Business Case Study
Cultivating an interactive & influential community at Her.HQ
Cofounded by yours truly, Her.Kind (FKA Her.HQ) was a female-focused experiential workspace in Dallas, Texas. Learn how my partner and I developed an original concept and built a groundbreaking business in two years.
My Role
Cofounder & CMO
Team
Cassi Oesterling
Timeline
2018 - 2020
Project Overview
What was Her.HQ?
Her.Kind was a female-focused community and experiential workspace in Dallas, TX. Our mission was the betterment of women through intentional community and shared experiences.
The Problem
Founded at the beginning of 2018 by Cassi Oesterling, Vanessa De Abreu, and myself – we bonded over our shared experience of moving to Dallas as adults and finding it difficult to form authentic connections and friendships with other like-minded women.
Our Solution
We wanted to create an inspiring space with all the amenities the modern working woman would need to grow their businesses and passion projects while building meaningful relationships.
Once we decided to move forward with our idea, we spent the majority of 2018 tirelessly working around the clock to ideate, research, and build out the business plan and pitch deck. In August of 2018, after countless pitches, networking events, and iterations of the pitch deck, Cassi and I decided to quit our jobs and make securing funds for Her.HQ our full-time job. By November 2018, we partnered with Centrl Office – a Portland-based coworking space, to launch a six-month pop-up within their new coworking concept launching in the Dallas Arts District in early 2019.
By February 2019, we opened the doors to our pop-up space as we continued our search for our permanent home. The goal with the pop-up was to create a preview of what the full experience would look like – we offered open-office space to work out of and monthly programming.
Marketing Approach
From the start, Cassi and I utilized our skillsets to ideate, strategize, and execute all of our marketing efforts in-house. We identified Instagram as our primary channel of communication for our millennial female demographic. We approached our prelaunch marketing strategy in three phases:
- Create excitement & curiosity for the new community. We achieved this through the release of our influencer-led photoshoot content and through approachable evergreen content to give our new followers a meaningful reason to engage with us. However, we strategically decide not to define what we were to build curiosity and excitement over the concept.
- Website announcement & email captures. After a month of building awareness on our social media channels, we launched our landing page with more information about the community and concept and drove each visitor to “sign up” for more information.
- Announced events calendar. A week and a half before launch, we announced our event lineup. Our goal was to build anticipation and sign-ups to drive foot traffic starting the moment we opened the doors.
Post-launch we heavily relied on the organic influence of our highly engaged community, partners and influencers, to drive conversation by reliving their favorite moments and experiences from Her.HQ and sharing on their owned channels.
Events & Programming
Our goal with our events was to bring awareness and interest to Her.HQ. We held between four to eight events per month centered on health & wellness, creative exploration and career advancement. We utilized Instagram Stories, polls, surveys, and conversations with the community to better understand the type of events and content they wanted to see.
We partnered with countless of incredible small businesses from our community as well as national brands like Adidas, Lululemon, Bumble, Stella & Dot, Follain Beauty, and Tanya Taylor to host custom events and brand experiences that resonated with today’s woman.
Events & Programming
In August 2019, with the help and investment from Common Desk, we announced our new home base in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, TX. With the funding we secured, we made updates to the 6K square foot space that was previously occupied by Common Desk.
The new Her.HQ was officially open for business on October 21, 2019. The space offered a flood of natural light and plenty of open-air. Members had access to bookable conference rooms, private offices, unlimited coffee & tea, a mezzanine lounge, washrooms, and a wellness room stocked with clean beauty products and other amenities.
Marketing Approach
Leading up to launch, while the space was undergoing construction, we continued to activate with light events to keep the momentum going. We also decided to make updates to our branding, website and create an eye-catching new member package to complement the new experience.
Similarly to our pop-up marketing strategy, we continued to rely on our dedicated community to drive authentic conversations about Her.HQ. We then shared UGC content across our channels to create a central hub for community-building.
Her.HQ launched at 8% capacity with an application waitlist of over 60 people. In just a month after launch, we saw an 88% increase in memberships.
Photos From Her.HQ
2020 was off to a great start and business was doing better than we could have ever imagined – our membership was growing month-over-month and we were on track to exceed our projections. This meant hiring our first Her.HQ team member was just around the corner. Our events calendar was fully booked for the next few months with member programming and private events. We were even in the early discussions with Common Desk about our second Dallas location. But then a little thing called COVID came rearing its ugly head and like the rest of the world, our business
came to a screeching halt as we moved into uncharted territory. Being a team of two, we were scrappy and quickly pivoted all of our planned in-person programming to Zoom, we wanted to give our members and community a place to connect, share, and feel a sense of “normalcy” among the chaos, fear, and uncertainty that we were all collectively experiencing. In April 2020, we launched an IFundWomen crowd-funding campaign to help raise the funds needed to stay open. However, after reopening in June, it quickly became apparent things were not going back to “normal” anytime soon. In August 2020, after evaluating the situation and our options, Cassi and I made the incredibly tough decision to permanently close Her.HQ.
Our Community
At the end of September, we made the internal announcement to our members and followed by our public statement a few weeks later. Below is a look back at our community stats at the time of closing.
Friday, October 16 was a lovely day – one of those quintessential fall days where a light sweater and jeans would do. We started the morning with Britten LaRue – our in-house astrologer hosting our monthly New Moon Morning series in person while I captured the session over IG Live for all of our followers. For the rest of the day a group of dear friends and Her.HQ members spent the day sitting at the community table in the front of the space binging on Topo Chicos – sharing stories, laughs, and ugly cries as we reminisced on the journey, people, and memories. At 7PM, we cleaned up and walked out together. This was the day I said goodbye to 633 W. Davis Street and closed the doors to our beautiful space for good.
Key Takeaways
Purpose Driven
With users being increasingly choosy and decisive about what they follow and consumed, we made it a point to understand what did or didn’t work and pivot to ensure our marketing efforts were crafted around meaning, not frequency. Growing our community through intentional partnerships, collaborations, inspirational messaging, and visually pleasing aesthetics.
Authentic Engagement
The quality of engagement within our community was extremely important for our growth. Understanding and implementing what our members wanted to see from us and keep our growing audience happy by delivering value in the membership, workspace, and community was what allowed us to continuously scale.
A Safe Space
From the moment we launched, the need and desire for a positive and safe community was apparent. We created a space for people to gather and feel accepted, validated, make friends and meet others’ they might never have met otherwise – giving users a meaningful reason to be a part of Her.HQ.
Learnings & Reflections
If I could do it all over again, I would do it in a heartbeat. Naturally, there’s a handful of things I would have perhaps approached differently but hey, that’s life and what would life be if we didn’t have failures to learn and grow from. I learned how resilient, resourceful, motivated and persistent I am. I saw firsthand the power and value of a collective community for support, love, personal spiritual growth and social transformation.
As for our initial problem of wanting to “create a space to form authentic connections and friendships with other like-minded women” that we set out to solve in the beginning? I now have an overabundance of wonderful humans I can call in case of an emergency, so I’d say yes – we succeeded.
I am filled with so much gratitude and appreciation first and foremost for Cassi, my partner in all of this, also Nick Clark, my family, my husband, my in-laws, Andrew O. and Mr. & Mrs. Oesterling. I’d also love to thank Vanessa A., Chad, Darcey, Jeff, Alex, Madison D., Yesi & Josh, Alaethea H. & McKenzie N. and the rest of the CD team, Matt A., Brie M., Minji, Jahee, Madeline C., Amber, Kara S., Lily K., Jordan P., Taylor M., Tori, Mariel, Candice B., Fallon, Ayo, Alex W., Carolina M., Jennifer A., Giselle, Andrea, Lauren H., Victoria B., Eunice, Carla, Claudia, Katie E., Tori B., Courtney N., Audrey Z., Haley, Britten, Jaleesa, Carolee, Kelsey L., Caitlin C., Amanda P., Becca, Brittani, Kirsten O., Ariel R., Jasmin E., Katelyn M., Bethany H., Meggie A., Kelly B., Victoria E., Lacey, and ALL the wonderful humans, business, and brands, that supported us unconditionally and made this once-in-a-lifetime experience possible. 💖
