• by Sara Guaglione , May 6, 2019

At its third annual conference, in partnership with presenting sponsor Mastercard, Create & Cultivate highlighted female millennial small business owners. This is part of a larger, multi-year deal between the two companies.

The company claims 1,500 people attended the event on Saturday in Industry City, Brooklyn.

Create & Cultivate is an online platform and experiential company that offers women tips, tools and resources to “create and cultivate” their careers and businesses.

Create & Cultivate’s partnership with Mastercard included an installation called “Small Business Marketplace,” where five local, female-led businesses were chosen to showcase their brands. They included jewelry line Bliss Lau, floral decor bran East Olivia Creative, logo clothing shop YES I AM, sunglasses store Coco and Breezy and hat designer Teressa Foglia.

Stalls were decorated with signs that featured the name of the brand, as well as the MasterCard logo, with the phrase: “Her Ideas” and “Start Something Priceless,” the latest Mastercard slogan and call-to-action

The brands “all have different stories and are at different stages of their business,” Cheryl Guerin, executive vice president of North America marketing and communications, told Publishers Daily.

Create & Cultivate recently launched the C&C x Mastercard Women’s Business Advisory Council, which currently has six members, including Create & Cultivate founder Jaclyn Johnson.

Before 30, Johnson launched and sold her first business, a digital marketing company called (No Subject). She founded Create & Cultivate to bring businesswomen together and offer resources and networking opportunities.

The partnership with Mastercard gives women resources on financial literacy. Women can discuss Mastercard credit-card benefits and Intuit tools, and how those resources can help women start and grow their businesses, Guerin said.

Later this year, Mastercard and Create & Cultivate will launch a small business summit in New York, Johnson said.

Create & Cultivate helps connect brands that do not always “have the opportunity to talk to women, to help spotlight those business owners” and connect them to the company’s audience of female entrepreneurs, she added.

This week, Mastercard debuted a marketing campaign featuring illustrated portraits and stories of women business owners in print, out of home and digital venues. The campaign appears in a three-page spread in The New York Times today, as well as live billboards of the drawings in Times Square.

Last month, Create & Cultivate launched a membership program to give its audience exclusive access to premium content, as well as other perks, like networking opportunities, monthly career mentor sessions and entrepreneurial resources. It costs $140 a year, or $15 a month.

The membership is an effort to monetize the company’s audience of 1 million monthly visitors across platforms and encourage them to attend more events.

Create & Cultivate puts on 50+ conferences a year, including three large-scale conferences and multiple free events around the country.

At the event on Saturday, actress Amber Heard, models Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Ashley Graham, and Martha Stewart were among the speakers.