Brands made by women get a ‘digital aisle’ of their own at Ocado

Ocado is pushing to promote products made by women, featuring a “digital aisle” grouping together more than 1,000 products exclusively made by female entrepreneurs.
Customers who click on “Buy Women Built” (BWB) banners peppered across Ocado’s app and website, or click on the “Inspire Me” tab, will be shown products made by women-founded businesses only, as part of a move to help boost the UK’s low levels of female entrepreneurship.
The move follows campaigns among retailers to “Buy British” and “Buy Black”. with Ocado collating 130 female-founded brands — including established names such as Little Moons ice cream and Biotiful cereals, alongside start-ups All Dressed Up sauces and the cashew nut butter-maker Mergulo — in a “shop within a shop”.
BWB is a campaign group set up by Coffee Republic founder Sahar Hashemi to boost sales at female-founded firms. Hashemi convinced Ocado to launch the initiative in a bid to push up the brands’ revenues and inspire would-be female entrepreneurs. Currently, men are three times more likely to start a business than women, while only 11p out of every £1 invested by UK venture capital goes to women founders.
The women-run brands — some of which are new to Ocado — bring in annual retail sales worth more than £1 billion.
Ocado Retail’s chief executive, Hannah Gibson, said the aisle for female-founded businesses, which launches tomorrow, will feature a photo of each brand’s founder and the business story. “When you read them, you can’t help but be inspired by what they’re doing — the risks taken and personal toll of building a brand,” Gibson said.
“There are far fewer women entrepreneurs out there and we want to support that community.”
US retail giants Target and Walmart have also flagged “women-owned brands” for shoppers, although critics have suggested such moves could be condescending for female founders.
“This isn’t patronising — it’s signposting,” Hashemi said. “Female entrepreneurship rates in the UK are 30 per cent behind other developed countries. Confidence is a huge issue — women don’t feel they’ve got what it takes. Showing people that so many brands are in fact created by women leads more female entrepreneurs to think, ‘We can do this.’ It’s a way to make future generations see the power of women.”
Growing up in northern France, in a family of potato farmers, Emilie Vanpoperinghe’s overriding thought when she moved to London in 2009 was “feeling amazed that I could get all fruit and vegetables year-round, but really disappointed by the taste”.
Then, on a holiday in Portugal, she bought tomatoes that looked ugly but tasted delicious. “I started to look at the UK food supply chain, and learnt about supermarkets’ tight specifications on how vegetables should look, to the detriment of taste. It meant 40 per cent of vegetables were going to waste at farm level.”
Vanpoperinghe was finance director of an equality charity at the time, but as weekend side hustle, she recruited her husband Deepak Ravindran to sell Oddbox — cartons of wonky or surplus fruit and vegetables — direct to people’s homes. It started in 2016, delivering to 20 neighbours in Balham, south London.
“The first two years were very slow, but when people couldn’t find a supermarket slot during Covid, they turned to us.” Sales grew from £3 million before the pandemic, to £18 million by the end of 2020. They now hover around £30 million.
Oddbox’s new listing on Ocado via the Buy Women Built scheme takes it full circle — onto the shelves of supermarkets that had rejected its products before. “We’re now starting discussions with other supermarkets,” Vanpoperinghe, 44, added. “Consumers want to support more diverse businesses, and know there’s a bias against women entrepreneurs.
“I see it myself, at investor meetings, I’ve had all the questions from investors being addressed to my husband, despite the fact that I am the CEO. “But there’s a willingness from consumers to support women-led businesses. I am excited to see it play out.”
“You don’t,” said entrepreneur Julie Chen, “find a lot of female founders in the toilet paper industry”. But Chen was inspired to launch her bamboo loo roll business, The Cheeky Panda, after seeing the grass used across toilets in China, where she grew up. During one trip back to visit her parents in 2015, she drove six hours from the city of Chongqing to a remote manufacturer, where she learnt that “unlike with trees, the more bamboo that was harvested, the more it regenerated — it was so sustainable.”
The Cheeky Panda was the result. Initially launched via a £12,500 crowdfunding to buy a first container of loo roll, the firm is on target to sell £17 million worth of wipes and tissues, as well as toilet roll, this year.
In the nine years since launching her business, which Chen’s husband Chris Forbes now runs with her, she said: “I haven’t met many other women. Toilet paper companies are dominated by giant, multibillion-pound corporates that are cutting down trees. But bringing female thinking into our products has been really important for our growth.
“As a woman, I think more about certain details and I think women buyers do, too,” added Chen, 43. “Supermarket own-brand toilet paper, for example, brings a lot of dust into homes, but ours, being 100 per cent bamboo, has no dust. That also makes it more gentle on skin, which is something we talk about. [Male-run] companies don’t notice this.”
Chen often meets investors and shoppers wearing her trademark cuddly panda hat; The Cheeky Panda likes to stand out. It certainly does so in Ocado’s food-dominated aisle of female-founded brands. “Female founders are an ultra-talented, smart group, but have gone unnoticed and under-represented for too long,” Chen said. “This is an opportunity to raise our profile.”
Buy Women Built says 98 per cent of female entrepreneurs build a product to solve a problem they’ve encountered in their life — exactly as Elizabeth Jones did. The founder of Real Good Ketchup noticed, while making many kids’ dinners for her son and his friends, that table sauces contained high levels of sugar and salt.
“We also have a lot of allergies in our house — to nuts, fish, strawberries and more — and I felt afraid as a parent to serve barbecue sauce and ketchup where I didn’t know if it was going to trigger a reaction. Then I thought: ‘I can fix this problem.’ ”
That was 2016, and Jones worked with a chef and a testing laboratory for 18 months, creating 27 variations of ketchup. “We started off with a base recipe, then we would get nutritional tests done in the laboratory to ensure low salt with no added sugar, whilst retaining flavour. But the ketchup still had to be the right red colour and the right consistency — a blob had to stick to the end of the chip. It had to be what children expected from ketchup.”
One summer involved a lot barbecues. “I invited schoolchildren and their parents for endless burgers and chips with our ketchup,” Jones recalled — “until we hit a barbecue where 80 per cent of the guests either didn’t notice the ketchup or said it was nice. I knew then that I had a winning recipe.”
Jones has focused on attracting school caterers to use her healthier sauce, and it is now served to 255,000 children at school dinner times. Ocado is the first online stockist for this Hampshire-based business — a big move for Jones, who has invested £400,000 in her brand.
“A lot of our customers are mums,” she explained. “Whenever we do any sampling and they realise I’m the founder, they say they are more keen to purchase. So I hope [the women-founder aisle] makes a difference. Women support women.”
Abi Cleeve also solved her own problem — this time, overseas. “I’m a burner. Every holiday I would get sunburnt, and suncream gave me prickly heat.”
During a holiday in Switzerland with her family in 1997, she “hadn’t expected it to be hot, and had to go to a little pharmacy to buy suncream”. She bought a bottle called Ultrasun: “It was amazing — it lasted all day and I didn’t burn.”
Back home, she tried and failed to find the brand. “Eventually, I phoned international directory inquiries — there was no internet then — and got through to Ultrasun’s inventor, [Swiss chemist] Tazio Tettamanti. We chatted for a long time until he said: ‘I think you’re more passionate about this than me — I think you should start it in the UK.’ ”
At the time, Cleeve was on a management scheme at Marks & Spencer. “It felt crazy, but I quit my job and spent two years in Switzerland to study Ultrasun.” She then returned to the UK, “bought the entire set of Yellow Pages — there was still no Google — and called every pharmacy in Britain to tell them about this amazing sun protection product.”
Today Ultrasun is sold in M&S, Boots, Superdrug and more, with a £25 million turnover. But for Cleeve, the Ocado move is more about representation than profit. “It means that my daughter and girls all over the world are seeing more role models. It’s like Black Lives Matter elevating people of colour so they can be seen. We are showing my daughter’s generation that it’s normal for women to be entrepreneurs. If you can see it, you can be it.
“I hope one day this is all unnecessary — that it’s taken for granted that everybody has the same access to investment and there are no more barriers to becoming an entrepreneur.
“But for now, women have to support each other and make a noise.”
Her career started in the deeply unglamorous setting of NHS foot clinics, but Margaret Dabbs has since hit the heights. The celebrity podiatrist (Jessica Alba and Emma Willis are fans) was one of the first to create the “medi pedi” to fix problematic feet while also making them look pretty. She now has 12 UK clinics and three in the Middle East and Spain, sells her foot products in 38 countries and generates a £15 million turnover.
“There was nothing aspirational about pharmaceutical brands when I started,” said Dabbs, 59.
She launched her business 15 years ago, opening a clinic in Marylebone, central London, and then she “messed around making products in pots before launching them a year later.
“Back then, there wasn’t a category for foot products; before I came along, no one included feet in ‘getting summer ready’ or ‘party prep’, like now,” she said. “I fused beauty and medicine to make problem-solving products that people love using.
“But I am still often underestimated. I took my team out to celebrate winning an award, and was standing next to my accountant — a young guy — when a woman came up to me and said, ‘Is he your boss?’
“She was embarrassed when I explained, [because] she knew and used my products. But people still seem to expect the man to be in charge. In beauty, there are still so many brands with entirely male boards, even though they are usually not the consumer.”
Dabbs, who includes the appeal for customers to “Buy Women Built” on her packaging, hopes Ocado’s move boosts the morale of female founders. “Being part of a community makes us so much stronger. Collectively, women entrepreneurs are a powerhouse and feed off each other’s confidence — success breeds success.”