box for my branding,” said Mercedes, founder of a recruitment agency supporting those who have been through the criminal justice system. “Joe took a genuine interest in the business and we researched competitors to get a better idea of the current market. Joe introduced me to a mind map programme which myself and the graphic designer have been using to test out new ideas and formulate a new style logo.”
At the end of last year, we held a review and retrospective meeting to have a look at what went well and what can be tweaked for next year, and we’re very happy that Outfly will be coming back in 2021 to deliver four more branding and marketing workshops for our cohorts. We’re also looking at new ways of connecting our founders with the experts at Outfly – Hatch founders can look out for upcoming Ask Me Anything events in our community Slack channel!