12 Small Business Ideas for Women To Earn Extra Income

Despite progress, female entrepreneurs still face unique challenges launching and running businesses. But plenty of proven, manageable business ideas for women exist across industries.

Whether you want to earn extra income with a side hustle or scale a full-time enterprise, choosing the right opportunity that fits your skills, interests, and lifestyle is key. This comprehensive guide explores various business opportunities for women along with real-world examples and helpful resources.

Lifestyle Business Ideas

So-called “lifestyle businesses” enable entrepreneurs to incorporate work and personal life in flexible ways. These opportunities also often have low startup costs and overhead.

Coaching & Consulting

From life coaching to career consulting to divorce coaching and more, coaching is a scalable service business requiring little upfront investment beyond a website. The ROI coaching certification shows credibility.

Most coaches charge $100-250 per hour-long session and offer packages, like 30 hours for $3,000. Coaches can easily gross $5,000+ per month working part-time. Popular coaching platforms include Coach.me and SuperCoach.

For example, a lifestyle coach could conduct 2 sessions per weekday at $150 per session to gross $1,500 per week or $6,000 per month working 20 hours weekly.

Handmade Crafts

Making and selling handmade craft products leverages creativity into income. Best of all, start-up costs remain minimal. You can even turn existing hobbies like jewelry-making or candle-making into side businesses.

Etsy provides the top online marketplace for craft goods. But also consider local craft fairs and your own ecommerce site. Basic SEO and beautiful product photography is key. For the right products, some crafters make over $5,000 per month profit.

A “mompreneur” could launch a candle business on Etsy, make 10-15 scented soy candles weekly in her spare time, price at $25 each, and easily gross $2,500+ monthly with some marketing.

Food-Based Businesses

Female entrepreneurs with passion for cooking, baking, or specialty diets can monetize those skills working from home. Options range from meal prep delivery to artisan food production.

Most home cooks launch food companies via farmers markets, festivals, or online stores using Shopify and social media. Initial costs vary but kitchen gear and packaging represents significant expenses. Profit margins can surpass 50%+ on the right products.

For example, a pastry chef could prepare custom cakes and desserts out of her home kitchen for $100+ each, selling 2-3 per week and earning $800-1,200 monthly.

Product Business Ideas

Beyond pure services and food, female innovators are also launching products in markets often overlooking women’s needs—everything from fashion to medical devices to consumer goods.

Fashion Company

The apparel world remains dominated by menswear brands, especially in segments like athleisure, outdoor gear, and basics. Savvy entrepreneurs are seizing opportunities to launch clothing for how real women live today.

That said, building scalable fashion brands today almost always involves ecommerce. Shopify and print-on-demand facilitate low startup costs for new women’s fashion companies. Instagram influencer marketing helps drive discovery. Profit margins can surpass 65%.

A Pilates instructor launched a line of women’s workout leggings priced at $75 each through her Shopify store and Pinterest advertising. Selling 25 pairs weekly would gross $1,875 per week or $7,500 monthly.

Craft Beverage Company

Female consumers increasingly demand innovative adult beverages—from hard seltzers and craft beer to better-for-you wines and ready-to-drink cocktails. More women beverage founders are seizing this opportunity.

Beverage formulation, production planning, licensing, and distribution represent complex undertakings. But partnering with an existing brewery to develop custom recipes lets entrepreneurs test ideas without huge upfront facility investments.

A founder could contract with a local microbrewery to produce an initial run of a new hard iced tea product to demonstrate consumer demand before committing to large-scale commercialization.

Baby Products Company

Despite spending the most on childcare, women notoriously get overlooked when companies develop innovative baby and kid products. Moms make ideal founders to address unmet needs.

Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter help validate interest for new products before manufacturing. Once again, DTC ecommerce enables founders to launch with little upfront investment and overhead. Proven baby inventions generate over seven figures in revenue.

An example baby product innovation would be redesigned bibs and mats addressing issues like upper-body coverage and adjustable angles. Running a Kickstarter pre-sale could secure $50k+ in funding to finalize development.

Local Brick-and-Mortar Businesses

While ecommerce opens doors for female solopreneurs to run location-independent operations, many women also excel running local retail establishments, studios, and services firms.

Boutique Fitness Studio

The rise of boutique fitness fueled growth for specialized concepts like barre, Pilates, HIIT training, and more—typically attracting predominantly female clientele. Despite intensifying competition, new entrants can differentiate.

With an ideal studio location and strong initial community marketing, new boutique fitness owners can profit within the first 3-6 months. Consider offering virtual classes to expand reach. Solid studios gross over $100,000 annually.

An indoor cycling studio may lease a downtown retail space for $3,000 per month, sell monthly unlimited class packages for $150 each to 75 regular riders, grossing $11,250 monthly in recurring revenue.

Coworking Space

Coworking provides members flexible shared workspaces and networking. While giant WeWork dominates the industry, opportunities exist for women to launch curated local spaces.

With as little as 2,500 square feet near public transit and a hip aesthetic design, new coworking spaces can open for less than $100k. promoting community is vital. Average full-time memberships run $300 per month.

A new women-focused coworking space could open with room for 30 full members ($300 per month each), 6 dedicated desks ($500 per month each), and projected 60% utilization to gross $13,200 per month by year 1.

Staffing Agency

Launching a niche staffing agency remains a proven business model in most cities—connecting specialized talent with SMBs or larger employers struggling to fill roles. Areas like healthcare, technology, and finance present growing opportunities to start niche agencies.

While state licensing brings government compliance, startup costs remain reasonable for staffing agencies. Commission rates typically range from 15-30% of salaries. Successful agencies can easily gross over $1 million annually.

For example, a physician staffing agency could secure 5 annual hospital contracts within several months to provide per diem doctor coverage, charging 20% commission on placed talent and grossing $20k+ per month.

Female-Centric Service Ideas

Some types of services businesses—especially those addressing pain points disproportionately affecting women—offer ripe conditions for female founders to disrupt.

Childcare Services

With limited daycare center capacity and high costs, better childcare solutions remain desperately needed as more millennial women enter peak career years. Everything from nanny placement to preschool alternatives to employer childcare networks presents opportunities.

While early education backgrounds help, parents today want better coordination, flexibility, enrichment offerings, and overall experiences—all areas where savvy founders are building modern platforms and services. New childcare services can easily gross over $250,000 annually.

One such concept would involve a mobile childcare service catering to corporate client events, hotel guest needs, and similar scenarios helping parents seamlessly integrate family and work with screened sitters.

Home Health Services

Between busy careers and growing aging populations, more support services are needed enabling independent living for seniors, adults with disabilities, and others needing assistance—cleaning, transportation, home health, errands, tech help, and so on.

While state-by-state regulations on fields like home health bring compliance considerations, trained experts in occupational therapy, gerontology, healthcare management possess useful backgrounds here as founders. Home care generates over $70 per client hour.

An example model would involve a home health services company specializing in senior time-blocks for household tasks, medication reminders, hygiene assistance and providing holistic in-home support via hourly caregivers.

Pet Care Services

The US pet industry keeps hitting new highs, projected to top $200 billion in 2022. But especially in cities, new solutions remain needed for daily pet sitting, dog walking, vet transport, grooming, boarding, waste handling and more.

While pet care services face labor challenges around hiring/training walkers, solid operators generate over $50,000+ in monthly sales covering between 300-500 dog clients with premium offerings. Apps like Wag facilitate booking.

A pet care franchisee, for instance, could cover a territory of 75 regular weekday dog walking route clients plus weekend/holiday boarding and gross over $10,000 per month.

Tips For Launching New Ventures

Beyond core offerings, strategic decisions significantly impact eventual success when starting new companies. Here are a few key tips for female founders:

• Solve real problems -Ensure your idea fills tangible gaps better than existing options, especially pain points actually affecting your target demographics.
• Start lean – Prioritize low-cost pilots, prototypes and market testing to validate demand before over-investing upfront.
• Focus locally – Profitability often requires hands-on work early on, making local opportunities ideal for new entrepreneurs with limited time.
• Use tools wisely – Technology like ecommerce platforms, email services, and social schedulers automate busywork so you can focus on growth.
• Watch cash flows – Carefully project expenses and realistic revenue to set prices that drive profitability week-to-week rather than just chasing scale.

Remember that perfect timing rarely exists, but unlocking flexibility and earning income doing meaningful work remains invaluable. So take the first step turning your passions into a women-led enterprise!

Additional small business resources exist through local SBA offices, women’s startup networks, consumer research tools, and mentorship programs like Score. Reach out early in your journey to secure support.

In closing, female entrepreneurs bring unique perspectives solving problems. But hustling through trial-and-error ultimately paves the way to success. By starting lean, embracing help, and committing self to growth, women can turn promising ideas into thriving enterprises.

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