“We have to convert misogynists. Misogyny is our new market.”
“We’re not one of our competitors that’s just trying to hook people up,” says Whitney Wolfe Herd, the 30-year-old CEO of Bumble, the online dating platform where women have to initiate potential interest. “We’re trying to say, ‘Let’s change thousands of years of behavior. Globally.’ Do you see why this is so challenging?”It’s an early afternoon in late May, and Wolfe Herd is in the posh ski village of Deer Valley, Utah, for Bumble’s annual retreat.
Tinder had a large head start on Bumble, and as Wolfe Herd is discovering, there may just be more people who want an easy-to-use dating app than want to topple the patriarchy. That’s why this year’s company retreat is much more of a working one than the celebratory atmosphere that characterized 2018’s event. Wolfe Herd admits onstage to her team that she’s frustrated that Bumble’s early “gangbuster growth” has “mellowed out.
Bumble’s success thus far is primarily due to Wolfe Herd’s savvy stewardship of the brand, which takes its pro-female message and wraps it in bright, upbeat packaging. Branding is both her superpower and a luxury: Bumble’s London-based engineering resources are a structural difference that have helped the company grow faster than it otherwise might have on its own, just as Tinder has benefited from being part of Match Group.
Bumble’s culture is reinforced by the many friends and former sorority sisters that Wolfe Herd recruited to the company, including head of brand Alex Williamson, VP of marketing Chelsea Cain Maclin, chief creative marketing officer Samantha Fulgham, and chief of staff Caroline Ellis Roche. This core group worked feverishly to get Bumble off the ground in 2014. “We were spending pretty much every waking minute together,” says Ellis Roche. “We would sleep over at Whitney’s house.
“The last thing we wanted to do was come in and say, ‘We’re this Western brand, we are all about empowering women and ending misogyny. And hey, women of India, we have a solution for you,’ ” says Priti Joshi, Bumble’s global director of strategy, who joined Bumble last year after several years at McKinsey.
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