Buy Women Built: Retailers Bet on Gender Kitemarks. Will Shoppers Follow?

Sahar Hashemi's Coffee Republic kitemark is now appearing on thousands of products across Tesco and Ocado. The same entrepreneur who convinced Britons to pay £2.50 for a latte in the 1990s is attempting something arguably more ambitious: persuading shoppers to factor founder gender into their purchasing decisions at scale. Whether it's enough to shift the structural funding disadvantages facing female entrepreneurs is another question entirely.

Buy Women Built, Hashemi's latest venture, has moved beyond the typical awareness campaign model. The organisation has secured permanent branded shelf space on Ocado and negotiated rollout across Tesco stores, placing kitemarks on products from 2,500 female-founded brands with combined annual turnover of £3.1bn. For context, that figure exceeds the market capitalisation of several FTSE 250 companies.

The commercial logic for retailers is straightforward, if rarely articulated. Female consumers control an estimated 85% of household purchasing decisions in the UK, according to research from Starcom MediaVest Group. Signalling alignment with women-led businesses costs retailers virtually nothing in operational terms whilst potentially strengthening customer loyalty among their core demographic. What's less clear is whether this creates meaningful economic advantage for the brands themselves, or simply shuffles existing market share among a defined subset of products.

Enjoying this article?

Get stories like this in your inbox every week.

Join the Community

From solicitor to espresso evangelist

Hashemi's credibility here stems from Coffee Republic, the chain she co-founded with her brother Bobby after abandoning a legal career at Frere Cholmeley. The business introduced the American-style coffee bar format to Britain, eventually operating 110 sites before the siblings sold their stake in 2001. That success story requires qualification: Coffee Republic entered administration in 2009, eight years post-sale, ultimately closing all locations.

Hashemi wasn't at the helm during the collapse, but her flagship brand's failure complicates the narrative of sustainable business-building that underpins Buy Women Built's mission. Still, building and successfully exiting a hospitality chain before turning 35 provides more operational insight than most advocates for female entrepreneurship can claim. Hashemi understands retail economics, supply chain negotiation, and the unglamorous work of securing physical distribution.

Her insistence that "clarity comes after" the leap, rather than before it, reflects someone who's actually managed P&Ls under pressure rather than workshopped empowerment slogans.

The visibility question

The central assumption behind Buy Women Built is that visibility drives change. Make female founders visible on supermarket shelves, the theory goes, and you inspire the next generation whilst simultaneously directing consumer spending power toward women-led businesses. Both claims deserve scrutiny.

UK venture capital funding to all-female founding teams reached just 2% of total investment in 2023, according to figures from Pitchbook. That percentage has remained essentially flat for five years despite proliferating initiatives aimed at closing the gap. Visibility schemes may create role models, but there's limited evidence they translate to material changes in capital allocation or investor behaviour. The structural issues—pattern-matching in VC networks, risk assessment biases, sector concentration in male-dominated deep tech—operate largely independent of consumer brand recognition.

Consumer behaviour data presents similar complications. While surveys consistently show shoppers express preferences for ethical consumption, actual purchasing patterns often diverge from stated intentions. The gap between what consumers tell researchers they value and what they actually buy at checkout is well-documented across fair trade, environmental, and social impact categories. Whether founder gender commands sufficient purchase motivation to overcome price, convenience, or brand loyalty remains an open empirical question.

Commercial intervention or aisle theatre?

What distinguishes Buy Women Built from purely symbolic gestures is the institutional buy-in from major retailers. Ocado doesn't create permanent branded aisles for initiatives it considers marketing fluff. Tesco, operating on razor-thin margins, doesn't commit shelf space to concepts without commercial rationale. The retailers' willingness to participate suggests they've identified either customer demand or reputational value worth the operational effort.

The £3.1bn aggregate turnover figure provides scale, but distribution matters more than total. If that revenue concentrates among a handful of established brands that already enjoyed retail access, the kitemark functions primarily as recognition rather than access expansion.

The meaningful test is whether Buy Women Built's retail partnerships open distribution channels for emerging brands that would otherwise lack negotiating leverage with major supermarkets. Hashemi's approach focuses on consumer-facing intervention rather than addressing capital formation or investor bias directly. That's perhaps pragmatic—changing shopping behaviour is difficult, but potentially more tractable than reforming venture capital's partnership structures or LP investment mandates.

Whether retail visibility creates a feedback loop that eventually influences funding decisions depends on demonstrable commercial traction translating to investor confidence. The coming 18 months will indicate whether this model has durability beyond its initial retail partnerships. If Buy Women Built expands to additional major chains and the kitemark begins appearing on product categories beyond the typical female founder concentration in beauty and wellness, that suggests genuine commercial momentum. If it remains confined to dedicated aisles and niche categories, the initiative risks becoming another well-intentioned marker that shoppers learn to ignore alongside fair trade logos and union labels they've been trained to consider optional purchasing criteria rather than decisive factors.

More articles by David Adams