Women’s Enterprise Scotland
Women’s Enterprise Scotland (WES) published the Study of Women in Enterprise 2025 to make one thing unmistakably clear: Scotland’s women entrepreneurs are starting businesses in record numbers, but too many are being forced out before they can stabilise and grow.
Funded by the Scottish Government, the study is a critical piece of evidence showing what Scotland stands to gain if we stop treating women’s enterprise as a ‘nice to have.’ As a women-led studio, we understood that this wasn’t just a data set—it was a survival map for our community. Studio Lutalica partnered with WES to transform the report into a high-impact advocacy tool: a publication engineered to reach policymakers, journalists, and grassroots advocates.
Project Team
Design: Cecilia Righini
Copyediting: Meghan Mooney
The Challenge
This report needed to command authority in multiple contexts. WES needed a partner who could handle the weight of the data—including the estimated £17bn annual uplift at stake—without losing sight of the human realities of attrition and inequality in the spreadsheets.
The content was intellectually dense: a wide range of findings (from cost pressures to pension poverty) and a long set of recommendations. The design challenge was to create a strategic system that prevented these vital insights from being buried, ensuring the report was as credible to a government minister as it was urgent to a busy founder scanning an executive summary.
What We Did
We provided the strategic editorial and design infrastructure needed to turn research into a movement. We copyedited the report for clarity and flow, then created an editorial system built to make complex research feel accessible and usable.
We developed custom visualisations to bring key findings to life—democratising the data through charts, graphs, and infographics designed for maximum impact and avoiding interpretation fatigue. We used clean typography, careful hierarchy, and generous white space to ensure an authoritative yet calming and accessible user experience.
Because the report was designed to be shared (on social media, for example) we strategically branded every page. That way, we ensured every bite-sized insight—whether a screenshot of a chart or a quote in a policy briefing—remained tethered to the WES mission, protecting their intellectual property and amplifying their reach.
Impact
The *Study of Women in Enterprise 2025* quickly became part of the wider conversation about women’s enterprise in Scotland, moving from a document to a centrepiece of the national economic conversation.
The result was a publication that did the heavy lifting for the WES team. Its core figures are designed to be easy to find, easy to quote, and hard to ignore: women-led start-ups at 54%, paired with a 61% attrition rate after start-up and women-led employer businesses dropping to 20%. The report also captured the lived reality behind those headlines—rising cost pressures, unequal access to funding, and the long-term risk of depleted savings and pension poverty.
By turning this research into a functional piece of infrastructure, WES now has a stronger platform to advocate for strategic support. The impact of our work is seen in the ease with which this evidence now moves across press, policy, and community conversations—proving that when women’s lived reality is designed with intention, it has the power to shift the system.
“Studio Lutalica did a wonderful job of taking our draft report and transforming it in to a well-presented and designed final publication. From the start our expectations were exceeded and we fully appreciate the value added throughout the process. Working with the team was efficient and enjoyable. We hope to have the opportunity to work with them in the future.”
– Bronwen Thomas, CEO of Women's Enterprise Scotland
