Kate Isler and Susan Gates founded WMarketplace early this year after most businesses were hit hard by COVID-19. Isler and Gates had worked together 20 years ago at another start-up, and during the summer of 2020, they joined forces and started WMarketplace.
The two created WMarketplace from Be Bold Now, a non-profit organization created to celebrate International Women’s Day. It is an online platform that provides opportunities to businesses owned by women. They also help network young entrepreneurial ladies with non-profit organizations.
Before founding WMarketplace both Kate Isler and Susan Gates had their separate careers in technology, start-ups, sales, and marketing. Kate Isler worked at Microsoft for almost 20 years, where she was in charge of subsidiary offices and marketing organizations in rising economies around the world. She later left Microsoft and founded Daysaver, a digital health start-up. She is a co-founder of Be Bold Now, a non-profit organization aimed at speeding up gender equality.
Susan Gates worked as a sales director for two different organizations; DaVinci and the Specialty Coffee Association. She also worked with the United States government as an International Trade Specialist, where she counseled on various trade policy issues, and formed private and public partnerships.
Isler and Gates felt that attaining financial independence and security are the significant aspects of closing the gender gap between men and women. This was after many small businesses were significantly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Women from Seattle were most affected.
If you are a woman, then you comprise 85% of the consumer purchasing decisions. WMarketplace provides you with an opportunity and an easy way to support your women-based businesses and those businesses that encompass your business values. WMarketplace also connects women shoppers with professional services such as doctors, accountants, and attorneys. All these professions are registered under women. To this day, the platform is proud to have more than 110 traders and service providers and over 600 products and services.
WMarketplace is working on created direct selling for its merchants and shoppers so that women can develop their enterprises. There is full providence of tools and structures that will make direct selling easy to focus on managing and growing the businesses.
WMarketplace is an e-commerce platform that offers an essential step toward achieving gender equality in the United States. Some might find it hard to venture into entrepreneurship because of dominance from the other gender. However, efforts to attain entrepreneurial success might be forfeited by the ever-increasing control of businesses by men all over the United States. Thanks to WMarketplace, this problem is becoming more and more unpopular.
WMarketplace’s Kate Isler said that their main goal is to be an economic instrument for women, combine women’s purchasing power, and make it a support tool for other women to grow their businesses. Through this, revenue will be generated by more and more women. This will leverage women’s economic status amid the pandemic and the modern market.
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