Victoria Armstrong stood before a room of her best friends.
The exquisitely dressed, high-heeled women complemented the artwork adorning the walls of Ann Connelly Fine Art in Baton Rouge, where the ladies gathered. But not all of the women were longtime acquaintances of Armstrong, founder of Curate for Women Who Work, a network of businesswomen and their supporters.
They were Curate Besties, angel investors looking to support female founders, who often struggle with access to capital. Funds pooled together from the group become prize money for the winner of a pitch competition at the annual Curate Conference. Armstrong recounted her own struggle to find investors to scale the conference, despite its success.
“They kept telling me ‘No, I wasn’t ready. We haven’t done enough,’” Armstrong said at a Curate Besties event this month. “Even though every conference was bringing 300-plus women. I was so confused.”
She solved the funding problem after asking friends and family for $1,000 donations, which gave birth to the Curate Besties model.
On average, women launch their businesses with about $75,000 in capital, according to the National Women’s Business Council. That’s less than half of the average funds that men use to start businesses. It’s a global issue, with a $1.7 trillion total funding gap for micro to medium-sized enterprises around the world, according the World Economic Forum.
Now in its fifth year, the Curate Conference is expanding into New Orleans as a natural next step for the business’s growth, Armstrong said. The multiday conference, set for Sept. 17-19 at Hyatt Regency New Orleans, brings female professionals together for professional and personal development, a combination that Armstrong says is critical for the workplace.
Sessions at this year’s conference will include professional development training on artificial intelligence, grant writing, experiential marketing campaigns and personal development classes on social styles, understanding hormone cycles and therapy.
“We have learned for many years that you keep your personal stuff at home, but you bring your personal self to work,” Armstrong said. “In order to be our best selves at work, we have to be our best selves mentally.”
Baton Rouge roots
Victoria Armstrong, Founder of Curate for Women Who Work, at the Ann Connelly Fine Art Gallery on Sunday, June 14, 2026 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Staff photo by Michael Johnson
Armstrong and her husband run video production company 4thFLR, which produces films sharing stories of businesses and creates visuals for brands and campaigns.
Founding Curate was a result of a calling, she said, dreaming of joining women together to teach and to learn from. She hosted the first conference, then called Curate Women in Marketing, with 114 women ranging from healthcare workers to business owners to college students.
The second conference brought more than double the attendees at the inaugural event. As the Curate network grew, Armstrong recognized a need for more space and decided to host the conference in New Orleans due to the city’s greater capacity for large, multiday events.
The conference has already garnered a national footprint with women attending from across the country, and Armstrong hopes to one day have the conference move to new U.S. cities each year.
But no matter where the Curate Conference goes, Armstrong is dedicated to keeping it headquartered in Baton Rouge, where she’s lived her whole life. She said the business landscape is “promising,” due to Baton Rouge’s strong culture and her experience building 4thFLR in the city.
But Baton Rouge needs to focus on retaining college students by creating opportunities that will make them want to stay, she said.
“I would never move Curate headquarters from Baton Rouge because there’s a lot of need here, but there’s also a lot of resources here,” she said.
‘I just want to see a girl win’
A previous Curate Conference
This year’s pitch competition at the annual conference will be the second ever and will focus on tech startups, with a $15,000 prize on the line, up from $10,000 the first year.
She named the program Curate Besties, symbolized by a pinky promise, because of how best friends show up and support one another, like how she’s seen female founders support each other. Though not all Curate Besties are businesswomen, some are simply women who want to support a female-owned business.
“They want to help fund whatever ideas that these women have that could be beneficial to them, or our children, or our jobs, or some of them are just like, ‘I just want to see a girl win. I have no attachment to this other than to see these women flourish,’” Armstrong said.
AnnaBeth Guillory, founder of beauty professional booking service Beauty Findr, won first prize at the first 2024 Curate pitch competition. She launched the Baton Rouge-based business in March 2024 as a way for clients to find and book hairstylists, makeup artists or tanning salons.
She had participated in other pitch competitions before but found that Curate offered training for contestants, unlike other contests. Participants worked through their pitch with consultants from business consultancy Success Labs and were able to meet with other founders prior to pitch day.
Guillory said the $10,000 prize helped her invest in technology and marketing to rebuild the Beauty Findr platform from the ground up. The platform is now available on the web and on the App Store and Google Play. Clients can now directly book with beauty professionals, in addition to the original model of submitting requests to a group.
The company has more than 2,700 clients and more than 200 businesses on the platform, and Guillory has become a Curate Bestie investor herself. Guillory said she wants to give back to others and help beauty professionals, like herself, build their clientele, a challenge she’s seen many young beauty professionals struggle with.
“When you’re an entrepreneur, just to hear someone say ‘I believe in you’ means a lot,” Guillory said.
Businesswomen community
Local business women gather to listen to Victoria Armstrong, Founder of Curate for Women Who Work, during the Curate Bestie Mixer at the Ann Connelly Fine Art Gallery on Sunday, June 14, 2026 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Staff photo by Michael Johnson
Laura Siu Nguyen, founder of annual event Night Market BTR and a Curate Bestie, has been a part of the Curate network for three years after first meeting Armstrong and her husband when they produced a promotional video for the Asian market event. She said she loves to support other women entrepreneurs, especially since most people in venture capital are men.
Only 11% of investing partners at venture capital firms are women and only 13% of venture capital funds go toward businesses with a woman on board, according to a 2019 Harvard Kennedy School report.
Curate has introduced her to other women who look like her, she said.
“We just want to see women thrive,” Nguyen said.
Ann Connelly, owner of Ann Connelly Fine Art, told the crowd in her gallery that her mother, her husband and a mentor helped her launch the business, which is in a predominantly male industry. It took her 5 years to launch the gallery, she said.
“The origin story of the business is that I had help from friends,” Connelly said at the event. “It’s so imperative for everyone that’s trying to launch and find their way to have a group of people that circle you and believe in you.”
