When Hannah Crawford posted in Facebook groups offering to help women move homes last year, she did not expect to be inundated with bookings and messages of support. A few months later, her side hustle—Han with a Van—became her main source of income. "It absolutely blew up very quickly.
All kinds of stories were pouring in from people saying, 'This is so needed. When I hired a man and a van, he was really late, things got smashed, I felt intimidated, or I felt rushed,'" Crawford told Newsweek. "Or sometimes the worst of it was, ‘They knew how to access my property and I got creepy messages afterward.’ Moving house is already stressful.
It feels like women have to steel themselves in advance for an ordinary experience like this," she said in a phone interview. Concerns around women’s safety are prominent worldwide: Globally, almost one in three women experience physical or sexual abuse at least once in their life, United Nations figures show. "The last thing you want is to have to take on the anxiety of booking a stranger and not knowing what that's going to be like, if they're going to make you uncomfortable, not knowing if they're going to intimidate you," said Crawford.
"I don't just go and lift boxes for people, I am there as a big sister figure on the day," added the 29-year-old business coach and former theater producer. For Ellie, who was returning to her hometown from London due to rising rent and health concerns, the move was an added stress. In a stroke of luck, she spotted Hannah’s Facebook post and booked her.
"I was feeling really fragile. I'm just so grateful because it is such an emotional process. When people are moving it's not always positive, there's uncertainty at the time, and to have someone to help you with that is really incredible," she said in a phone interview.
With demand soaring, Crawford launched a nationwide network in August to hire more female removalists, making five figures that month alone. She said she expects to reach £50,000 ($66,000) a month in turnover with a 15 percent profit margin by the end of the year. Just 2 percent of Britain’s 900,000 tradespeople are women, according to 2023 research by economic consultancy Cebr and Kingfisher, which owns home improvement retailers Screwfix, B&Q and TradePoint.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
