Sisters Want To Flex Women's 'Purse Power' Through Startup App

LAKEWOOD, CO – She's one of three sisters, who grew up in Lakewood and who found her voice in the 1970s and 80s while her mother, a nurse and professor, marched for the Equal Right Amendment in Colorado.

But when former Oklahoma corporate HR vice president Donna Miller sits in a cemetery and makes notes about her own purpose in life, she is frustrated that women are still marching in 2019 "even with the same signs" and there has "been so little progress forward" for women's equality, she said.

Miller and her two physician sisters have launched an app, PursePower, that they think will bring more women into decision-making in businesses.

"Eighty percent of spending decisions are made by women," Miller told Patch. "Let's use that power to find and buy from women-owned and woman-led companies ... Most sustainable changes in history are driven by economics."

The app – "for women who want to promote equality by using their purchasing power" – is a directory and Google Chrome extension that alerts a user to more than 750,000 participating businesses that are either run by women, or at least 50-percent women-owned, or corporations that have 20 percent-or-more women on their boards.

"If you're buying peanut butter, you can support a peanut butter company that has a female CEO or has women on the [corporate] board," Miller said.

People who download the app are also contributing to end domestic violence. As of December, 2018, Purse Power makes a donation to Denver's National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) with every download.

"We look forward to this relationship and the possibilities for making a change," said Ruth Glenn, CEO, National Coalition Against Domestic Violence in a statement.

Now based in Edmond, Oklahoma, Miller grew up in Jefferson County and attended Lakewood High School with her sisters – Dr. Karen Nern, founder of Vail Dermatology, and Dr. Phyllis ("Freddi") Pennington – and her sweetheart Kurt Miller, to whom she has been married for 35 years. Nern and Pennington are board members for the startup and Donna Miller is CEO.

When she was a "nerdy shy kid" in Lakewood, Miller said she sang with Madgrigal groups in junior high and then participated in the Golden-based "Westernaires" horse drilling team in high school, which built her confidence.

Donna says her "accomplished and contributing" parents gave the three Colorado girls confidence that there was nothing they couldn't do. Their father, a federal mining engineer who escaped poverty through the GI Bill, registered 22 patents, she said. Their mother was a psychiatric nurse, who ended up authoring six books and teaching at what was then Metropolitan State College in Denver.

Although she appreciates the "down-to-earth, genuine nice people" in Oklahoma, Miller said she still misses her home state and wandering the back roads in the mountains with back roads in the mountains and the "wildflowers, aspens and blue spruces. Colorado is beautiful, I really miss that," she said. A Colorado childhood may have contributed to her idealism and belief that she and her sisters could make a significant change in the world, she said.

Miller worked her way up the corporate ladder as a vice president and executive coach for the cable and computer industries, but had always been frustrated by the lack of women in positions of power as business owners and in the board room. She said she didn't personally run into many blocked opportunities in the business environment, possibly because "my sisters and I are all six-feet tall," but she did have to scale back her corporate career to raise three triplets, now all in college.

She believes promoting women into decision-making roles is more than an issue of fairness, it's a "smart business decision." Companies with significant women decision-makers "outperform companies without" across all industries in the U.S., Miller told The Sunday Oklahoman.

Miller is inspired by the Boston-based 2020 Women On Boards campaign, which seeks to get women into the board room at 20 percent participation by 2020, she said. The app's ultimate goal is to use the buying power of women to "shatter glass ceilings" and improve lives "in a matter of quarters rather than decades," Miller said.

So far, the startup has attracted almost a half-a-millon dollars in investments from 24 investors, mostly in Oklahoma, she said in the interview. Around 1,400 people visit the site every month, she said. A second round of investing is scheduled for June in Colorado, Miller told Patch.

Using women's buying power to reward companies that promote women isn't about boys-against-girls, Miller told Patch. She's also clear that the company's mission is not political. "A good portion of our investors are Republicans. We don’t want to be divisive about women in any way. Women have allowed themselves to be divided, if we will come together and act together there's nothing we can’t do," she said.

"We want to support the men who are supporting women. If a business is owned by a husband and wife, they belong on Purse Power. We're trying to reward that companies that reward women, not trying to punish anybody,"she said. "I have a husband and two sons. This is a partnership with men to fix the problem."

Check out the company's website here.