There’s something different about the way women-owned businesses operate in Richmond. Ask any of them what makes this city a great place to run a business, and the answer is almost never about something you’d study in business school. Almost every single one of them says the same thing: the community.
Not just the idea of community, but the living, breathing, name-dropping-in-rooms-you-haven’t-been-in-yet kind. The kind where business owners show up for each other’s events, send each other customers, and collaborate instead of compete. We reached out to women entrepreneurs across RVA to hear about their businesses, and what came back was less a collection of profiles and more a portrait of a city holding itself together through genuine human connection.
Take Tia Bryant, Savannah Manzie, and Kasie Murphy, the three co-owners of Lucky In Love Chapel, which opened this past June. They didn’t find each other at a networking event. Tia had been officiating micro-weddings around the city through her business, Hello Love!, and had gradually built a circle of vendors and collaborators around her work. Savannah and Kasie came in to help coordinate, and the three of them grew so close that opening a chapel together felt like the only natural next step. “The community is so magical,” Tia says, “that business owners love to band together and promote each other’s businesses.” Lucky In Love is built around exactly that spirit, an all-inclusive, welcoming space that brings people together through the celebration of marriage, fueled by the same relationships that created it.
That kind of origin story, business growing out of genuine connection rather than market analysis, shows up again and again across Richmond’s women-owned businesses. Leonda Jiggetts started The Sweetest Thing in 2018 as a side hustle, baking cookies and cupcakes in nostalgic, unexpected flavors. As partnerships expanded and her banana pudding cookies became a word-of-mouth phenomenon, she faced a choice: walk away or go all in. She went all in, and hasn’t looked back. “The community of entrepreneurs and loyal customers cheer you on,” she says, “and carry your name into rooms you haven’t set foot in yet.” Her cookies are now available online and at shops and restaurants across the city, not because of advertising, but because Richmond showed up for her.
What’s striking, when you talk to these women, is how anchored they are, not just in Richmond broadly, but in specific neighborhoods, specific blocks, specific corners of the city they’ve made their own. Lisa Hutchinson of Top Stitch Mending, a sustainable sewing studio she’s built over nine years in Church Hill, is a perfect example. She sold her couch to buy an industrial sewing machine when she was starting out, told everyone she knew about her mending services, and made every mistake possible along the way. Today her low-waste studio offers clothing repair, vintage restoration, visible mending, and sewing classes, and she’s woven so deeply into her neighborhood that her day off reads like a Church Hill itinerary: breakfast at Fat Rabbit, lunch at Proper Pie, dinner at Pizza Bones, dessert at Spotty Dog, then a bike ride with her dog and time at the Chimborazo community garden. She waits for the Folk Festival all year and loves Friday Cheers. Richmond, to Lisa, isn’t a market. It’s home. “Everyone feels like friends and family,” she says, “because of the size of the city.”
Noelle Parent of Blue Sage Bridal has built that same kind of intimacy downtown, where her boutique, proudly called “The Bridal Shop for Everyone,” sits within walking distance of some of her personal local favorites, including Stella’s Market. And Rebecca Rabiger, who launched Patch to Porch just this past fall, bringing locally sourced pumpkins and seasonal styling to Richmond doorsteps, has already built partnerships with Enrich Compost, the Ronald McDonald House, Gild and Ash, Emily Warden Designs, and The Shed. “It started with me and a farmer,” she says, “and has expanded to collaborations with businesses across the city.”
For some of these women, community isn’t just the environment their business operates in, it’s the explicit mission. Nicole Mason of Glean Cleaning Service and the Glean Network has spent years building something that goes well beyond commercial cleaning. The Glean Network exists to empower other locally owned commercial services companies to scale through virtual resources and sales leads, because Nicole believes that turning “dirt into jobs” is about creating sustainable opportunity for people who are motivated to work. Lucy Trapp of Party Perfect, who revived a 27-year-old event rental company nearly a decade ago, runs her business on a similar principle: she provides second chances to individuals coming out of incarceration or recovery programs, giving them the opportunity to prove themselves through hard work. “We believe in second chances,” she says, which is also, she notes, exactly why she brought the business itself back to life.
Teaching and facilitating connections run just as deep. More than twenty years ago, Christine Wansleben noticed that Richmond had no freestanding cooking centers, so she opened Mise En Place, which has quietly become one of the city’s most beloved social experiences. Strangers arrive, cook together, sit down to eat, and leave as friends; some guests have even gone on to form their own cooking clubs afterward. “It’s one of the best dinner parties in Richmond,” Christine says. Lisa Hutchinson holds teaching at the center of her work too, she says it’s her favorite part of the job. “Once someone gains a skill, the world around them is transformed.”
The businesses that have been here the longest carry this community spirit most visibly. Jenni Kirby has owned Crossroads Art Center for more than 20 years, a gallery and class space she built around the belief that affordable art should be accessible to everyone. Her neighbors at Bremo Pharmacy, Amir Rugs, West End Antique Mall, and Project One are among her most treasured local favorites. Wendy Umanoff has spent 15 years designing custom light fixtures through Umanoff Design, drawing on a fine arts background from Parsons to create work that lives at the intersection of sculpture and function. She collaborates with local metalsmiths, woodworkers, and glassblowers throughout Richmond and loves Craft and Design at Main Street Station every November. “Achieving a finished product,” she says, “absolutely takes a village.”
While Richmond is home to some longstanding women-owned local businesses, newer arrivals bring fresh energy without losing that connective thread. Erin Keene opened Second Bottle Wine Shop just a few years ago as a neighborhood retail destination for small-production wines and conservas, hosting free Thursday tastings to introduce her neighbors to the winemakers she carries and building personal relationships with every customer who walks through the door. Lauren Llewellyn and Katelyn Peretti opened Erma Jean in Short Pump after launching online in 2019, naming their women’s boutique after their grandmother, a woman who dressed her best and carried an effortless style, and building a business around honest, pressure-free styling for the everyday woman. “Fashion can change the way women view and feel about themselves,” they say.
There’s a reason so many of these women, when asked what makes Richmond great for business, land on the same answer. It’s big enough to have real economic energy and small enough that a recommendation still travels person to person, shop to shop, neighbor to neighbor. When Leonda says her customers carry her name into rooms she hasn’t been in yet, she’s describing something that no ad budget can manufacture. When Lisa says everyone feels like friends and family, she means it literally; she’s lived it, street by street, in Church Hill. When Tia says business owners band together here, she’s speaking from direct experience; she built an entire network of collaborators before she ever opened a physical space.
Women-owned businesses in Richmond aren’t just filling market gaps. They’re tending to the city’s social fabric, teaching, feeding, dressing, cleaning, celebrating, mending, and healing, and doing it in a way that keeps coming back around. That’s community. And in Richmond, it’s very much alive.
Cover Image: Lauren Llewellyn & Katelyn Peretti of Erma Jean.
