Thank you to Emma Style, founder and CEO of Killing Kittens, for sharing her article in today’s blog.

When I started Killingkittens.com 13 years ago, I wanted to create a brand that stood for women and what they wanted. Greater awareness of female sexuality and sexual freedom was slowly becoming more socially and commercially acceptable. Yet, there was still a long way to go in an industry that claimed to be for women, but run almost exclusively by men. I knew that to empower women sexually, it had to be with a business that put them first.

You can’t build a successful business without a passion for what you do and a team who believes in it just as much as you do. You need to have fire in your belly to take on an industry that is almost universally run by men, like the adult and ‘sex-tech’ industries. Unfortunately, there is still a huge amount of bias and misconceptions to address. Despite this, I have never once doubted my belief to lead the business and keep pushing the boundaries. It is true, sadly, that sexual discrimination is still alive and kicking in many sectors, across all levels. Many women struggle to be treated with the respect they deserve. I have learnt that the best way to deal with the negativity is to stick to the facts and stick to the evidence. Always track your achievements, demonstrate your successes and let the facts and figures do the talking.

From just a few initial members of around 80 people, Killing Kittens now has a 100,000 strong membership. It has evolved as a community that brings fun, sexual adventure and freedom to thousands of women, men and couples, without fear of admonishment. Before the days of social media, we relied simply on word-of-mouth recommendation to grow our community. Whilst we have inevitably evolved with the digital era, it is still that sense of belonging to a community that has helped fuel our success today.

Our members are everything to us and we make sure we listen to what they want and use their feedback to drive us forward. For example, we are planning to expand the educational side of our business with workshops and couples retreats. Our research told us there is a huge interest from our community for these types of services.

The passion my staff share for the business is the reason why we’re still working successfully together after many years. The business is a blend of traditional office-based and remote set-up that lets my team work how they need to, when they need to. For the women I employ, it means they have more flexibility than a traditional 9-5 set-up. This has given many of them the opportunity to work and bring up their families, a task that still often falls almost exclusively to women.

I believe in letting my staff have a long lead to work as flexibly as they want, whilst being able to pull the lead in if l need to. Sometimes I do have to push hard on deadlines and availability, simply because of the global nature of our events. Only half of our events are held in the UK, the rest are across the US, Australia and Europe.

My team are like a group of gladiators who work incredibly hard to bring our events together, create new services and support community. They believe in what they do and we have first-hand customer feedback that confirms that, for many women (and men!) we have helped transform their lives. It’s a powerful driver for us, seeing the transformation at the other end of everything we work so hard at. Our latest challenge is to secure funding to help build on the digital side of the business, accounting now for over 50% of our revenue. We use our brand to diversify into more life-style services and apps that reflect the way people find and connect with others in the community.

Empowerment in the workplace means not putting people in ‘a box’. This includes not stereotyping by gender and getting hung up on traits that we assign to men or women. Women don’t need to be ‘more like men’ to succeed, for example. You just need to play to your strengths and have that inner self-belief.

True empowerment is about letting people have the opportunity to think for themselves and explore new ideas and concepts without worrying about set-backs and failures. In my experience, women can sometimes doubt themselves a bit too much. Ask yourself, what’s the worst that can happen? If you can handle the consequence, you should go for it. Failure isn’t black and white: the best will come from the knock-backs that you’ve recovered from along the way and experience is what makes you stronger; I had 13 solid years of experience of living and breathing Killing Kittens when we recently secured investment to continue our digital growth. Nothing gives investors more confidence than knowing you’ve seen it all and weathered a few storms along the way.

Killing Kittens is at the forefront of a really exciting industry that is becoming respected in its own right, something I’m very proud to be part of.

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