They might just be shopping for new makeup or clothes, but many customers also know that when they shop, they’re supporting a company’s ethics with each clickthrough and conversion.
Today’s consumers want to see their values reflected in the brands they buy from. And, they want clear, meaningful ways to participate in positive change.
Increasingly, personal care and fashion-oriented companies are stepping into that space by connecting customers with missions that champion women.
But even the glossiest lip service isn’t enough to make a difference in engagement or efficacy. Some companies are leveling up their social impact strategies in order to move the needle for women-centered causes and businesses.
How? By putting the power in their customers’ hands.
Gimme Beauty: Supporting women entrepreneurs
Haircare brand Gimme Beauty was inspired to launch its own partnership with Kiva. With a corporate identity rooted in inclusion and innovation, Gimme offers a fresh example of how social impact can be a powerful engine for customer engagement, employee pride, and economic opportunity.
The company designs tools and accessories for all hair types, with the ethos that there is no "one-size-fits-all" solution to beauty. Gimme also champions its audience through marketing and engagement that focus on women's diversity and interests. Approximately 10% of Gimme customers identify as entrepreneurs.
In 2025, Gimme sharpened its focus on Gimme Opportunity, one of four pillars in its broader Unlocking Potential program, which also includes Gimme Essentials, Gimme Education, and Gimme the World.
The goal: Close gaps in the financial system that limit women's access to capital, especially for those building small businesses or pursuing education.
The challenge: Scale that intention in a way that felt authentic and hands-on.
Kiva + Gimme partnership
With a global network fueling crowdfunded loans to support underbanked and financially excluded individuals, Kiva’s model offered the right fit. A partnership allowed Gimme to:
Engage customers directly in its social impact mission
Provide capital to women entrepreneurs, including its own customers
Deepen its alignment between corporate goals and community empowerment
Contribute to Kiva’s broader effort to expand reach to underbanked women worldwide
In August 2025, the Gimme + Kiva partnership launched its first major activation: a voting campaign that asked customers and employees where the company should direct its support. Through a voting page on Kiva's site, participants could choose from four distinct loan categories outlining various areas of support, from education to entrepreneurship.
The response exceeded expectations.
Gimme promoted the campaign to customers across email, SMS, and organic social posts. Plus, Gimme promoted voting through in-house channels and a dedicated “Kiva Day.”
The “Women’s Education” category won, and Gimme allocated $20,000 to support those loans.
After deployment and repayment, the original funding for those loans was remitted to new borrowers, in accordance with Kiva’s compounding loan recycling model. This rocketed Gimme’s impact from supporting 106 borrowers to more than 430 women — a four-fold increase fueled directly by customer engagement.
A growing tradition of giving
That first campaign was just the beginning. Since then, Gimme has made the vote a recurring tradition, running a new campaign nearly every quarter and refining its four focus areas along the way to: Women's health, Women's education, Underbanked women, and Women-owned small businesses in the U.S.
For Giving Tuesday 2025 and the holiday season, Gimme customers voted for Women's health, directing funding to support loans across the category. Then, for International Women's Day in 2026, Gimme featured Kiva as a key impact partner at its live "Unlocking Potential" event in Dallas, where the company's CEO, Jeff Durham, spoke about the partnership and encouraged attendees to cast their vote in person..
Now, Gimme's is about to launch its next campaign, once again inviting customers to choose where their support goes.
Voting campaign results appear on Gimme’s public Kiva impact page, where customers can see exactly how their participation shaped each campaign's outcome and directly supported women around the globe.
Gimme's partnership with Kiva has helped to further align its social mission with its corporate goals. To date, the partnership has moved $47,500 in deposits into $60,325 in loans, a 1.27x multiplier that has reached more than 1,227 borrowers in just one year. Health, education, and retail businesses top the list of sectors supported.
Why social impact moves customers
Across the beauty and wellness industries, many brands are already spotlighting issues that are important to women. And companies that give customers an active role in creating impact are seeing stronger engagement and deeper loyalty.
An increasingly successful way to do that is to direct a portion of product sales towards loans for women entrepreneurs. This allows consumers to:
Choose exactly who to support with lending credits given at the point of sale
Follow the stories of women whose lives and businesses are shaped by access to capital that they’re helping provide
Match their dollars through the brand on the lending platform
This approach has been employed by makeup companies like toty and IT Cosmetics, which have conducted multi-year campaigns that helped fund crowdsourced loans for women.
And in 2023, fashion footwear giant UGG invested $25K in matching loans for International Women’s Day, connecting customers to women borrowers from around the globe.
Similarly, True You from the Vitamin Shoppe activated its audience to disburse $94K in loans by awarding $25 in lending credits with each purchase.
As a social impact strategy, crowdsourced lending has widespread appeal because it centers on real people, requires dynamic participation, and provides a transparent avenue to track progress.
Individuals see the impact they make with every dollar they spend, strengthening brand loyalty and engagement with customers and employees. That transparency is easily presented through Kiva.
All of the companies above chose to partner with Kiva on campaigns to further their social impact strategies.
The bigger picture: Investing in women works
For Gimme, integrating social impact into its customer experience helps build momentum for women entrepreneurs who enrich their communities
For Kiva, partnerships with brands like Gimme accelerate the ability to bring financial access to more women in more places.
And for customers, this model proves that making a difference doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes it starts with a vote, a story, or a single $25 loan.
When brands and customers work together to support women, even one clickthrough or conversion can help change the world.
