They Wouldn't Let Her Say 'Period'

Melanie Barr: Welcome to She Built It. I'm Melanie Bar. Period care has existed for decades and barely evolved. Lauren Wang decided to change all of that. She founded Flex Co. in 2016, and today Flex is the number one selling menstrual cup and disc in the US, available in over 30,000 retailers and the only maker of a disposable disc in the country. She is EY entrepreneur of the year for Los Angeles 2023 and former marketing leader at Coca-Cola and IBM. Lauren has been featured in TechCrunch, The New Yorker, and NPR. Lauren, thank you for being here. What problem were you determined

Speaker 2: to solve when you created the Flex Company? We set out to solve a couple of different problems. The first problem that I saw was that periods are extremely stigmatized. We don't talk about the period problems that we have. Periods have become less taboo over the last 10 years. But something that I heard a lot before starting Flex was that people just hate their periods. And when I say hate their periods, it's like a week out of every month. And we spend at least the majority of our adult lives menrating to tackle this issue of body education and destigmatizing periods.

Speaker 2: And on the other side is really a product issue. So at the core of why people don't like their periods, a lot of that can be tied back to having a negative product experience. And instead of blaming our products, we tend to internalize it and blame our body. So it was a two-pronged approach. One on the mission side and one on the product. And we want organic and good products for ourselves. And you think about all the

Melanie Barr: women in the world and we all go through this. And good for you for having these conversations because you're right, we need to have them cuz we all go through it. And I have a daughter and she's starting to go through these things. And I'm so happy that there's new products and new things for her today, too. And that we're having more of the conversations.

Melanie Barr: I love that. And I appreciate that you have that openness with your daughter to have those types of conversations. And we're hearing that more and more from dads, from moms, from all different types of people that are willing to teach young people about their bodies in a way that a lot of us didn't get the benefit of learning about. Maybe if you're lucky, you learned about periods in school. Fewer than half of the states in the United States mandate reproductive health education. So, a lot of people have never been taught about their own bodily functions. Periods are shrouded in secrecy and shame. And it shouldn't be that way. I've had this conversation with my daughter and it's interesting because it's been fairly recent, but I've said, "Think about it.

Melanie Barr: Every woman goes through this. Every woman. There's not a woman that doesn't." And for a while, she would say, "I don't want to go do this because I have to go through it." And I said, "It it shouldn't stop you from living your life or going on a trip or going to the beach or going to a hotel with

Speaker 2: friends." I totally agree. On the flip side, if you think about advertising for period care brands over the last decades, I mean, I don't know about you, but I grew up with commercials with the blue liquid and the women running around on the beach and their white bikini or in the tennis skirt and you're like, "Okay, let's let's be real." Doesn't feel realistic at all. I will be at home with my knee pad. Thank you very much.

Melanie Barr: Yes. Yes. What makes Flex different from traditional period care options?

Speaker 2: We consider ourselves to be a modern period care brand. talking about this family of better for you products that have kind of come up over the last 10 years. So that could include organics that could include reusable products, cups and discs and period underwear. These we consider modern period care.

Speaker 2: And Flex is well known for naming and building the menstrual disc category. And we now make the number one selling menstrual disc in the world as well as the number one selling menstrual cup. And we're really proud of those facts.

Speaker 2: All of our products are designed inhouse. They are manufactured in Canada. We're really proud of all of the R&D and attention and care that we put into every little feature and benefit of all of our products.

Melanie Barr: As your company scales, you mentioned where your products are made and the care that you put into everything. What's your biggest growth challenge that you're facing?

Speaker 2: Biggest growth challenge is advertisers shutting us down for talking about things that are just run-of-the-mill topics for us. So, if you think back to the early days of Facebook, brands are advertising all different types of things like alternatives for Viagra and talking about things that are pretty sexual and pretty racy. But when it comes to periods and menration, we had to fight to be able to show red blood instead of blue blood. We had to fight just to be able to say the word period across every different advertising platform you can think of. So that's Meta, Instagram, YouTube, Google, Amazon, every single platform we've had to fight. And what's so interesting is just yesterday we had a meeting about our ads from the last two weeks and how things were performing. And a bunch of our ads got disapproved. And what is so frustrating about that on two different platforms and for both of those platforms, we asked our account rep, "What is it that you want us to do? Tell us what the rules are. Tell us what the guidelines are and we will follow them."

Speaker 2: They couldn't tell us. They're just like, "Well, if somebody marks your content as inappropriate because they don't feel comfortable with a red liquid, then we're going to say that that's sexual content." And you're like, "Wait, how can content be inappropriate when it happens to every woman on the planet?" And think of all of the violence and the blood and violence that you see.

Melanie Barr: Oh, yeah. That's all over YouTube. I met a founder who has a company in men's sexual health and one of his investors

Speaker 2: literally came up to me at a conference and was like, "I can't believe you all have been able to build what you build because we know that there's a double standard. We can say literally whatever we want on all of the platforms and market our products and we know that you can't."

Speaker 2: I have a weekly podcast. I have 52 episodes and when I saw your company and your name come through, I thought absolutely yes. Because I had a feeling of what you're facing. You think about how many women are in the world, it should not be this way.

Melanie Barr: Yeah, I agree. I appreciate that. How are you thinking about visibility, which we were just talking about, as your category becomes more competitive, which hopefully it does.

Speaker 2: It's really important that more people are doing education, more people are talking about periods and vaginas and yeast infections and fertility and infertility and menopause and parmenopause and everything in between. Because the more of us that are speaking on these topics, the more apparent that the problems will become. And when problems are really apparent, the market is really good at developing solutions to solve those problems. And I have a hypothesis that there's been such a darth of innovation in period care. Not just because it's extremely difficult to make medical devices, but also just because the problems were buried. We've been told since we were young girls that this is a curse. You just have to grin and bear it. People are finally coming out and saying enough is enough. When you have a period that's that heavy and that painful, you need to get examined for PCOS or for endometriosis or for other medical issues. So again, the more there's a chorus of voices talking about women's health across the entire spectrum, the more we're going to further research and the more we're going to further advancements and solutions that are going to solve our problems. I was just on the soccer field and one of the daughters was asking her mom for Advil because she had cramps. And I remember thinking, what can be done to help eliminate that? Is it diet? Is it more exercise? And maybe there isn't really an answer cuz everyone's different. But it's interesting when you think about how to make lives better for women as it relates to that time of the month, to your period.

Melanie Barr: It's really ironic that you just said that story because my team took me to my first Angel City football club game yesterday. And for those of listeners who aren't familiar uh with Los Angeles, but that is our ladies soccer team.

Melanie Barr: They're amazing. And I had terrible cramps there. But because it's a stadium, I didn't bring my purse cuz you have to have the clear bag. And so I left my bag in the car and forgot. And I had terrible period cramps. So there's two different types of menstrual cramping. And I'm not a doctor, but there's cramps that happen before your period that are really hormonal, and that's typically like that low back

Speaker 2: pain. you feel the day or two or sometimes a few days ahead of your menstrual cycle and your hormones are changing and sending the signal to your body to shed the lining of your uterus.

Period cramps

Speaker 2: And then there's cramping that happens during your period that can be exacerbated by certain activities or by the products that you use. So a lot of doctors will say that um a couple of things that can help alleviate cramps.

Speaker 2: on the product side, it's been really interesting on this journey. A lot of people have told us that their cramps get worse when they use tampons. And that's not everyone. And we've talked to a lot of different OB/GYNs trying to understand what's causing that. Our best understanding is that the vagina is typically like this. And when you're holding a hard phallic object in between the two walls of your vagina, you can actually feel that pressure. And as your body is releasing the uterine lining, um, your muscles are contracting, but that tampon is almost acting like a plug. So you're unable to let that air and that flow naturally out. The flex disc was designed to move with your body and to flex with your body. That's why we named it flex. But it sits further up around your cervix, almost like the shape of a diaphragm, for example. So it covers your cervix, but it leaves your vagina free and clear. And that's why more than 70% of our customers say that they have fewer cramps when they use the disc versus when they used to use tampons. But again, none of those product changes are going to solve the premenstrual hormonal cramp. Maybe it was because I knew we were coming into this conversation, but yesterday I was at a high school and saw that they have all the free period care in the bathroom and I thought that's amazing

Melanie Barr: cuz it wasn't always that way.

Melanie Barr: No. And it's not that way everywhere. I absolutely love that. What part of town were you in?

Speaker 2: Um it was in Elsagundo in the high school and it said free and I thought how great.

Melanie Barr: Yeah. Period products should be free.

Speaker 2: absolutely everywhere with cramps. I guess I was lucky cuz I was pretty athletic throughout my whole life. So, I didn't experience that, but I know a lot

Melanie Barr: of family and friends who have. Yeah, I'm extremely athletic and I have debilitating cramps and they seem to

Speaker 2: have gotten worse after having kids. No, it's okay. It's funny. I just I have a heating pad here in the office. I have a heating pad that I keep at home and a

Melanie Barr: heating pad that I keep in my suitcase. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Hopefully, you feel better. It does. It's appropriate. I'm running a period care company.

Melanie Barr: Yes. How has your leadership changed from Coca-Cola and IBM to building Flex?

Speaker 2: Well, that was so early in my career. I was definitely more of a follower than a leader at those places. The biggest thing my leadership style has changed is I've learned to listen to myself more.

Speaker 2: So early on, investors commonly say, "Listen to your team. Trust your team."

Speaker 2: I listen to my team. I trust my team. I'm very trusting. And there have been certain moments in time where I didn't listen to myself. I didn't think certain thing would work or I wasn't quite sure about a new product that we were going to launch. And in the moments that I didn't listen to myself, I ended up regretting it over time. It was really important to me to not have an overcorrection or overreaction to that because I'm not always going to be right and I'm not always going to have the right answers. How we've solved for that is we've built process. When you're very early on as a founder, it's like you don't need or want a lot of process and you're probably only 5 to 10 people anyway. So there's not really a need.

Speaker 2: But as the company has grown and scaled, it's been really important that the team understands the parameters and the filters through which to be able to make specific decisions and when to bring things to me or when not to bring things to me. Um, and that's been really empowering for them and really empowering for me too because feels like we have the right gates in place so to speak to be able to accelerate our innovation and be able to make decisions more quickly and really have a large diversity of ideas and opinions that are part of the fabric of what makes our culture so strong and unique.

Melanie Barr: And it's great that you put those systems in place. It's also interesting that it is a muscle. Trusting that instinct is a muscle that everyone has to figure out how to build.

Melanie Barr: It's so true. What is one lesson in building a category changing consumer brand that more founders need to hear?

Speaker 2: Getting into retail is a dream for a lot of CPG companies and I would argue that retail absolutely make your company it's made ours but it can absolutely break your company and I've seen a lot of companies unfortunately that that's happened to. My advice to any early stage CPG founder is to always ensure that you have your marketing flywheel that's working online ahead of going into retail because even if the product is amazing and people really like it, if you don't have a cost-effective way to be able to market to people at scale, then at the point that you get into retail, you're not going to have the velocities that are going to be able to command that shelf space. And then you end up in a situation where the only way that you're marketing your product at shelf is discounting it. It should be part of the marketing mix but not the whole entire marketing plan. We initially launched DTC and we grew super super quickly. Tens of millions of dollars in just a few years. And at that point I felt like we had pretty much figured out the the marketing flywheel.

Target's pursuit

Speaker 2: But Target had been pursuing us since before we even launched. They heard about the product. They wanted to see more innovation in this category. and I flew out there two years in a row to say thank you but no thank you. We got to wait until we're ready. So the marketing flywheel was certainly a part of that.

Supply chain and finance

Speaker 2: And then the other piece of that was supply chain and finance because once you're outside of direct to consumer where people are ordering product and paying you right away with retail you have a whole different set of process process and order to cash fulfillment and you have to have a good strong finance person, a good strong supply chain team before you're ready to do mass retail.

Melanie Barr: And good for you for holding off until

Speaker 2: you were ready. Thanks. I appreciate that. It was a very controversial decision at the time because DTC was going so well and it was a completely different business. It's not just a new sales channel. None of us had any retail experience at all. So, we had to build a whole new team, a whole new way of operating. We made our business so much more complex and challenging. And then we also had to launch at Amazon in the same time because once you start selling in retail, you have to claim those Amazon SKs otherwise you'll get bad actors going and reselling your product on Amazon and you don't want that

Melanie Barr: happening. How are you infusing AI within your business today? I mean, I know AI is touching every business in different

Speaker 2: ways. Yeah, we were really early adopters of AI. I downloaded Taj PTF first week. it

Melanie Barr: came out to the public.

Speaker 2: Mhm.

Speaker 2: And so how we've used it has evolved over time and continues to evolve. But the most important thing has been normalizing it and training the team on it. And in the early days of being out in the marketplace, we got a lot of resistance from folks on the team who just didn't use it or didn't want to use it or were embarrassed to tell us that they weren't using it, but we could tell that they weren't using it.

Speaker 2: And so what we did was just say it's totally okay that you don't know how or you might be afraid of this thing or you might not know how to use it. So we want to encourage you is that you have an opportunity to learn on the job here and this is an important career skill for you. This is an important thing for the Flex company. This is important for you as a human being for the next job that you have after Flex and the job after that that you're learning how to use these tools and you actually have a real world application. You're getting paid to do it here. So that's pretty exciting. So first it was like this is actually for you and not just for us. It was just about empowering the team and helping people uncover the best ways that they can work with it in their day-to-day lives.

Melanie Barr: We talked a lot about business today. What brings you joy outside of your business?

Speaker 2: My children and my family bring a lot of joy to me. My daughter just turned six. My son just turned four. They're a lot of fun right now. It's a really good age. Outside of that, I love to run and lift and read, cook, travel, all the

Melanie Barr: things. You for everything that you're doing for women and the products that you're creating for women. Please share with us how and where we can find you.

Speaker 2: Oh, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking to you. So you can find us on Instagram, Tik Tok, anywhere that you have social media at Flex. It's F L EX and my link is in the bio everywhere.