West Tenth Creates Marketplace For Home-Based Skills

According to Census Bureau data, some 17 percent of women opt out of the workplace permanently within five years of having children, while close to 50 percent step away for a significant time period of a year or more. Other data demonstrates that women who step away for a significant time period are three times more likely to return to a lower-paid or lower-responsibility role than those who do not take a break.

And it’s not a problem that is improving. In fact, under the pressure from COVID-19, it is an issue that is arguably getting worse. Since the onset of the pandemic, 400,000 more women than men have left the workforce, according to reports.  And forecasts by  McKinsey and Oxford Economics estimate that employment for women may not recover to pre-pandemic levels until 2024, while full recovery for men is predicted for 2022.

“Women are financially vulnerable in the United States. The gender wealth gap is such that women only have 32 cents to every dollar in financial assets men have,” West Tenth Founder and CEO Lyn Johnson told PYMNTS in a recent conversation. “One of the big reasons for the wealth gap is that women step away from the workforce. And there are so many economic benefits tied to employment, Social Security, retirement, et cetera, that they lose access to.”

And in trying to figure out how she might set about working to solve that problem, she discovered a curious asymmetry in the market. There is actually a world of women who had left the workforce who went on to spend years outside of a traditional employment environment becoming experts in the areas of home and family management. Skills that families like hers actually desperately needed access to given that both she and her spouse stayed in the full-time workforce and found themselves thus starved.

And from that observation, she said, the idea for the West Tenth marketplace was formed — to create a space where women could monetize their myriad domestic skills — mostly selling to a buyer base of dual-income households “who have some disposable income and no disposable time.”

Focusing On Momtrepreneurs

Describing the platform as something like a mash-up of Thumbtack, Etsy and Angi with a particular focus on the softer side of domestic life and the variety of super-micro businesses women all over the nation are founding. And there is, Johnson said, a lot of variety. While the platform started with a focus on the home bakers who had evolved their skills from the run-of-the-mill brownies for the bake sales to cakes and cookies as works of art — West Tenth quickly found that there were a lot of momtrepreneurs out there with a variety of ideas. Home organizers, hair and make-up artists, decorators, eco-consultants, florists, baby sleep consultants — in its short time in business West Tenth has rapidly learned there is a large and underserved segment out there of super-small, small- to midsize businesses (SMBs) in desperate need of exposure to a wider market.

“We’ve been blown away quite frankly by the variety of businesses that are started in the home,” Johnson said. “We knew that there was a lot that we didn’t know, but we’ve been blown away by how much we didn’t know. This is a demographic that no one serves well yet because these firms are so small. They can’t be found on Amazon. They can’t be found on Google. They can’t be found on Yelp. That’s so micro, the only place you can find them is through a recommendation or in a social media group.”

That means customers miss out on knowing the full extreme of economic activity around them happening in homes. West Tenth, she said, was founded to start filling that voice — and giving female entrepreneurs a way to monetize their hard-won domestic skills in a market that needs them. And help them grow those firms as well, West Tenth has just launched its subscription program, the Foundry, for its members. The $40 a month program, she said, gives consumers access to take classes from other entrepreneurs on social media, bookkeeping,  media campaigns, photography — the host of things the SMB owners want to learn, but that actual legitimate educational resources can be hard to unearth. These folks, she said, are vulnerable to multi-level marketing (MLM) companies that try to use “coaching” as a tool to lure them in or expensive coaching programs that don’t have much to offer in the way of actionable information.

“We arrived on it because we just wanted something that was really affordable for people and a new way to be part of the community and to access all of that collective business knowledge,” Johnson said.

And expansion, on the whole, she said, is the firm’s goal immediately going forward. Just off a $1.5 million seed funding round — that will enable the firm to formally market itself for the first time, the goal as they look toward the horizon is growing the firm. Available today in Southern California and the Greater Salt Lake City region in Utah, she said by the end of the year, they would like to be throughout the Intermountain West and also move into San Francisco and Northern California.

The firm also aspires, she said, to have completed its Series A round by the end of 2021.

Because she noted, there is a hole in the market: People with useful monetizable skills who aren’t able to monetize them because in a world full of eCommerce platforms, none were quite designed for them. Or at least they weren’t before, but West Tenth hopes it can be the first.

“We think we can start changing the way that we look at skills developed in the home and transition from seeing them as hobbies to actually marketable skill sets that women have developed,” Johnson said. “And we can monetize that and find a way to ease the burdens of countless families on the other side.”