Emma Redfern

Lucky Founders Club + Studio Self-Made

Emma Redfern is a brand strategist and the founder of Studio Self-Made and the Lucky Founders Club, a UK award-winning accelerator and membership community that helps ambitious founders build the personal brand, storytelling and visibility skills that open doors. In 2025, she was named Young Entrepreneur of the Year at the UK StartUp Awards, recognising the business and movement she has built around one idea: talent alone isn't enough; founders need to be seen and heard too.

Emma founded her first company, The Calming Club, a self-care and stationery brand, while still a student at Sheffield Hallam University, growing it to sell more than 10,000 products across 15 countries with no outside funding and no background in business. That experience of building a brand from scratch and learning to tell its story became the foundation for everything she has built since.

Studio Self-Made and its flagship community, the Lucky Founders Club, exist to help other founders do the same. Studio Self-Made's Creator-Founder Accelerator is an 8-week hybrid programme that gives underrepresented founders the personal brand, content strategy and storytelling skills to increase their visibility and opportunity. The Lucky Founders Club is an invite-only, monthly membership built on the belief that "luck favours the visible." Inside it, founders get weekly LinkedIn power hours, 20-minute masterclasses, speed mentoring and brand sprints designed to turn engagement into real opportunities: speaking slots, partnerships, press and funding. Members have landed national media features, won regional Young Entrepreneur titles, and grown audiences from zero into thousands of followers. Together, these programmes have supported more than 50 founders and freelancers and over 2,500 students and graduates, backed by partners including Virgin, Santander, Big Change and Nuffield Health.

Emma's work has been recognised nationally: alongside Young Entrepreneur of the Year, she has won Best Creative Business (Yorkshire & North East) at the UK StartUp Awards, is a Virgin Money Young Change Maker, a finalist and winners of Big Change's Big Education Challenge (2023 and 2024), a Theo Paphitis #SBS winner, and won the Community Champion award through Ingenuity Impact. She has also built a platform of her own, a 20,000+ strong LinkedIn following, sharing insights on content, entrepreneurship and personal branding, walking the same talk she teaches inside the Lucky Founders Club.

As a speaker, Emma is known for translating her experience building two brands from nothing into practical, actionable frameworks that any founder, creator or early-career professional can use to grow their visibility and credibility.