Raya lives in the south end and spends what free time she has wandering around on foot, cooking, listening to podcasts and filling it with side projects.
In her working life she is the project/account manager at local design studio Civilization. She was previously an arts administrative professional with roles at local organizations: KEXP, The Vera Project and 4Culture. She is currently serving as board president of Northwest Film Forum.
Alison loves riding her bicycle around Seattle, listening to obscure feminist punk bands, and searching for the world’s best slice of pizza. She is an occasional creative nonfiction writer.
At work, Alison is a self-taught front end developer. Her first website was an ode to her love for Harry Potter at age 12. Now, she devotes her internet skills to building websites that are accessible to people of all abilities and income levels. The possibilities of the internet are beautiful and endless—but only if everyone can access the content
The two of us have developed our own practices of conscious consumerism, and one element we both choose to prioritize is supporting businesses owned by womxn. Pending the downfall of capitalism, this feels like a worthwhile endeavor!
Unfortunately, existing resources we’ve encountered are limited, outdated, or difficult to use. To fill that gap, we combined forces to create WMN OWN: an interactive local guide. This is not a final product, it’s a starting place, and we hope to see this grow and evolve in the future.
The typefaces on the website are Montserrat designed by Julieta Ulanovsky, and Fredoka One designed by Milena Brandão.
The use of an “x” in the word “woman” is, for us, a way to indicate that we are encompassing a broader spectrum of gender identity and expression, rather than simply one half of a dichotomy. Our directory is open to indexing businesses owned by all femme and female-identifying people!
Our goal is to help people make the everyday choice to support a womxn-owned business, so for now, we’re only including retail and food/drink. Eventually, we’d love to have artists, services (accounting, consulting, office share, beauty) and more!
We are adopting the City of Seattle’s definition, that a womxn-owned business is at least 51% owned by female-identified people.
It’s a difficult thing to verify! Short of setting up our own certification process, we’re left with the imperfect task of doing our best with the information available to us.
We rely on a variety of sources—our own firsthand knowledge, that of those around us (including you!), lists developed and published in media, as well as a few of the resources below:
We started from our own knowledge, knowledge from each of our communities and the Washington State Office of Minority and Business Enterprise Certified List.
Inevitably, there will be many businesses we have missed and new ones opening. Drop us a line below if you have something to add, we plan to keep this growing!
We stand in solidarity with all marginalized communities! However, our resource was specifically developed to direct traffic to businesses owned by womxn and especially womxn of color, because we couldn’t find anything better out there.
GSBA is a wonderful resource for LGBTQ businesses.
By taking on a task like this we are putting ourselves in a position to make assumptions about people’s identities, we recognize and own that risk.
If we have misidentified or misgendered you or your business please send us a note below and we will edit or remove your listing accordingly.
If you would like to suggest a listing, request removal, submit a correction or connect with us, drop a line below!