DAMEchangers Innovation Camp Review

Every great journey starts with a pivotal moment. The moment when someone crosses a threshold, from the known to the unknown, when they leave the safety of the normal world for the mystery of the extraordinary world. From ancient myth to Harry Potter, the stories we love always have a protagonist who accepts the call to adventure and steps towards the extraordinary. The Matrix would be a lot more boring if Neo never took that red pill.

At DAME we think the same can be said for creating change, at some point you’ve got to step into the unknown. For our co-founder Celia that threshold was crossed at 30 when having her first child gave her the courage to leave her job and become an entrepreneur. Celia’s own journey into the unknown has worked out pretty well. So well in fact, that this year the UK government recognised her with their Women in Innovation award. The award came with a generous £50k cash prize. We decided we wanted to spend this on helping the next generation of female leaders to step over their own thresholds.

And so DAMEchangers was born. First, we ran an online challenge to find the best female innovators aged 16-17 across the country. We set challenges to find exceptional Storytellers, Designers and Problem-solvers. The prize? A week-long innovation camp in Oxford where 20 of them would be put through their paces, learn new skills and be inspired by some of the UK’s best female entrepreneurs, leaders and creatives.

Each of the 20 girls would have had their own reasons for wanting to give up a week of their summer to join DAMEchangers, but one thing they all had in common, they all felt compelled to cross the threshold.

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Much of the week focussed on solving problems close to DAME’s heart - sustainability, gender equality, period taboos and poverty, to name a few. To give you a full picture of what we did:

Monday

From Stirling to Bournemouth and everywhere in between, the girls descended on Somerville College in Oxford to join the camp. After getting to know each other, and what we had in store for them, they were joined by the marvellous Mika Simmons, founder of The Lady Garden Foundation and host of the Happy Vagina Podcast. Mika has a book coming out on the Gender Health Gap and shocked the girls with stories of the medical world’s ignorance and neglect of the female body from the distant and not-so-distant past.

Tuesday

On Tuesday it was the girls’ time to start innovating. After an introduction to some key innovation frameworks the girls were put into teams and tasked with ‘hacking’ a problem. They were given 2 hours to solve the problem of negative periods following a process of problem framing, ideation, prototyping and refinement. In the afternoon they were given insight into the life of an NPD Manager, auditing existing period products (this invariably means tearing them apart), and exploring what it would take for a reusable period product to go mainstream amongst teens.

The day was closed by the exceptional Eshita Kabra, founder of ByRotation, who joined us to tell her story about building one of the most exciting solutions to the problem of overconsumption in fashion, despite being an outsider to both tech and fashion before she started.

Wednesday

The girls kicked off on Wednesday with a “fishbowl” debate on the environmental crisis. Essentially this was the conversation that should be had, but won’t be, at COP26 in November. Next they used their insights and skills from Tuesday to try and hack the barriers to adoption that exist for teen girls wanting to switch to reusables.

Then it was time for something completely different. One of the coolest print design studios in the world, the female-led Her Studio London, ran a special print workshop for the girls. It was time to get creative. The superhumans from Her Studio took a box of still-drying painted paper back to London and worked through the night to digitize them and turn them into professional prints. We then asked our Instagram followers which they thought would look best on a special edition pair of period pants. The winner was….drum roll....

Ruby! Check out her rad retro design below

From red paints to the red carpet, that evening we were joined by the world-famous fashion designer Emilia Wickstead. Audible gasps could be heard as Emilia told stories of dressing Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and Emma Watson, but Emilia was more interested in taking the girls back to the beginning, explaining how she built her eponymous brand from the ground up. Her main advice: just pick up the phone and ask.

Thursday

Thursday was brand and marketing day. How do you take a product or service out into the world? We asked the girls to work in teams to create a brand and marketing campaign for a positive period brand aimed at teen girls. Just when it was needed we were joined by the saintly Sisterhood who helped the girls find their inner “why” and distil it in a creative collage.

Throughout the week we made the girls pitch their ideas. We thought standing up and being comfortable in front of a room was an important skill to learn. Given how little time they had to prepare each time they had to do it, we didn’t expect much. How naive we were. Having been so used to adults doing these sorts of things we expected basic PowerPoint slides and an earnest if slightly nervous explanation of half-baked ideas. What we got was fully-branded presentations, spoken word poetry, accompanied with perfectly edited informative and humorous videos. Truly unique ideas presented with fully realised prototypes and trailers. Yikes. Who was leading whom here?

Friday

It was time for emotional goodbyes, but before that the girls all reflected on their experience at DAMEchangers and wrote personal manifestos for change.

If we were feeling tired already from a pretty intense week, that was put into perspective when we were joined virtually by the Ocean Sheroes who had just got back from the insane endeavour of rowing from San Francisco to Hawaii to raise money for the Seabin Project. A truly staggering feat which the Sheroes themselves never knew they were capable of until they did it.

At DAME we’re on a mission to make periods positive, and during the camp the girls reminded us just how complicated a concept that is for teenage girls. There’s no product swap-out or campaign that can magically make a girl’s early experience of her period positive. It’s a time of conflicting emotions, unsympathetic surroundings and a severe lack of information. The very act of not going with the flow is hugely courageous. To not lie about why you “feel too unwell” to go to school; to not hide a product from boys at home or school when all you want is to not have to hear their stupid comments; to ask a friend a difficult question instead of suffering in silence; to switch to a resuable when you’ve only just found a disposable product that works. It can feel like a huge effort.

At DAME we can’t change the system that makes it such an effort overnight, although we are determined to change it eventually. We can try and make products which make positive switches as easy as possible, but we realise that ‘easy as possible’ probably still isn’t very easy.

One of the teams presented a slogan on Thursday, “Lead, and we’ll follow”. How brilliantly insightful. It is an act of courage to step away from the status quo. We can’t take that step for teen girls, but we can promise to aid, support and uplift them.

Lead, and we’ll follow.