No “Seats at Shitty Tables”: Sick of the System, Two Business Founders Are Building a New Model for Women

Tracey Warren’s idea for F5 Collective didn’t begin with a pitch deck. It started from deep frustration. “Working across financial markets, we kept seeing the same story repeated: women are building these brilliant businesses, they’ve got great traction, yet they’re just absolutely excluded from the funding conversation,” she says.

That frustration laid the foundations, but it wasn’t until Bree Kirkham came on board as COO and partner that F5 Collective began to evolve into something much bigger than just another venture capital (VC) fund.

“Most women aren’t building SaaS [software as a service] businesses; they’re building product-based businesses,” Kirkham explains. “Around 70 per cent of women-led ventures are in consumer – beauty, wellness, fashion, lifestyle. These are real businesses with revenue, with loyal customers … and so instead of retrofitting a traditional VC model, we are creating something entirely different.”

F5 Collective offers what the pair describes as a “capital meets commerce” model. It pairs access to funding with infrastructure that female entrepreneurs need to grow and scale a small business, including marketing support and expert help. Kirkham and Warren emphasise that funding alone isn’t enough.

“Women don’t need more mentorship circles. They don’t need a seat at a really shitty table. We need to build more tables,” Warren says. “They need money, they need infrastructure, and they need to be seen as economic powerhouses.”

“So, we’ve built a new model … we’re not just a funder … we’ve really become an ecosystem. What we’ve decided is we’re not going to patch a broken system. We’re actually going to rebuild a system for women by women. And what does that mean? It’s creating a capital structure and products that match the businesses that women are actually building.”

At the heart of F5’s approach is addressing a long-standing structural misalignment. Warren explains how most financial products, whether from banks or alternative lenders, still rely on outdated credit systems.

“Women are building consumer-based businesses and product-based businesses, they thrive on credit and debt-style products. They thrive on inventory financing, revenue-based financing, lines of credit,” she says. “But those traditional credit models were literally designed with industrial-era thinking, and they have not evolved since.

“There is no way for these credit scoring systems to actually measure the types of businesses women build, where they build loyalty and legacy customers. They have culture and brand. They build communities. There is no way for these credit models to actually measure that,” Warren says.

The F5 ecosystem includes a marketplace to help drive revenue and shopper pathways because, as Warren puts it, “the only validation that ever matters is revenue and paying customers”. The launch brands that will be featured in the F5 Marketplace include Nat Sui, Le Sept, Palma and Fearless Swimwear.

This marketplace also gives the F5 Collective team access to real-time performance data, something most investors don’t have. “We have visibility into these brands’ performance, including sales volume, click-throughs, and other key metrics for us to see how the consumer is responding to the brand, and the volume of sales … to ascertain which are the brands that we should double down on and invest in,” Kirkham says.

The long-term goal for F5 Collective is creating generational change for women through economic empowerment and ownership. To that end, the pair has also established the F5 Foundation, which will channel 10 per cent of all earnings directly into grant funding that gives women in underserved regions the tools, capital and agency to build wealth and lead create lasting change for themselves and their communities.

“Hopefully, we’re going to help women build empires, sell, come back in and reinvest in the next generation of women,” says Warren. “Cultural capital is also going to matter just as much as financial capital, and so grants that really connect on an emotional, ethical, social level are going to start to lead. This is what women do like no one else – this is women’s superpower.”

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with F5 Collective. La Femme, F5’s first activation, blends shopping with storytelling, design and innovation to put the spotlight on the next breakout women-owned brands. It takes place on November 13 in Melbourne – get more details here.