Louise Troen
VICE-PRESIDENT OF INTERNATIONAL MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS AT Bumble
Louise Troen was working in fashion PR when a chance meeting with Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe in 2O14 ‘changed my life’ and led to her joining the ‘Hive’ a year later. ‘When I first came on board, there were six people in the company and I would sometimes work out of a deckchair in our co-working space when we ran out of desks,’ she recalls. The UK team now has its own Bumble HQ in Soho, and Forbes recently valued the app at $1 billion.
As you’d expect from the female-focused dating app, the team at Bumble is dominated by women. ‘What we achieve creatively is so much more interesting as a result,’ says Troen. ‘Someone comes in and says, ”I was made to feel rubbish about my body this weekend,” so we sit down and try to work out how we can inspire body confidence in women. We are identifying real experiences, and we’re busy creating campaigns to try and solve them.’ Troen mentions the app’s recent Snooze function, which allows you to keep your matches if you need a break from dating apps. She also talks about The Female Film Force initiative, for which Bumble granted five female directors, writers or producers £2O,OOO to make their own short film. ‘Technology needs more diversity, not just women, because the people developing exciting initiatives like A.I., which has the potential to better our lives, need to represent the wider community,’ she says. ‘The #MeToo movement has created a space for women to talk and be listened to, and it’s definitely trickled down. There’s a microscope now on technology and that’s very much needed.’
Although these days she heads up huge campaigns across multiple global time zones, Troen says she’ll never forget one of her very first jobs at a PR agency, ‘putting biscuits on plates in conference rooms and getting a biscuit thrown at me’. Clearly the perpetrator of biscuit-gate didn’t follow Troen’s best business advice: ‘Treat everyone like they’re your next boss. You never know who might become conducive to your next step.’ Her second-favourite mantra is currently doing the rounds on billboards all around Berlin: ‘Glass ceilings make great dancefloors.’
“Glass
ceilings make
great
dancefloors”