Ambition A.M. meets Anna Butterworth, founder of women’s health-focused marketing agency Ultra Violet, to chat about her efforts to change what she sees as a historically fragmented industry.
It was only a few days into her role as a marketing manager at London-based women’s consumer tech brand Elvie that Anna Butterworth realised she’d found her passion.
“I became like a dog with a bone,” she says, laughing about the role that changed her life.
“It just opened my eyes to this entire disparity that we have in women’s health – the gender gap, the gender health gap, gender pay gap, the gender research gap, everything – and it just became an absolute passion of mine,” she says.
“I knew that this was my mission in life now was to try and close the gap of all those gaps and try and bring more equitable worlds to women.”
Butterworth went on to found the women’s health-focused marketing agency Ultra Violet in 2017, which started as a marketing and communications agency and has since grown into a women’s health trend forecaster with a global reach.
Last month, Butterworth launched Ultra Violet’s flagship report, Femtech Futures 2035, a deep dive into the female healthcare and tech trends over the next decade.
It has since reached readers from 58 countries from the likes of the World Economic Forum and the UN to NIH and NHS.
With 200 downloads in the first week, the report has also been used to guide various women’s health brands worldwide, such as Elvie, Flo, Unilever and CVS Health.
But what makes Ultra Violet’s work so special in an industry that is constantly changing and historically fragmented?
What is Ultra Violet?
Butterworth says Ultra Violet has three main business offerings: trend forecasting, which is presented in reports available to industry groups; strategic future mapping; and personalised consultations.
The expansion, she says, came when it “became abundantly clear that this industry desperately needed guidance and it needed direction.”
And, with a 2024 McKinsey Health Institute report highlighting that closing the women’s health gap could boost the global economy by $1 trillion (£780bn) by 2040, the founder might just be right.
Navigating the industry
Butterworth says the real challenge for the industry as a whole is its lack of vision.
“Women’s health innovation is almost completely reliant on individual women who have had a really shitty experience with something and chose to figure out how to solve it themselves and then build a business based on that and then go through the startup journey,” Butterworth says.
And when you factor in all the resources involved in teaching the aforementioned group of budding entrepreneurs how to build a business, it becomes an unnecessary expense.
“That’s a very expensive – in terms of time and resource – way of building out an industry,” she adds.
“They go through all of these educational pieces to get the product and then they have to figure out how to build a business, and then they have to figure out how to get money and then they go through the VC funding route, which is incredibly challenging in women’s health and as a female founder.”
What’s next?
Despite the challenges, Butterworth isn’t planning to give up on her ambitions anytime soon.
Her current (and ongoing task) is figuring out how to bring Ultra Violet’s research to as many industry leaders as possible in a market worth nearly $25bn (£19.5bn).
“My biggest challenge is time,” she says, with a smile.
“But now, for me, it’s about scaling… It’s really about focusing on the growth of this business and that’s my next big challenge.”
CV
Name: Anna Butterworth
Company: Ultra Violet Agency
Founded: 2017
Staff: 1 (around 10 freelancers)
Title: Founder & MD
Age: 37
Born: London
Lives: London
Studied: American Studies BA, Political Economics MSc
Talents: LOL no idea
Motto: Everybody love everybody
Most known for: Knowing everyone
First ambition: To be an inventor and build a business where I improve on the design of everything. I was 6 and it was called Everything Made Better
Favourite book: Lights out in Wonderland by DCB Pierre
Best piece of advice: Don’t let perfection get in the way of progress