Stella Has Launched In The UK!

For over two years, we’ve been proudly putting the needs of women first. As a challenger brand, we’ve been disrupting the Australian market as a purpose-led, pro-women insurance brand. 

But we’ve always had ambitions to impact women across the globe. Today, we’re thrilled to share that Stella has arrived in the UK!

That’s right, we’re shaking up the insurance game for women across the UK. To mark this exciting next step, we sat down with our Founder and CEO Sam White to dive into this next chapter for Stella, why she’s proud to be launching Stella UK and so much more. 

Why did you decide that launching Stella in the UK was the next step for the brand? 

“It was always the plan to take Stella global, along with widening our product offering, initially with insurance and eventually into other financial services. 

Australia was a perfect test bed to launch the brand – obviously with the UK being my home and with the insurance market being ten times the size, it makes perfect sense for this to be our second territory,” shares Sam.

How do you see Stella coming to life in the UK?

“The MVP launch of Stella UK will happen in November. It will see us initially just testing the customer experience with limited marketing channels. We want to make sure we get everything right experience-wise before pushing hard on the marketing.  

In Australia, we are able to price women differently from men (due to the better risk profile) but in the UK we will need to rely on product design, customer experience, technology, and customer connection to win people over.  

We will still be partnering with a charity working to end domestic abuse (as we did with WAGEC in Australia). We’re so excited to be teaming up with Flyanyway Foundation, and go one step further by including domestic abuse insurance as part of our policy. This will protect policyholders who find themselves a victim of this horrendous situation.

Stella UK will be very much focused on streamlining the customer onboarding, policy changes and claims process using technology to enable this, but we will also be looking for ways we can ensure predominantly female risks that perhaps haven’t been considered or catered for in the past,” explains Sam. 

What made you realise that Stella was a challenger brand that needed to disrupt the insurance industry in the UK? 

As Sam shares, “I’ve been in the UK insurance market for over 20 years, and whilst I love the industry and the majority of individuals in it, we are still very male-dominated and quite antiquated in a lot of the thinking and processes. 

I’m passionate about empowering women and creating fresh meaningful change in the industry. I do believe that we all build and solve problems that affect us on a general basis, and so it makes sense to me that bringing a more female perspective into the industry will result in a different kind of innovation.”

How do you feel about leading a global, female-first brand like Stella?

“Absolutely incredible. This is the business I feel I’ve been leading up to my whole career. 

I’m also passionate about creating more leaders behind me to push the brand further and farther than I could ever dream over the next few years.  

Dani Wallace who runs our partner charity Flyanyway has an expression: ‘we all do well when we all do well.’ This is a core principle for me for Stella.”

What impact are you hoping Stella will have on UK women? 

“Other than winning back some of the lost trust in insurance, I really hope it makes UK women start to question what else hasn’t been designed with them in mind.  

I also hope it helps inspire other budding female entrepreneurs to tackle some of their own problems using business as a solution. I’m also really hoping we can have a significant positive impact on victims of domestic and financial abuse,” shares Sam.

Are there any upcoming partnerships or initiatives you’re most excited about launching with Stella UK, and why?

“The Flyanyway Partnership – we’re all incredibly excited to support this foundation. 

In all honesty, I’m just excited to see Stella UK come to life. There’s been a lot of blood, sweat and tears from the whole team in getting over the line.  

The real magic, however, will be in how we build and evolve the brand from here. It’s an incredible time for us all and there’s a collective feeling that we are really creating something special.”