The revenge of the original girlbosses

The Great Girlboss implosion that came to a peak in 2020 created a whole category of start-up founders who seemed destined to be banished from the business world forever.

- Bloomberg

They were a group of mostly young, White women who capitalized on the 2010s Instagram era, building media-savvy, aspirational lifestyle brands that were tied to their magnetic public images. They sold not only luggage, make-up, and workout gear but also the idea that buying their products meant you were supporting feminism and inclusivity. (The term "girlboss" was a product of the same era, coined by retailing entrepreneur Sophia Amoruso in 2014.)

But as corporate America struggled through its own racial reckoning in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, many of these founders were accused of everything from racism to creating toxic work environments to just plain bad management—sins made worse by the feeling that they were not actually living up to the ideals that they had hawked. They'd embraced a press that had fawned over their promises to create a better kind of business on their way up, and then got burned by it for their hypocrisy on the way down. One by one, in a very public and embarrassing fashion, they resigned.