How the Sisterhood of Trades Built a Community for Tradeswomen, from a Snapchat Group to a Discord Server
Manufacturing Happy Hour
Recorded live at Fathom's Manufacturing Exchange at ARTISANworks in Rochester, New York, this episode of Manufacturing Happy Hour has host Chris Luecke talking with Nush Ahmed, CEO of the Sisterhood of Trades, and Brooke Laing, its chief strategy officer. The episode centers on one question: how do you build a real, engaged community in the skilled trades and manufacturing? The Sisterhood of Trades describes itself as a community for tradeswomen by tradeswomen. Its stated mission is to share the stories of real women at work and inspire the next generation of young women to pursue a skilled trade. Luecke frames the conversation as useful beyond women in the trades. He wants to draw out lessons that manufacturers can apply when building regional communities and engaging customers, partners, and their own teams.
The Mission and Who Does What
Asked to describe the organization as if over a drink, Nush Ahmed says its mission is "to empower the next generation of women in the skilled trades." As CEO, Nush leads the organization's operations.
Brooke Laing, the chief strategy officer, mainly handles engagement on the group's Discord server, which Brooke describes as the primary place the organization operates. For Brooke, the mission is about bringing people into the community, because "it is a community." Brooke drove in from Toronto for the event and uses that to make a point: there is community everywhere in this industry, and that message needs to reach the rest of the world.
A Wide Range of Trades, and Many Women Working Alone
Luecke notes that the two guests come from quite different corners of the skilled-trades world. Nush works in manufacturing and has moved from CNC operating to quality and now to marketing and enablement. According to Nush, the group chat represents more than 50 trades, from pipe welding and pipe fitting to ship fitting and mechanics. Brooke adds scaffolding to the list.
Brooke highlights a detail about the membership: quite a few women on the Discord are the only women they know of in their trade. Brooke describes that isolation as one of the main reasons for creating the Sisterhood.
From Snapchat to Discord
Brooke tells the origin story. Brooke was not a founding member but says they tell the story often. The group began around October or November 2024 as an idea and an unnamed Snapchat group chat. It outgrew Snapchat fast. As Brooke puts it, anyone who has had 250 people in a Snapchat group knows "your phone kind of just stops working." The group then moved to Discord, which can hold thousands of members in a single group-chat-style space. The name Sisterhood of Trades was officially founded in February 2025, so at the time of recording the organization was about a year old. Brooke describes it as the largest interactive group chat for women in the trades, run by women in the trades.
Who Joins: Current Tradeswomen, Students, and Career Changers
Luecke asks whether members are mostly already in the trades or whether some are using the community as a way in. He ties this to a question the industry keeps asking: how to get more people interested in manufacturing and the skilled trades while so many roles are hard to fill.
Brooke says many women join looking for other women who already understand the day-to-day on a job site or in a shop. The group also draws high school students and older women considering a career change who don't know where to start. They find the group on TikTok, Instagram, or LinkedIn, think it looks cool, and join the Discord. From there, Brooke says, the community has helped a few women get into the industry and has also helped women move from one trade to another.
Nush adds that the organization tries to help women grow within their industries, for example moving from a machining position into a managerial one. Many of the "curious members" are in high school or just learning about the trades, so the group pairs a lot of members with mentors. Nush stresses that these newcomers should learn from someone who actually works in the trades.
Social Media as a Recruiting Channel
Luecke contrasts the Sisterhood's approach with how manufacturing usually builds community, through sales calls, LinkedIn, and email. The group started on Snapchat and is active on TikTok, and he asks whether that is partly a demographic thing.
Nush says times are changing and people are realizing that "social media is a very real currency." Many people Nush has interviewed create content themselves, are passionate about it, and see it as a way to advance their careers. The organization therefore sees social media as a good way to reach people its members' age. Nush gives an example from the room: someone in the audience first connected with Nush on TikTok, and the event was the first time they met in person. For Nush, that shows how powerful social media can be.
Showing the Unfiltered Side of the Job
Luecke asks for actionable advice on using these platforms strategically. He offers his own benchmark: if a company's Instagram account only posts holiday greetings like "Happy 4th of July," that is not a strategic use of the platform.
Brooke says much of the industry's older generation doesn't realize how many younger tradespeople are on social media. Brooke and Nush push LinkedIn to their members and to people in general, but they also use TikTok heavily, and there the goal is to show the real side of the industry. "We don't sugarcoat anything," Brooke says. The reasoning is about retention as much as recruitment: if you want people to come into the industry and stay, you have to show them what the shop floor or job site is really like. Brooke's own content and the organization's content mostly show what a typical day looks like or how a particular process works. Breaking the work down for people who have never been exposed to it is, in Brooke's view, a good first step.
Serving Women at Different Stages of Life
Luecke observes that the conversation so far has had a youthful tilt, but the membership spans young women fresh out of school, trade school, or college as well as mothers and others at different life stages. He asks how the organization meets such different needs.
Brooke credits a team of highly engaged moderators who are in the server constantly and check in on members. The members have also built relationships with one another, which Brooke says was the whole goal of the Discord server. The point was not to elevate the founders or talk about their own work but to help members connect. The organization recently added an "allies" update, which lets people outside the core membership, such as the event's audience, join the server. Members are encouraged to network with allies and create their own opportunities and relationships through them.
How the Discord Server Is Organized
Nush explains the structure. Discord lets the group split conversations into separate thread rooms. There are rooms for work-related topics, including one literally called "work-related," as well as rooms for PPE and safety. Every trade in the server has its own thread, and when someone from a trade the team hadn't thought of joins, they create a new thread for it.
The server also uses roles. When members join, they can choose roles for being a mom, liking sports, or "any of the 19 million other things we have threads for," as Nush puts it. Roles make targeted outreach possible. Nush's example: to connect with a mom in Texas, you can tag both the mothers role and the Texas role, and people with those roles get a notification on their phone. Nush says this keeps things organized and lets members go straight to a topic or find people in a specific area. Nush also tells the audience that Discord is very similar to Slack in how it is built.
Why Discord Worked Better Than Snapchat
A show of hands suggests most of the audience knows Discord. Luecke summarizes the appeal: a community of more than a thousand women can be segmented by trade, location, and more. He says he has been telling manufacturers that Discord is an underused tool for running communities, whether local to Rochester or upstate New York or national, such as a tooling association. He asks what has made it work for the Sisterhood's mission.
Nush's answer is organization. On Snapchat, questions about welding, PPE, and apprenticeships all piled up in one stream, and in ten minutes there could be around 130 messages, so questions got lost. On Discord, each topic has its own room. Members can use the search bar to find a past conversation and who sent it, or find people by role and see their messages. Nush calls it "so much more powerful." Discord also supports voice chat, and the team occasionally hops on to talk with members directly, which Nush says is really nice.
Best Practices for Community Management
Luecke asks each guest for one general best practice, whether the community is tradespeople or local manufacturers.
Brooke's biggest tip is to have a team behind you that you can work with and trust, because doing it alone is hard. Brooke describes the daily work of talking with more than a thousand tradeswomen and allies and trying to make sure the questions and prompts don't always target one group. The aim is to include every part of the community.
Nush's tip is to listen to your people. Nush thinks people are "sick and tired" of social media posts that aren't followed by action. When members raise something, they will most likely see it within the next week in an article, a podcast, or some written form. That tells members their experiences aren't being ignored and are being discussed actively. Nush believes this is what built the organization's trust with its members.
First Impressions of Upstate New York
Since the event is in Rochester and Nush recently moved to the area, Luecke asks for Nush's early impressions of the local community. Nush says a good friend named Tuck, now a mentor, welcomed them right away and has been teaching Nush to TIG weld and mill in his garage. In his free time, Tuck also volunteers with Rust Belt Robotics, a local robotics club. Nush finds it inspiring to see people give their free time to teach the next generation about manufacturing, robotics, carpentry, working with their hands, and communicating effectively.
Stories That Show What the Community Does
To close, Luecke asks each guest for a moment that shows the power of a community like the Sisterhood.
Brooke points to the shirts Brooke and Nush are wearing, which a member who Brooke believes lives in Maine sent them. Members regularly exchange letters and packages as another way to connect. Even when they live in different countries, as Brooke does in Canada, a sticker or a note in the mail is one of Brooke's favorite parts of the community. Luecke picks this up as a tip for manufacturers: physical mail is underrated, and he sends postcards as thank-you notes. He suggests it as a way to engage partners or customers.
Nush's story is similar. Reading a conversation in the server, Nush saw a member mention she wasn't having a good week. Another member jumped in and said, "Hey, send me your address and sending you a hoodie." Nush says you could see the energy shift in the conversation. For Nush, that moment shows that "all it takes is really one person to, you know, notice you and make you feel better."
Luecke closes by repeating his framing. The conversation was about an organization of tradeswomen, but he says the same approaches apply across manufacturing: engaging communities, customers, and your own teams.
We've helped a few women get into the industry, but we've also helped women who are looking to move from one trade to another.
We also have a lot of members that we pair up with mentors. We find it's really important that they learn from someone who is in the trades.
This episode is all about community building in manufacturing. More specifically, it's about the Sisterhood of Trades. The Sisterhood of Trades is a community for tradeswomen by tradeswomen with a mission to share the stories of real women at work to inspire the next generation of young women to pursue a skilled trade. We're joined by Nush Ahmed and Brooke Laing, CEO and chief strategy officer, respectively, of the Sisterhood of Trades.
In this episode, we'll get more into their mission, but we'll also cover how they're serving such a diverse range of members and tradeswomen so effectively, how they're building community, and finally, we'll cover some very tactical aspects of what manufacturers can learn from Nush and Brooke about community building in the industrial space in general.
This is one of two episodes recorded live in Rochester at Fathom's Manufacturing Exchange. Make sure you check out Fathom for your contract manufacturing needs. And don't miss our other episode recorded there, the art of precision manufacturing. Seriously, awesome event all around and a very hip and art-focused venue called ARTISANworks where we recorded this. For those of you watching the video, hopefully you catch some of that.
If you want to connect with our sponsor, Fathom, Nush, or Brooke, make sure to check out the show notes page at manufacturinghappyhour.com and definitely check out the Sisterhood of Trades. With that, let's head to Rochester, New York, and meet up with Nush and Brooke.
Before we get started, I do want to give a round of applause for another very important organization that without them, we wouldn't be doing this today. Let's hear it for Fathom Digital Manufacturing. Give them a big round of applause.
If you haven't yet, they're well represented here. Make sure you chat with them. They're actually going to be in our second podcast as one of the panelists. But make sure you get some time with them and give them a big thank you for tonight's very cool celebration and probably the coolest spot we've ever done a Manufacturing Happy Hour interview, or maybe any manufacturing podcast for that matter.
But if you're not familiar with Manufacturing Happy Hour, I'll be super quick. My name is Chris Luecke. I'm the host of Manufacturing Happy Hour. It's a show that we're celebrating our 10-year anniversary, and we talk about tech and manufacturing and the trades the way it would as if you're having a drink with someone, right? It's all about getting candid and talking about what's working, what could be better, what are the strengths of different regions. And one through line you'll see in our podcast tonight will be around what are the strengths of upstate New York manufacturing. So we're definitely going to touch on that.
But without further ado, let's jump into our first interview with Brooke Laing and Nush Ahmed from Sisterhood of Trades. Welcome. And I think the only appropriate question to start, Nush, maybe if you want to lead off, and then Brooke, if you want to bring it in after that. How do you describe the mission of Sisterhood of Trades as well as what you each do for the organization? As if you're having a drink with someone. Nush.
Awesome. Is this on? Can y'all hear me? Okay. Beautiful.
Thumbs up.
Thank you so much for having us on. I'm Nush Ahmed, the CEO of Sisterhood of Trades, and I again serve as the CEO. So, I kind of lead our operations. Our mission is to empower the next generation of women in the skilled trades. And that's how I would introduce it if I was to have a drink with somebody.
Brooke, what might you add to that?
My name is Brooke. I serve as the chief strategy officer for the Sisterhood. So, I basically kind of head the engagement aspect of our Discord server because that's where we mainly run. And aside from that, our mission I would say is just really kind of trying to bring everybody into the community because it is a community. Like myself, I'm from Toronto actually, so it was a bit of a drive today. But there's still community everywhere in this industry. And I think that's just kind of a message that we need to relay to the rest of the world.
So, I'd love to hear a bit of the origin story around Sisterhood of Trades because all things considered, this is a relatively new organization, relatively new community, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you both represent two pretty different aspects of the skilled trades world. So, maybe as you share the origin story, can you also share just the range of different trades that are represented in this organization, just to paint a holistic picture for us? Nush, do you want to lead this one off again?
So, I work in manufacturing and I've went from CNC operating to quality and now to marketing and enablement. But we have over 50 trades represented in our group chat, from pipe welding and pipe fitting to ship fitters and mechanics. And yeah, I lowkey forgot the second part of that question, and I'm not going to lie. So, Brooke, you could pick it up for me.
Yeah, along with obviously all of those trades that we have, we have like scaffolding, and I feel like there's a lot of different trades represented. There's quite a few women in our Discord who are the only women that they know of in their trade. So that was another kind of really big point of creating what we created with the Sisterhood. The Sisterhood of Trades started, I believe, in October of 2024. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Yeah, around October, November. And it was just a thought at that point.
Yeah. So, it didn't even have a name yet. It was just a Snapchat group chat. I actually wasn't one of the founding members, but I do tell this story quite often, so I can do it pretty well off the top of my head. But it started off on Snapchat, and if any of you have Snapchat, you know that when you get 250 people in a group chat, your phone kind of just stops working. So, from there, they moved it to Discord, where you can have thousands of members in a kind of group chat. So our whole thing is that we're the largest interactive group chat for women in the trades by women in the trades. But the name was officially founded in February of 2025. So we're about a year old now.
I'll maybe get into the Snapchat aspect about this a little later in the conversation, but one of the questions I do want to ask is, the women that are joining that are part of this, I'm curious to know, were they already in the trades in most cases? Is there somewhere they join and they're getting into the trades? And the reason I ask this question is, as an industry, we're always asking how do we get more people interested in manufacturing, in skilled trades, and all of these roles and positions that we're having challenges filling right now. So maybe if you have a story, I'm curious, and because, Brooke, I think I've heard it on your podcast before, where there are women that have joined your organization that were doing something else but are now in the trades. Can you share a bit more about that?
Yeah, so a lot of the women that do come in are looking for a community of women who kind of already understand what we go through day-to-day on the job site, in the shop, whatever it might be. But we do have quite a few high school age students or, you know, even just older women that are looking to make a career change that kind of don't know where to start, and they see us on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever it might be, and think what we're doing is cool. So they join the Discord, and then kind of from there, we've helped a few women get into the industry. But we've also helped women who are looking to move from one trade to another as well. So...
And we try to help train women on growing in their industry. So growing from a machining position to a more managerial position. We also have a lot of members that we pair up with mentors because a lot of our curious members are, like Brooke said, in high school or just now learning about the trade. So we find it's really important that they learn from someone who is in the trades.
So you talk about there's mentorship, there's not only helping people get involved in the trades, but it's also advancing in their careers. You're creating a space where they can connect with peers. One thing that I think is really important to touch on is you're leading this community, and I think one of the things we're always trying to do in manufacturing is how do we strengthen our respective manufacturing communities, whether it's the regional community, whether it's, you know, the tooling association chapter in the area, a lot of different aspects to this. But you've highlighted how you're on TikTok, the origins are from Snapchat, and things like that. You know, how in the world did you get that to work as a way to attract people in? Because I think in our world, we often think, hey, we've got to go make a sales call, we've got to interact on LinkedIn or email. But you've found some really innovative ways and different places to engage your members. Is it partially an age thing, the demographics? What are your thoughts around that?
I think times are changing and people are realizing social media is a very real currency. A lot of people I've interviewed also create content, and it's something that they are really passionate in. It's something that they can actually excel their career in. So, we figured it's a great tool to get in front of people our age. There's actually someone in the audience that I met from TikTok, and we didn't know each other prior to this, and it's my first time actually meeting her in person today. So, it just goes to show you how powerful social media really is.
What would be your actionable advice to the audience out here, the folks that listen to the podcast afterwards, on how to leverage some of these platforms that they might not be leveraging today, but how to leverage them strategically, right? One of the things I always say is, if the only thing your company is using an Instagram account for is to post, you know, happy holidays type thing, happy 4th of July, right? That's not a strategic use of that platform. But, you know, Brooke, maybe if you want to lead this one off, what would be your advice on how people can use these platforms strategically, whether it's for building a community in manufacturing, in the industrial space or the trades, or engaging prospects, partners, things like that?
I think a lot of the older generation in the industry doesn't realize that there are as many younger generation people in the trades on social media. So, like, Nush and I, obviously we push LinkedIn to a lot of our members and to people in general, but we also use our TikTok a lot, and we're trying to kind of show the real side of the industry. We don't sugarcoat anything. If you want people to come into the industry and stay, you have to show them what the real world is really like on the shop floor, on the job site, anything like that. So a lot of our social media and my personal social media is just showing, you know, this is what I do day-to-day or this is what this process looks like. So just really trying to break it down for people who may have never been exposed to it before is a really good first step.
One question that I have around how you serve your community is, as I understand it, I would say our conversation so far has had somewhat of a youthful spin to it, right? Talking about the social media platforms. But you're serving women in the trades that are in different phases of their lives. There are young women right out of school, trade school, college. There are individuals that are mothers in your organization. How do you go about serving all of those different types of women in your organization to make sure the group is serving their needs for where they are in their phase of life?
So, we actually have a really amazing team of very engaged moderators who are in our server constantly, and they're basically checking in on our members as well. And our members are also really great. They have built their own relationships with each other. And that was the whole goal with our Discord server. It wasn't just to elevate ourselves and talk about, you know, what we do. It was to help them build relationships with each other. And now with the addition of our allies update, now we can have people like yourselves on our server. Now that we have them added, we also encourage our sisters to connect with them, network with them, create your own opportunities, you know, and your own relationships through there. So that's one way. Do you want to pick up?
We also have on Discord, I don't know if anybody uses Discord, but you can kind of separate everything into individual thread rooms. So we have the work-related ones, obviously; we literally have one called work-related. But then we also have ones for PPE, for safety. We have a different thread room for every single trade that's in our server, and if we have a new trade come in that we didn't think of, we create a thread for them. We also have roles as well. So when you come into the server, if you're a mom or if you like sports or any of the 19 million other things we have threads for, you can select that role. So, for example, if I was trying to connect with a mom in Texas, I could tag mothers and I could tag Texas, and they would get a notification to their phone. That way, it kind of keeps everything organized. So, if you're looking for something specific, you can get right there, or if you're looking to kind of talk to somebody in that area as well.
Actually, if you guys have used Slack before, Slack is very similar to Discord. Same build, same everything.
Yeah, I was actually going to ask, because I have another question for you that's more of a tactical question around Discord, but also a more general question around community management after that. Quick show of hands in the audience: who is familiar with Discord? I'm very curious to see. Okay, so, you know, that's nice. I mean, that's a majority of the folks out there, and I think the Slack comparison is great. I think that's a tool a lot of folks use. I mean, the way I look at it, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it's a way you can have basically a large community. You have over a thousand women that are now part of this organization, but you can segment it in different ways, where it's the different type of trades, it's, you know, you can have it location-based as well. Can you share the strength of having leveraged a platform like that as your community hub? Because I've been telling manufacturers I think that's actually kind of an underleveraged tool, again, if you're running a community that's local to, let's say, Rochester, New York, or upstate New York manufacturing, or, you know, maybe it's national tooling, for example. What has made that a platform that has allowed you to achieve your mission of connecting and engaging and amplifying women in the trades?
The organization. Discord is so organized. In our Snapchat, we were getting lost with questions for welding, questions for PPE. People were asking about apprenticeships, and you would go 10 minutes and you'd have like 130 messages. With Discord, everything's in a specific room. You can find it easily. You can actually search in the search bar and find the conversation, find who sent it, find people by a role, and see what messages they sent. It's just so much more powerful. And you can also have voice chat sessions. So, we do that every now and again. We hop on voice chat and actually physically talk to our members, which is really nice.
So one thing I want to ask, I promised it was a two-part question. So the more general aspect: you've talked about the benefits of a place like Discord, and I would say an action for anyone listening to this, it's a worthwhile tool to check out if you are
trying to manage and organize your community. But what would be a general best practice that you would share with the audience around effective community management? You know, I think we've talked about a tool like Discord as one area, but maybe it's something we've talked about, maybe it's something we haven't touched on. Brooke, what would be one best practice you'd offer when it comes to engaging a community of folks, whether it's in the trades, whether it's local manufacturers in the area? What would be your tip?
My biggest tip would definitely be to have a team behind you that you know you can work with and that you know you can trust, because trying to do all of that on your own is definitely not easy. Like trying to talk to over a thousand tradeswomen and allies every single day and make sure that we're, you know, asking questions that don't just target one specific group all the time. Trying to make sure that you include every kind of aspect of the group at all times, really.
Nush, anything on your end?
I think you really have to listen to your people. I think people are sick and tired of, you know, seeing the social media post and not seeing action or seeing actionable items. When we talk about something to our members, most likely they'll see it in the next week in an article or on a podcast or maybe even written down somewhere so that they know we're talking about this actively. Like, your experiences, the things you go through aren't being ignored. We're bringing them up constantly. I think that's what really built our trust with our members.
Nush, I have one more question for you and then one more question for both of you as we wrap this up. But since we're in upstate New York right now in Rochester, Nush, you've recently relocated up here, and we've been talking about the Sisterhood of Trades, but I'd love to get some of your first impressions on what the community is like here in upstate New York.
So, like you said, I just moved up here and immediately I was welcomed by my good friend Tuck, who's my mentor now. He's been teaching me how to TIG weld and mill in his garage. But in his off time, he also volunteers with Rust Belt Robotics, which is a robotics club here in the area. And it's amazing seeing all those people come together in their free time and teach literally the next generation about manufacturing, robotics, carpentry, how to work with their hands, and how to communicate effectively. It's been really inspiring to work with him. So, shout out Tuck.
All right. And I know we're going to be talking more about the community here in upstate New York as we celebrate the industrial community here in upstate New York later in the conversation. But to wrap this up, you know, you've both been working with Sisterhood of Trades for a while. I'd love to hear one of the moments, could be a short story, could be just a moment where you saw a connection take place. What's a story that illustrates the power of a community like Sisterhood of Trades?
Yeah, I want to go first. One of my favorite things is, for example, these shirts that Nush and I are wearing today were sent to us by one of our members who lives in Maine, I'm pretty sure. But yeah, so all the time we're sending out letters, we're receiving letters, packages, all that stuff, just because our community wants to connect with each other in another way, right? Like we might be in different countries, for me especially, but it's still a really nice way to connect, whether it's just a sticker in the mail or just a note or something like that. That's one of my favorite things about it.
I think that's a great tip, because I think sometimes we miss the power of actual mail. I try to send postcards as my thank-you notes and things like that. So, if you're looking for a strategy to engage a partner or a customer, whomever it is, that's a great tip, and I love hearing how that's playing out within Sisterhood of Trades.
Yeah, actually bouncing off of that, literally the same thing. I was reading a conversation in our server and one of our members wasn't really having that good of a week, and she just mentioned that, and another one of our members hopped in and was like, "Hey, send me your address, I'm sending you a hoodie." And you see the energy shift, and all it takes is really one person to, you know, notice you and make you feel better. And I think that's kind of what that exemplifies for me.
Well, I appreciate you sharing your stories, examples of what's been working within Sisterhood of Trades. Like I've said for everyone out there, we've been talking about, you know, an organization of tradeswomen today, but this applies to a lot of other areas within manufacturing: how you can engage your communities, customers, your own teams, etc. So, hey everyone, let's give a big round of applause for Nush and Brooke. Thank you for joining us to kick off the party.
Thank you so much. This was awesome.
Hey folks, thank you for listening. Make sure to check out the show notes page at manufacturinghappyhour.com for all resources mentioned in this episode, and make sure to subscribe to Manufacturing Happy Hour wherever you get your podcasts. Stay innovative, stay thirsty. We'll catch you back here on the podcast real soon. Cheers.
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