$10K Startup Grant Awarded to The Wildflower Company

We’re excited to announce the $10,000 Startup Grant recipient for November 2023. Congratulations to Ashley Olafsen & Michaella Estevez, co-founders of The Wildflower Company.

Recently, WomensNet Advisory Board member Jama Hernandez sat down with Micha for an exclusive interview. You can listen to their conversation and view the transcript below.

Video Transcript

Jama: Hi everyone, my name is Jama with WomensNet, and I am here talking with our November, 2023 winners.

We have with us Michaella, co-founder of Wildflower Company, and she is our Startup Grant winner.

And so we’re excited to chat with you and learn more about the awesome things that you’re doing. And so maybe we can begin with Michaella… can you please tell us a little bit about Wildflower Company?

Michaella: Sure thing. So the Wildflower Company is a mindfulness planner and community company wrapped in one for women in their twenties who wanna reach their goals, find balance, and live an intentional lifestyle. That is our big old business pitch.

Jama: Wonderful, wonderful.

You talked a little bit about wellness, and your company has a different approach. Maybe can you speak a little bit about what makes the Wildflower Company so unique?

Michaella: Absolutely. So there are a lot of planner companies out there. We all know that it’s always hard to make a decision about which planner to go with, but what makes the Wildflower Company particularly unique is our community and accountability group portion.

To explain that a little bit further… our accountability group is a monthly group where we meet to basically reflect on the previous month. And then set value-aligned intentions and goals for the upcoming month. The accountability group is really intended to really do what the title says, right? It’s just to hold you accountable and have a set date every month throughout the quarter to check in on your goals and see what your progress looks like. And kind of bounce ideas and brainstorm off of other like-minded individuals as to how you can actually reach your goals.

It does often take some time depending on the goal, our goals really look like, anything that you’d like to achieve that can be loftier goals. Like, I want to get a promotion by the end of the year, or they can be smaller goals, like I want to drink more water every day… or make sure I take my vitamins at the end of day.

So it is a really unique portion of our business, and we think it’s just really a great way to set goals in a community-based way.

Jama: When I went on your website, one of the things I liked was that your planners are also offered in a digital format. And so I thought that was really unique, and cool.

What’s really nice, everyone, is if you go on their site, you can actually see some of the pages in the journals. It really is framed nicely to help you just stay on task. I really appreciated that.

So, you won the Startup Grant… can you tell us a little bit about what strategies you’re using to let others know about what you’re doing? So many people utilize social media, but we wanna know what that looks like for your company.

Michaella: Up until super recently all of our growth has been organic and any sort of paid boosting has been about like 10 to $15… just kind of anything we can. But what we’ve noticed is we get a lot of traction by just simply engaging with our community one-on-one.

So what that looks like is anytime we get a new follower on our Instagram, we will DM them, encouraging them to download our free weekly planner. We send them the link. And this is also conversely a way for us to generate email subscribers as well. So they would subscribe to the email and immediately get the free weekly planner. So it kind of works in tandem, which is really great. And then occasionally, depending on what campaigns we’re running, we will encourage them to purchase select offerings at a discount depending on what we’re promoting during that time.

Some other strategies that have worked really well for us are giveaways with any value-aligned partners. We are so lucky to have a really supportive community of fellow entrepreneurs who are also looking to grow their Instagrams and their socials or email lists. Being able to partner and really leverage that collaboration feature in Instagram has allowed us to really tap into other people’s audiences who would be interested in something similar, because we are kind of value or mission-aligned as brands. And that has been a really helpful generator of additional awareness and eyes on our platform.

And then some more kind of day-to-day things really: it’s commenting on people’s posts, liking them, resharing them, and just letting them know that we’re here, we’re friendly, we’re a community, and this is a safe space for everybody to be here.

Jama: Awesome. I love it. And I love how you DM people back, and then you send them a sample of your weekly planner. It’s almost like the samples you get at Costco or Sam’s [Club] or something before you buy.

Thank you so much Michaella, for telling us a little bit about what you’re doing. And thank for taking the time out today to be able to connect with us and to connect with our listeners today. We really appreciate it.