I’ve been working on TaskHer for around 3 years now. I was working in marketing for an events company when I was made redundant whilst on maternity leave with my first child when I came up with the idea and started looking into the world of women in trade.
The gender imbalance in the trades industry and the impact that current social norms have on the lifestyle of women shocked us so much that we knew we needed to use our skills to help change the landscape.
My husband and I put together an idea for the TaskHer platform and approached an institutional investor Bethnal Green Ventures, who offer a startup accelerator programme with some investment capital. We used the investment to create our prototype booking platform and our brand as well as supporting our tradeswomen research and some marketing spend.
Our plan has always been to offer the TaskHer booking platform for free to tradeswomen. They receive confirmed bookings from customers who are actively looking for a female tradesperson and receive fair hourly rates to help them build their businesses.
From there we were able to launch an MVP version of the TaskHer booking platform and started live testing with real bookings. We started building a community of tradeswomen, initially seeking them out manually on social media platforms or directories. We offered them free workshops including legal advice and insurance advice, as well as partnership offers and discounts with trade brands. Our tradeswomen community is a huge asset and something that sets us apart from other players in the trades industry.
We closed our pre-seed round in December 2023 having raised c. £500k investment from a mixture of institutional investors and angels and have been using the investment to grow our bookings and support women in trade.
Since our launch in 2022, we have taken over 1900+ bookings and onboarded 50+ tradeswomen in London, offering three trades (electricians, plumbers and heating engineers). We hope to expand to other major UK cities and to increase our trade offering (we will be offering painting and decorating in the near future). ]
In November 2023 I won the Fiverr x Virgin Start-Up Female Founder competition and won £15,000 worth of Fiverr credits, enabling us to experiment with using AI to support our online booking process.
We’ve been shortlisted for both the Startup Awards, The Seedlegals Startup Awards, Great British Entrepreneur Awards, Impact Shakers European Startup Awards and CogX Awards.
We won the Impact Shakers European Startup Award for Gender Equality.
In April 2024 we were approached by advertising giant MOTHER to create a campaign for National Decorating Month in partnership with them. Our campaign highlighted the issues women in trade face on a daily basis.
We are currently working with a South London council on a plan to bring tradeswomen into local secondary schools during careers week to showcase what a lucrative and flexible career the trades offer, especially for school-leaving girls who are often filtered into lower-paying work like childcare/hairdressing if they don’t plan to go on to university. We are also working to support schools in communicating with parents who currently create a high barrier to their children entering the trades, deeming it not a successful career path.
On the contrary, girls leaving school to go into more traditionally ‘female’ roles stand to lose around three-quarters of a million pounds in lifetime earnings compared to their male peers entering skilled manual trades.
