‘How it was named’ is a series where I explore the creation of brand names that have caught my interest. This edition features Anna Moynihan of TaskHer

 

1] Tell us about TaskHer; what do you do?

 

TaskHer is an online marketplace that connects homeowners and tradeswomen. We work across domestic jobs and we’re working now more as well with women’s refuges and housing associations. The premise of what we do is essentially make it easier to book tradeswomen with the tech that we offer, but also predominantly to make it easier to be more inclusive and allow tradeswomen to get more well-paid work in the skilled trades that they’ve trained in.

 

2] And why do you do it?

 

It started from a personal experience, I suppose.

 

I needed work done on my house — we’d moved into a property (myself and my husband, who’s also my co-founder) into a new area of London, we didn’t have any friends locally who could give us recommendations so I started looking for tradespeople.

 

The first thing I really disliked about the process was that you had to ask for quotes and chase people, I hated that. Everything felt very analogue and offline, it was a very disjointed and unsmooth process. I also noticed that, once I was doing it, basically every tradesperson that came to our house to give us a quote would always speak to my husband — it was Covid times so we were both at home a lot and even though I’d been the person they’d been emailing and speaking to on the phone, they’d always then speak to my husband, which I found really annoying.

 

I didn’t notice it straightaway at the time but I was never offered a tradeswoman either — not even a hint of their existence, there were no visuals of women, no photography of tradeswomen on any of the sites I was using.

 

Which got me thinking, “I wonder if I can find a woman, I wonder it’ll be a different experience” and I went online sort of assuming that something like TaskHer already existed but there was nothing there so that was when we had the idea of doing it ourselves.

 

The meaning behind doing it has expanded since we started learning more about the trades, and women in trades: like the fact that only around 5% of tradespeople are female; or that, if you look at young school leavers coming through the ranks, no girls are at all offered trades as a career option — they’re offered childcare, hairdressing, cosmetology… things like that, which, whilst they’re great jobs, they’re (relatively) very low-paid and their male peers tend to be pushed into skilled trades which are significantly better paid. That obviously contributes to the gender pay gap.

 

And, the conditions to train in the trades are not particularly attractive for women, because often if you’re a woman going into trades, you’re the only one in your group. So a lot of what we do now is about inclusivity and normalising women in trade and giving homeowners like me — who want to be inclusive and put their money somewhere impactful — the opportunity to help rectify an industry, essentially.

 

3] What values inform your ‘why’?

 

There’s two key values that our work is rooted in. Firstly, the visibility and normalisation of women in trades. It’s an industry that is massively outdated. Gender disparity is still absolutely enormous even in most other industries, and worse in the trades. We take the view that we cannot help the industry without making visibility and normalisation come first. So what we did, what we’re doing and what we focus on is always educating and allowing people to think about the fact that they could hire a tradeswoman; a lot of our work is around PR, paid ads and getting in front of people in as many ways as we can.

 

When we started out and were working to develop our brand (with Lauren Jones of Brand by Boudica) she basically couldn’t find any imagery (of women in trades) because there was little to no existing imagery we could use. Soon as we had the budget we got photography done and all the images that we now use are of real tradeswomen. So you can see that achieving that visibility is such a huge thing, and normalising it so people aren’t surprised when they see a woman turning up to their house to fix their boiler or plumbing etc.

 

Alongside that is trust; trust is a really big part of what we do, it spans across everything and is quite varied in how it shows up but it’s really important to us as a value. For instance, the trades have got a really bad rep for being untrustworthy, for not turning up, or not communicating costs clearly… regardless of whether you’re a male or female tradesperson. The deeper you dig into it the more you understand why a lot of that happens — a lot of it is built around the way that you learn your trade, how all of this information is passed down, and so a lot of bad habits are formed. TaskHer is designed to be the trustworthy middle person.

 

Not to say that tradespeople aren’t trustworthy, it’s more the existing systems are broken. 90% of the time, if you can’t get hold of a tradesperson, it’s probably because they’re under a boiler, or fixing a circuit board; they’re on the tools basically, using their hands, or they’re in their van driving to their next job. That’s why they’re difficult to contact. So we help with the communication angle — help ensure that if customers are facing an issue we support them by being able to get hold of the tradesperson in a reliable and timely manner. That’s one side of the trust angle.

 

The other side is ensuring that, for the tradeswomen we work with, that the customers that we put them in touch with are verified in the same way that we verify our tradeswomen. We take job briefs and payment details from customers so we can check they’re legitimate requests and avoid instances where customers with nefarious intentions are hiring tradeswomen to come to their home. This isn’t obviously an issue specific to tradeswomen, but one that women everywhere have to battle every single day. We’re simply contributing to minimising that risk in the way that we can so more tradeswomen join the workforce and find stable employment.

 

Trust and safety matter for both sides of the marketplace, as well. For instance, we’re increasingly working with women’s refuges for domestic repairs that they need done. The reality is that a huge majority of the women living in women’s refuges have probably had a really negative experience with a man in a domestic situation. Having a male tradesperson come and fix a boiler or do work in their property can be really triggering and really difficult for them because of their experiences. The work still needs to be done though, women’s refuges still need to be maintained, so being able to offer women to come in to do that work really helps respect their dignity and make them feel safer.

 

Obviously, we’re not and would never say that tradesmen are inherently unsafe. It’s more that the situation warrants prioritising the physical and psychological safety of a very vulnerable population and we have it in our power to help resolve that situation in this way. Equally, the safety of the tradeswomen is really important to us too. We put a lot of processes in place to ensure that they feel safe when they go to jobs and go into people’s homes. So, yeah, long story short, visibility and trust.

 

4] How did you end up with the name TaskHer? (did you work with an agency, undertake trademark searches and registration, indicative costs…)

 

When we first started TaskHer, we had no investment, no money, it was just myself and my husband. We did some essential top-line market research with tradespeople and customers. And then we wanted to do fake-door testing on social media, putting ads out there that led to an email subscribe list and such.

 

We found that there was a hunger for booking women in trade. So we needed a brand, and a name… something to put out there. So we brainstormed, we came up with a lot of lists, a lot of ideas (including some terrible ones)… ones, I think, that felt maybe too corporate and too close to our competitors. We used naming tools as well. We literally used everything that we had to hand, since obviously we didn’t have any budget for an agency.

 

I remember looking a lot at female healthcare as well, and how they named their brands. We realised there was quite a big divide (or rather, a clear divide, I should say) between those who referenced women or female… essentially, those that specified gender in the name and those that didn’t. We knew we needed to nod to women because that is a massive USP for us in our vertical. I remember thinking “oh, we need a URL. We just need something to start testing, we need something tangible.”

 

I remember sitting at the dining room table and thinking of the word ‘task’ and thinking that’s actually quite encompassing because we had no idea which trades we were going to include at the time. And again, the word ‘her’, it felt relatively less gendered but still made one pause and consider.

 

It was me literally sitting alone in the end at our dining room table, needing to register a URL and thinking we can change it later. But then we grew to love it, and had trademark searches done through an IP solicitor before committing. Those searches were in the very low thousands, but necessary, especially when we got a tiny bit of investment to put into the brand itself and having a name we knew was safe was key to creating the other elements of the brand.

 

5] What did you almost call it before deciding on ‘TaskHer’?

 

One was SheTrades, which… what’s interesting actually, as a side note, is that we now follow a lot of tradeswomen on our social media, many with their own registered businesses. And it’s so funny how many of these names are either identical or so similar to the ones that we were kind of looking at.

 

But yeah, SheTrades was one of them. We steered away from that because the word ‘trades’, obviously, it’s skilled trades *we’re* looking at, but trades can also be lots of other things. And from an SEO perspective we felt that it was leaning more towards trading in a financial sense so that was a no-go for us.

 

‘She Can’ was another option which we liked, but that felt a little bit derogatory potentially, as in, “oh yeah, she can”, but also like, “why wouldn’t she be able to?” Another really random one was WOM, W-O-M (that was from a naming generator) based more around a real moment in time where people were just removing vowels from spellings and using it as their name — as in like, it’s a normal word, but the actual brand name doesn’t have an I or an E in it. I felt like that one didn’t really explain what we did, it gave no indication. That’s not necessarily massively important every time, but again, we’re working in an industry where your competitors are ‘Check a trade’ or every competitor has a word (in their name) that indicates what they’re doing and you need to work in a similar vein.

 

We were also trying to be really careful, we didn’t want to sound like a charity or a lifestyle brand or a refuge… so I felt like those few still left on my list weren’t hitting the nail on the head quite as much as we’d have liked.

 

6] How important is a business name according to you?

 

I mean, it’s massively important, even though we kind of came into it thinking “we’ll just use this for testing, then, once we’ve launched our brand, we’ll rename it something different if need be”.

 

I think that, ultimately, you do need to use [the name] to stand out from your competitors. It needs to be something that’s memorable. It needs to be something that people can say… which also I find interesting with TaskHer, because internally we pronounce it ‘Tasker’, we don’t really say the H. It is there. But whereas a lot of people I hear say it back to me call it TaskHer, really putting an emphasis on the ‘H’.

 

But you know, I think you need to stand behind [the name], if you’re going to commit to being a business. I think we got around 30k of investment, and we used about 7–11k on the brand development — visuals, tone of voice, messaging. That’s a big investment for a small business so you want to be able to stand behind that brand name for at least a decade, I would say.

 

And I feel really proud saying the name now. I feel proud when we see it, when I hear the name. I didn’t want to feel embarrassed, because it had dated, or it looked like we tried too hard. I felt like that longevity needed to be there. I suppose for me, it’s also quite difficult to remove the brand name from the brand visual identity. Like, whenever I think of the brand name, I think of the visual identity as well now. It’s quite difficult for me to separate the two. It’s testament to say that I’m quite proud when I tell people the name.

 

7] What one thing do you wish people were aware of about your area of expertise/industry? 

 

This one I’m quite passionate about. The skilled trades aren’t a fallback career — they’re actually highly technical. At the moment, and moving forwards, they will be economically essential and increasingly in demand. Bringing women into trades and normalising women in the trades is not about diversity. This is a real problem, a real skill shortage that we’re facing as a country and needs to be addressed.

 

It’s also, as I mentioned before, really widening the financial divide based on gender because women are still pushed into lower-paid skilled work (like hairdressing), and not into higher-paid skilled trade work like being a heating and gas engineer.

 

Another angle is that women always end up being the primary caregivers, regardless of whether you care for a child or an older person. And what we find with all of the tradeswomen that we work with is that it’s such an incredible career for them because they gain the freedom to work their own hours; the nature of skilled trade work means that working for yourself is prevalent which makes it so much more manageable than many other industries. You have the flexibility to work your own hours, you can take time off to do childcare, pick up your kids from school and such… There’s a whole other avenue around neurodivergent women — ADHD is hugely prevalent in skilled trades and it’s an amazing job for people with ADHD because they’re not sat behind a desk, they’re using their hands and their brains and they’re focusing on something that they’re really, really interested in. There’s just so, so much to say for skilled trades!

 

I’ll end with the fact that it’s [trade skills jobs] something that AI is not going to be taking away anytime soon. No amount of AI tech is going to be able to come into a Victorian townhouse in London in the next 30 years and fix your plumbing system when it’s blocked. So it’s an amazing skill set to have and develop.

 

I think people look down on the trades because it’s a so-called ‘blue-collar’ industry and they really shouldn’t because people train as long to become a heating gas engineer or an electrician as they do to become a dentist or a teacher. I’m quite passionate about that.

 

8] Question for funsies! Fill in the blank: Whatever you do, don’t _____ 

 

Don’t believe everything you see online.

 

Certainly as a founder, it’s really easy to compare yourself to other people’s successes that you see on social media. The startup rollercoaster is very real!