From Competition to Community – Creating a Business in the Feminine Model by Lucy H. Pearce

I was standing in a supermarket car park, packing my groceries into the car when I had a light bulb moment.

It was the sort of moment where it feels like the sun has come out from behind the clouds and the birds are about to start dancing around my head with ribbons a la Cinderella.

I had been working from a city coffee shop for a couple of hours whilst I waited for my child who is struggling with school right now. This was followed by a harried grocery shop around the aisles laden down with Christmas produce.

Whilst I was waiting in the queue at the supermarket, I was reading through and responding to woman after woman who had reached out to me with such beautiful words of recognition and support for my vulnerable sharing about what I have learned and struggled with personally running Womancraft for the last decade. 

To anyone in that supermarket I was just a middle-aged woman doing her shopping. They didn’t know I was at that moment also running my successful publishing business and weaving community.

And I just thought: can you imagine Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk doing this?

This is a very different way of doing business to the model we are taught. The one that requires office presenteeism, leaving your emotions and needs at the door, prioritizing work over family, businesses built on anonymous customers and all-powerful power-dressing bosses. Can you imagine Bill or Mark or Elon sending out a vulnerable personal email that acknowledged the gifts of their partner at the heart of their business? (Unless they were trying to avoid divorce proceedings after an extra-marital affair!) One that acknowledged their own many flaws and failures. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine them making their schedule mobile so they can nurture and support their families?

These men are officially the titans of business. They are the models of what business success looks like in this late patriarchal capitalist world. They are what we are taught to look up to and emulate: leave your feelings at the door, business is heart-less and driven by the head.

And then there is this other model that we are nurturing together.

“Womancraft Publishing was founded on the revolutionary vision that women and words can change the world. We act as midwife to transformational women’s words that have the power to challenge, inspire, heal and speak to the silenced aspects of ourselves. We share powerful new voices with new visionary ideas, empowering our readers to actively co-create cultures that value and support the female and feminine. This to us is deeply exciting and powerful work.”

This model of collaboration, community, support, mutual learning, sustainability and celebration. Several of the women who sent messages cheering us on were what the old model would class as “competitors”. Other people in the publishing industry, publishing in similar genres. Other authors. Competing officially for the same wallets and eyes and us. But no, there they were cheering us on, just as I do for their work.

I am so heartened by this sisterhood. Women cheering on women. Women witnessing and celebrating other women in their wholeness, not just their superficial successes. We know that the richer the ecosystem is, the more diverse it is, the more great stuff will be created, the more the big work will be done between all of us. The work that matters most, that never appears on any balance sheet. That it doesn’t just require one or other of us to be Master of the Universe and win at the game of capitalism. (And how exactly do you do that anyway?)

The new way is about collaboration, cooperation, not competition. It’s about – as we share in our new Compendium, Weaving Our Way Beyond Patriarchy, weaving resilient communities. As I said in the introduction:

“The reclaiming of the power of the metaphor and literal act of weaving has been an ongoing project for women artists, writers and thinkers throughout the twentieth and into the twenty first centuries. A reclaiming of this skill, this ancestral lineage. “Across the world from culture to culture, century to century, weaving was – is – both a practical and a spiritual, as well as a creative activity.” Jennifer Higgie, The Other Side: a journey into women, art and the spirit world. […]

“I ask us all to reflect: what do we mean when we say “change the world”? What do you mean? This big, vague promise was used to inspire and mobilize people in the twentieth century when it was the rallying cry from hippies and despots. The question for us now in the twenty-first century, as we witness the death throes of patriarchy, is not how we can change the world, as a massive action, by force of will, at some unappointed time in the future…this is the endless lie of governments, reformers and rebels. No, the question is how can we live well now? How can we embody our beliefs and values more completely each day? How can we create community here, with the people to hand? Rather than decry or ignore those many different folks we share our geographical communities with, wishing for the ideal, like-minded folk we would cherry pick for the utopian community we dream of. How can we create now? What will we create? Who with? This is not to say that we don’t consider our greater environmental and political impact, that we don’t think of the future – we should and we must – it is something patriarchal culture has been remiss at. But most of all we must think – and feel – broader, wider, deeper, wiser, always paying attention to the larger pattern, both warp and weft. We must keep on weaving: whilst there is breath in our bodies, the sun in the sky, there is hope. Let us weave it through our lives and communities…creating beautiful new patterns in the cloth to keep us warm on cold nights and to lie on the sun together on summers’ afternoons. Creativity, community and hope will take us far, whatever the fates bring. These should be what we return to. These are what we must practice: creativity, community, hope.”

When I was working with a woman on marketing strategy for how to celebrate our first ten years of Womancraft Publishing, she reflected back to me that most of what I talked about when she asked me what Womancraft was and what we did, was community – not business, not books. That is our priority – books are a tool, for passing on knowledge and wisdom, they are portals, they are how we earn our living, but the bigger picture for us always has been community – giving back financially to many charities, creating free book clubs and community events, gifting books to those in need, collaborating in innovative initiatives such as the Divine Feminine app and the visionary Ninth Wave newsletter of women and women-led businesses combining their shared leverage to uplift each other, rather than compete. Focusing on new ways of women collaborating, cross-pollinating, sharing each other’s work and lifting each other up, rather than each sitting alone in our own silos trying to do it all ourselves, feeling like we’re in competition.

All this to say we are learning new ways of doing business. This does not mean I am not competitive: I am one of the most competitive people you are ever likely to meet. We have a board game night at least once a week. I’m the only woman who usually plays. I love to win. But more than that, I love to play. The strategies, the seeing what works this time…

As we are sat around a kitchen table in the evening, eating crisps and playing at capitalism or saving the world from a pandemic or mining gems or laying tiles in Portuguese cities or trading fish and tobacco for rice and sandals in Edo era Japan, our Womancraft web shop (which is connected to an app on our phones) makes a cha-ching sound, every time we make a real-time sale. Cha-ching, money in the bank. But even more important, cha-ching: another person has found us for the first time, cha-ching: another person is drawn to our new book or ecourse, cha-ching: a treasured return customer, cha-ching: a beloved superfan…Mary, Cynthia, Katia…oh look an order from Singapore, that’s unusual, I wonder how they discovered us! It is so satisfying to know that we are reaching the people who want our work, from our small business in rural Ireland, reaching out and squeezing hands with women around the world.

We are so deeply grateful for the circles of support around us and do our best to be that for our authors, artists, readers and the wider community, weaving a world beyond patriarchy, community building together.

Another way is possible. We are creating it. Together. Now

BIO: Lucy H. Pearce is the author of twelve life-changing non-fiction books, including Nautilus Award silver winners Medicine Woman, Burning Woman, and Creatrix: she who makes.  Her other titles include Amazon #1 bestsellers: Moon Time, Reaching for the Moon, The Rainbow Way and Crow Moon. Her other books include: She of the Sea, Full Circle Health, Moods of Motherhood andshe is the co-author and illustrator of The Kitchen Witch Companion. Her writing focuses on women’s healing through archetypal psychology, embodiment, historical awareness and creativity. Her work has been shared internationally in online and print media.

An award-winning graduate in History of Ideas with English Literature from Kingston University, and a teaching degree from Cambridge University, Lucy founded Womancraft Publishing in 2014, publishing paradigm-shifting books by women for women. In its first decade, Womancraft has published over fifty books by almost thirty authors around the world, including bestselling titles: Kitchen Witch, Descent & Rising, Burning Woman and Yoga for Witches

Lucy has been a passionate teacher of the creative process for over two decades, teaching in person and online. Her popular e-courses include: Get Published! (now enrolling, starts February 4^th 2025); Word +Image; Your Authentic Voice; Be Your Own Publisher; Reclaim Your Creative Magic; Peaceful Patterns; Structuring the Soul of Writing and have been taken by several thousand women around the world. Several of her classes, including her immensely popular Masterclasses are available as reply editions on womancraftpublishing.com

Lucy is the host of the popular Creative Magic podcast, where she interviews contemporary creative women about the creative process, previous guests include Toko-Pa Turner, Phyllis Curott, Sarah Robinson, Molly Remer, Danielle Dulsky and Dorrie Joy.

You can stay up to date with Lucy’s creative work and access exclusive Creative Magic content on her Patreon.

The mother of three children, Lucy lives in a small village by the Celtic Sea in East Cork, Ireland.

lucyhpearce.com 

womancraftpublishing.com