The Truth About Pads No One Talks About | Here We Flo | S06E03

0:00On this week's episode of Getting to Grow, we have the amazing Susan Allen, who is the founder of Here We Flo, and the first period brand I've had on the pod, so super excited to get into it and learn and hear all about you. So, would you like to introduce yourself? Sure, what can I say? Okay, so I'm Susan Allen. I'm co-founder and chief brand officer for Hair We Flow. So I oversee all things marketing, brand, culture for the business, and then share all the co-foundery things coming in with the mad ideas and all of that. And she'll give you the two-minute brand story. Absolutely, I want to hear it all.

0:40So as you can hear, I am American, but technically the British-American founder because my family is from Montserrat. in the Caribbean, so I do have a British passport. Oh my gosh, yeah, of course. I learned about that volcano at geography A-level. Oh, yes. Yeah, that's my link to it. Just popped off in 98. Yeah. And they shut things up. And so the story goes, I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, in the States, and have always worked in sort of like the non-profit social justice space, but was curious about business. so applied to the Global Masters in Management program at the London School of Economics.

1:22On the other side of the U.S. in California, my future co-founder, love of my life, Platonic Solmay, Tara Chandra, was growing up in what is now Silicon Valley, so in the Bay Area Mountain View. Proper, like hipster, hippie. When I met her, half her head was shaved. practically invented kombucha is what I tease her about and she was working in the music industry and had deals in Germany and in Japan but was feeling really like most of her career was being controlled by men and she wanted to learn more about business and sort of be empowering so the two of us met in class the first day sat next to each other Alan Chandra fell in instant best friend love.

2:09We're going to the Louis together between classes. And I'm like, forget the PayPal mafia. Let's start the feminist mafia. Let's start a business together. And she's like, yes, absolutely. Let's do that. What is our moneymaker going to be? I'm having such a hard time finding organic tampons. Because at the time, you could only find them in like a Planet Organic or another small health food store. And when she was living in LA, there's a Whole Foods on every block. so you always had access to them. And we were having this chat and we're like, you know, there's clean beauty products, there's plant-based milks, there's organic baby wipes, anything that you need, there's a clean alternative for it.

2:47But if you need something for your intimate health, you were stuck with these larger conventional brands that were using petroleum-based plastic products that could be found with pesticides and all kinds of things that you don't want to put in the most absorbent area of your body. And so, because we were in business school, we were like, right, sustainable, affordable, accessible, adorable. And the sustainability piece is really around, you know, the average user uses 11 ,000 of these products in their lifetime. Wow. And they're made, conventional products are sort of like 95 to 100 % petroleum plastic that's going into landfill, and it will be here for as long as we are and beyond.

3:27So if we could just create a sustainable swap, for people to use, it would have such an upsides impact on the environment and on our health because it's made from healthier products. And then from a brand side, so you can see the tampons come in an ice cream tub. I noticed that. I love it that they come in an ice cream tub. That's so cool. We just wanted to bring some light. We say that our brand voice is funny, feminist, and fierce. It's really sort of trying to get rid of the shame and stigma that surround us. So these are the period products, but we also have sensitive bladder and sexual wellness products as well and all these areas carry such a heavy stigma with them so we just use humor to sort of break the ice and have the conversation the products look interesting when you read the copy it says hello gorgeous yeah i really love that it's such a better sort of like user experience yeah um and then people can like talk about it with their friends but it's really starting to like break that and drive conversation and drive change so our mission is to make people feel crazy confident in their messiest moments yeah we really want to be the friend for them to sort of go on that sustainable um and less stigmatized journey basically i mean how like was it perceived when i guess you went and told your friends and your family i'm gonna start this kind of business so we were lucky because we were doing our masters so our 17 male classmates very tired about hearing about tampons and bags by the time.

4:55I couldn't imagine. And then Tara did her dissertation on the business case because at the time, Dollar Shave Club was super popular. And we're like, periods are cyclical. Subscriptions are cyclical. Perhaps this is it. And looking at it and talking to people who have periods, it's like, I don't know when it's coming. It's very much a habit or a convenience-driven purchase. And so that really influenced us from the beginning that this was something we had to focus on for retail. and so we always had the aim of it being like mainstream brick and mortar um which when we had a lot of our competitors sort of started as z to c and then had to try to switch over to to going into retail but that was our aim from the very beginning and part of why we designed the products the way that they were i sort of said to tara it's gonna be a long time before we can afford a billboard we need to make the product one and so that's why they really stand out on shelf they definitely stand that on shelf because the period aisle is a weird one in the supermarket or the boots or wherever you're shopping it but it is like you don't like hanging around in the aisle you kind of go and you get out but actually this would make you hang out more in the aisle they're cool like i the first thing i noticed was the fact that it's an ice cream tub and to be honest like i would not pick that up thinking it was a tampon so actually if i walked around with that in the supermarket nobody would be like oh she's holding tampons because it is a bit to be which is ridiculous yeah it shouldn't be of course but it's not in the conventional what you think it should be 100 and that's my favorite feedback that we get from mums that are buying for their daughters is she used to hide all her period care under the sink but now she keeps it up yeah and so it's the small ways that we're chipping away definitely so in the really early days when you were kind of like figuring out i guess the sourcing of the materials how how did you go about all that Yeah, so Tara is my lovely bookworm.

6:42So she started with like the FDA register, found all the manufacturers and basically politely and persistently just like booked them until they sent us out samples. And then we were able to share that with friends and try it ourselves and figure out who we would want to work with when we launched the business. So it was a lot of trial and error. And then eventually we went out and like visited them and looked at the factories and all of that. So we had a sort of set business plan when we left school, but it took us a couple of years to sort of get the courage to actually launch the business. And actually a couple of our classmates were the ones that really encouraged it.

7:21Like, who was so shy about all of this? And I remember Tara and I had lunch with him, and he took like a tampon out of the thing and opened it in the restaurant, and I was just like, we have come so far with you. Yeah. And so we did a Kickstarter at the end of 2017 and raised 14 ,000 pounds, produced 6 ,000 of those bad girls, and then literally sold them into our local shops in Hackney and Islington, just like, do you want to buy a case of 12 of these? and so it was very very like side hustle for the first couple years just me and Tara trying to find product market fit and learning how to sort of grow up in retail right because she was living in Clapton at the time and so the man that owned the off license across the street was like you come unload avocados I'll talk to you about how I order from my distributor and then when it was in there he's like people are looking at it but everyone's confused why there's ice cream in the middle of the aisle you need you need to put a sign or something here so that's how we learned about point of sale and so when we launched in boots sort of end of 2019 early 2020 we knew to ask for like shelf trays and things like that yeah that's where you're able to communicate with the customer so it's been one long journey of learning that was very trial-of-error yeah but actually like a lot of the founders that come on the podcast will say the same thing like in the beginning the kind of naivety is your superpower because it allows you to learn and absorb and just like keep learning and make mistakes but you know learn from them and then kind of keep going 100 % and so you've kind of found your manufacturer you're selling what happened when you sold out to all the kind of local shops um so we just kept building so we started with like the first 10 and then it was 30 we started going and doing like bristol foods um tara went out with the table and found like you'd have customers that would come in and it's when you're learning about demographics of different shops and so um really lovely women are coming in and they're like oh no i'm done with that and she's like well you know what kind of product would you actually use and that's part of what went into us starting a sensitive bladder range right so it's there's always an opportunity if you're able to speak to customers to sort of understand that and what we always wanted to do as a business was to meet our customers where they what were in and it could be in their sustainability journey or um just in their product journey or in their journey of like getting out of the shame and stigma whatever it is and so really understanding their need and being able to um to sort of answer for that yeah and i don't know enough about like period care really so talk to me about like the big conglomerates and why their products aren't gift for us and the kind of benefits of having you so they the conventional box of pads or bag of pads has the same amount of plastic as four plastic carrier bags so it's just it's so it's plastic wrapped in plastic wrapped in plastic which is why if you're using it kind of feels like you're wearing a nappy it's basically basically um and it's made from like the tampons are made from synthetic fibers so this was a conversation that Tara and I had actually because I didn't know what an organic tampon was I was like what is that it sounds like a scam like why would my tampon need to be organic and she's like what you're using is not you think it's cotton because it's bleached white and it feels kind of cotton but no it's made from like rayon and other synthetic fibers and what happens is when it's inside you um those fibers sort of shed outward and then that can be left inside you or can cause tiny micro tears which is what leads to like toxic shock syndrome um but cotton or an organic cotton sort of clings to itself when it gets wet and so there's been a zero percent incidence rate of toxic shock syndrome with those so they're much better for you um they're not they're sort of like farmed in a very clean way so you don't have pesticides or any of those things being exposed to.

11:29And then for our pads, our pads are made with bamboo, which is a super sort of sustainable material because it grows really quickly, it doesn't require much water, the leaves fall and sort of self-fertilizes, and we use edge-grown bamboo so we're not stealing any panda food. It's all extra. And then it's so good for sort of like busting carbon emissions and but from a user experience it feels really lovely it's soft and nice and but it's very absorbent because it holds four times its weight and so when cotton gets wet it sort of like it expands well when you have a pad with bamboo sort of stays flat so that's like people love our pad because it's such a great user experience it's such a different one compared to this very plastic pad that like you know our customers have said they've had rashes or irritation because then you have that netting across the top that can like irritate your skin um so it's just you use what you have because you don't know any better and these market leaders control like the biggest company you can think of owns like 90 percent of market share and so there just wasn't an alternative um and you when you first get your period or your parents coming up in school you get like the free sample pack or it's what your mom grew up using and so you just use it as well so it's really our mission is to come in and really disrupt that so people understand the alternatives and the benefits of it and that's such a hard market to disrupt i can imagine because you're right it's incredibly habitual like i totally just had the free start of public school yeah that's what happened the kind of big guys came in and i remember they did like almost like a mini it's like a talk on it it was it wasn't very long I was in like PSHE or whatever, and we were given kind of samples, and then, yeah, my whole life it was that.

13:24So actually, is there a plan to kind of go into schools and do more of an educational piece on it? So that takes resource, but that is a goal for us, is sort of like the break the cycle initiative that we want to do. Where we've been able to do some of that, actually, is partnering with sports. So last year, we did a collaboration with the Nike Sports Club. Amazing. St. George's Park and we had 600 girl footballers from age 8 to 16 and just like talking to them about their periods and the menstrual cycle and period tracking for the older girls and gave them like lots of samples but just helping them understand not only their body but also what the menstrual cycle means and so like you're feeling amazing in your follicular phase that's when you want to be training harder and trying tricks but in your luteal phase you want to sort of like do the bare minimum and just get through it because yeah your body's like going through it and just just the sort of like understanding what it is and what that means they found to be so powerful and then also alongside we had 600 coaches there and talking to them and trying to get them shake the stigma that they have because obviously their players are looking up to them that's the first sort of like port of call that they're going to and them not treating it like it's this dirty word is really a powerful impression for them to make on their players so we use avenues like that to sort of like talk to girls earlier but also yeah just being able to reach that audience at that age.

15:04Yeah that's key isn't it because when they're influenced at a young age as you said as we've said it's habitual so then they tend to kind of continue so when you when you launched you launched straight into kind of shops you didn't have a dc right or did you have dc as well we had as well we've always been omnichannel but it was a very small like fulfilled out of our shops but we when we got the boots account we're like okay great we're a real business now so we raised a seed around and hired our first two employees and closed that round February 2020 of course we did everything shuts down a month later it's like a 22 ,000 wait list to try to get on boots.com because nothing's set up for e-commerce so our Amazon sales went from like zero to seven thousand pounds which is so much for us at the time but luckily or unluckily thank god you had your Amazon shop front that and then like COVID wasn't a real thing in the US and we got pulled over there and were able to sort of like build up up and down the west post in smaller health food shops there and smaller chains so we got to 600 or 700 doors and eventually went into whole foods so we're full chain with whole foods and with sprouts in the u.s okay and then our sexual wellness line is in 800 900 cbs stores around the uni towns But eventually things opened back up here and we continued to scale with foods and Holland and Barrett.

16:35Superdrug came on shortly after that and we really grew quite steadily with that set of stores. WHMS Travel as well. That was our first national account for WHMS Travel. And just sort of grow steadily until we could prove ourselves and get the attention of grocery. and so last year was a massive year for us because we launched with Tesco and Sainsbury's. Amazing. And then the beginning of this year, Tesco also took our Sensitive Bladder and Sexual Wellness Lines triple distribution. And so that's been a huge focus because that's where 70 % of people buy these products. So that's been... Wow, so you scaled like incredibly quickly, really.

17:19Like, I know it might not think it from like day... I know. Yeah. It's funny that, isn't it? like the 10 year overnight success like it from the day that kind of initially that conversations were happening but from what you just said it all sounds like it happened but obviously it didn't but what was someone like the biggest challenges in the early days were there some massive mistakes you made where you wish you could have kind of gone back and put that I wish you didn't do it that way I mean I'm just I always say we've like survived the worst macroeconomic crisis of like the last 50 years all happened between covid and the cost of living crisis and the supply chain crisis like we had stock stuck in the suez canal behind that big boat if you can remember yes um oh my god it was all stuck yeah and then i had lots of delays you moved to train and then train freight triples and so it was just a lot of like learning how to pivot and and while we couldn't get into grocery then we really scaled Amazon UK and that's one of our massive we're the number two product out of all of like feminine care wow so so yeah we just had to learn to pivot and it was a lot of um yeah it was just a lot of okay that's not gonna work what are we gonna do because initially sort of our strategy was scale in the uk and eu but then the combination of brexit and covid like made that impossible so we had like a 600 store listing in the other words that was basically gone overnight because we couldn't deliver within the window that we needed to deliver that was completely out of our hands.

19:07And so we had to switch strategy to just look at working with distributors that are able to come and pick up from our warehouse and handle everything because we couldn't do anything more than that with a small team and then transfer it to focus on the U.S. where we were able to scale a bit more easily. Are you bigger in the U.S. or the U.K.? So we're bigger with grocery, so it's a 60-40 split. Okay. But we actually thought for a while that it would be the other way around. But then the US has had its own sort of trials and tribulations with Mass, with Target and other places. So it's a lot of building flexibility into your plans and really watching what's happening in the market has been really key for us.

19:58Yeah, definitely. have you seen some of the big boys kind of come after you with different products that they've launched yeah i mean because it's it's so weird like they have all the money so they could really make a proper organic it just costs more it just costs more to do it um but they have economies of scale but instead they'll do something like a cotton core tampon which what is the purpose of that because what's touching you is still the synthetic um or just a cotton top sheet pad where the rest of the pad is plastic so um it goes down to to our demographic we lovingly call the gen zenio right it's like um our babes that are 18 to 34 and they are do a lot of what they're doing sort of like value-based they're very suspicious of corporate brands rightfully so because they're like what have you been putting there's also a lot of greenwashing out there so it's really hard to like decipher yeah you know that kind of stuff as well exactly right and so so they're looking for brands that align with their values and um and with their aesthetic and and we're able to do that so we just really focus on on who who we're making the products for and yeah like um i forget where the quote comes from but tara says all the time you're more likely to die by suicide than murder as a business so you should not don't worry so much about the competition worry about yourself and making sure that you're on track and sort of staying on brand and true to what your customers need and so that's what we try to focus on yeah so you're you're kind of marketing your brand side um versus the selling side yeah i mean i i get in on the selling side a bit but i I am the brand and marketing one.

21:49Tara is very focused on commercial and product. And then we come together. But we did all of this ourselves. Like we taught ourselves Illustrator because we couldn't afford a designer. But we're just at the tail end of a brand refresh. Cool. An evolution, not a revolution. But basically, we designed the tampons. and then the next product was these are day and night pads but we had a multi pack as well 10 day 5 night and that was we designed each product and the liners came so it was like one by one and when we went into oh here's a mistake when we went into Tesco it was the first time we had to put them in their shelf ready packaging like a box is where you just rip off the top and the lip was so high if the lips this high all of the all the pads look exactly the same oh gosh yeah you can't see what they are but we no one ever used the srps before so we were like yeah it's fine so in the refresh we sort of we brought the it up we've made this smaller just like better yeah because we worked with an actual designer okay like product designer and just along the top you have what the shape of the pad is and how many is in there and like a scale that tells you what what in terms of absorbency and absorbency scale so it makes the range much easier to navigate yeah and we've added a couple of products that are located to heavier flows because we're seeing so much around endometriosis and picos and just wanting to be able to support flows across have you had to learn a lot about women's health as well along the journey as well as like obviously being product led yes yeah it's i mean that's that's part of what inspired some of these products right so even in that initial conversation like tara was teaching me about organic tampons but someone had taught her and it was actually a gay man on a photo shoot that told her about it she's like you can't be using those tampons girls they're gonna kill you you need to use these so it's um yeah there's always a teaching moment but now as we're going just like i knew about the menstrual cycle but hadn't really thought about how that impacts you and what what those symptoms mean and so now i'm like a bit more forgiving on my myself i just run a marathon i'm telling everyone because i'm so proud of oh my god well done congrats which one did you run i the Brighton Marathon on Sunday.

24:25Oh my God. How'd you find it? It was, I enjoyed it. I love, I love running. Mile 20, I had an existential crisis probably. I was looking at my splits in my app and I'm like, this mile took me 24 minutes to run. And I did stop to use the bathroom, but still I was like. Do you know what? You did it. I did. I also hit a fat wall at 20 miles. It is like a thing and it literally is a wall. Like that wall is real. Like I literally saw the brick. why have I done this? Why did I sign up for this? But we pushed through in the end. I did it in five hours and 56 minutes. Well done. So I wanted to do it under six.

25:03Now, but I want to go and do a half now because I did the half in 2.45 but I'm not going to saving stuff for the tank. Okay. I feel like I could do it under two. And it now seems easy to me because I'm 26. Do you know what? I think marathon is a different, like lots of people do half marathons. Like, you know, generally if you're quite fit you can probably run out and do a half on no training. you cannot go out and run a marathon on your training it will literally like like you cannot you won't walk the next day it was bad no i went we went to brighton beach house afterwards yeah and there was this guy his feet looked like he had leprosy i'm like sir what no i woke up early and shout out to chat gbt i was like what do i need to do to prep for this marathon give me a checklist and i went through it and i greased myself up I didn't have any no yeah no chafing or anything yeah no the chafing I didn't to be fair I didn't either but like the men that I saw that had bleeding nipples like literally they were in tank tops and just like two little reds and I was like guys get your nipple tape yeah because we don't think about that because obviously we wear bras yeah but for them like the constant oh it's so sore so it was tough yeah people went through it but yeah I was every muscle in my body was aching like the next day But I'm fine now.

26:23Yeah. I went for a nice 90-minute massage. So I got to massage in Marlboro. Nice. And, yeah, I'm feeling good. Good. I'm taking my son for a one-mile. He wants to do the mini-marathon. Oh. So I'm like, let's see. We're going to go for a one-mile run tomorrow, see how he does. Bless him. That's so cute. Oh, how adorable. Yeah. Do you have a daughter as well, or is your other one? I do. Okay. My mom, she's four. She's the real boss of the household. Is she? Yeah. She's sassy. She's very excited I'm taking her into the office on Wednesday so she can hang out with the flow ladies. So, house my team is referred to in my house.

27:00Okay. Because we're still an all-female team. Is she gonna, she'll be the new, she'll be taking over the empire one day. Oh, we've been calling her the chairwoman of the board since she was born. She's just, she's always been a boss for Black K1. I love that. I love it. That's brilliant. She's amazing. Yeah. Also, like, you know, being a girl and she can learn so much from such a young age and go influence like everyone and like tell her friends and that would be so like key when she gets to that age um it's it's influenced both of them because i remember when benji was 18 i have like a little video and he's tapping away at his little vtech laptop and he's like i'm checking my emails and i'm like this is influence i've had oh my god and someone will walk around and she's like no no no i just have to take a meeting hold on hold on what do you need i'm like i cannot deal with these kids but oh my god that's brilliant they're gonna be entrepreneurial 100 they'll have it in their blood yeah they'll want to do something different also like it's incredibly inspiring isn't it like watching your parents and your mom go up and do that that they'll be like i want to be cool like mom like my mom's cool also you're so cool i've got to get your shoes up because i need to show them on the camera they literally say boss lady like sorry that's the coolest pair of flats i've ever seen i need a pair that's my nickname is shoes in her shoes so my favorite thing is when we're in a meeting with like an external partner and it seems like yeah shoes will do this and that and like very confused and I'm like I'm very sorry that's my nickname oh my god I love so it's become my brand now yeah so speaking of brand what is kind of your so marketing I I'm not a marketer at all I'm in sales in the day and I find marketing really difficult it's so hard because you have to influence like you know consumer behavior and I think it's such a tricky one to try and get in the heads of customers and also make your brand stand out stand out but constantly also be the innovator there's so many brands out there that do a lot of copying you know from other brands but how do you innovate and stay ahead of the cut all the time so I think what's been really helpful and what I think customers appreciate is consistency and authenticity and we spent the time early on really hammering out what's our mission what's our vision what's our values and that has stuck with us and we're not not just like thinking of them and putting them on a wall somewhere but we really live it so it's like from the job description through to orientation, performance reviews, when we're dealing with a difficult customer, one of our values is kindness is queen.

29:40And we've just gone through a process of updating them because the team grew from, you know, it was like four of us when we first did them. The team's now 17. Wow. So we did a refresher on them and I rewrote them. So now kindness is a courageous queen because we found that that showed up a lot of the time especially internally as politeness rather than like giving giving the feedback you need to give and like feedback is a superpower um we are tough on the problem soft on the person and that softness is a method so you don't have to look at it as being something that's weak or wrong um you can give someone feedback in a kind and respectful way how do you take feedback are you good with it I love feedback.

30:24And it's, I think as a founder, when the team was very small, we were all like very tight knit. It was very flat. Everyone's doing everything. And that's something that Tara and I have had to think about as the team's grown is you have, even though we still keep it as flat as we can do, there's still that sort of like power distance that's happening. And so, you know, newer hires aren't going to feel as comfortable. that's something that I challenge we're doing like our performance evaluations now and I challenge my head of marketing I'm like you give me feedback great I need you to be able to give tar feedback in that that same way because it's important for us to you know to touch grass and know what people really think I don't need you just telling me flowery things all the time I want to be constantly improving too it's like why we built this business is we're all insecure over achievers and we want to continue to grow and just make sure what we're doing is the best that it can be um but i think tara and i have been really good about like acknowledging what our gaps are and hiring really incredible people to fill those gaps and then i'm empowering them to do what they do um and just wanting to continue to be able to do that basically um and so having that those voices and that expertise come in it continues to give new ideas but because we wrote those those mission and vision values down it grounds everyone in who we are as a brand did you do that as a team thing yeah and so that that helps us sort of like stay true to who we are while still being able to like expand and I think we're just free to to experiment like I say I'm like a sophisticated awkward black girl and that that is what's authentically me that's how i show up to things um and people could there's something that you can relate to in that because we're all a bit awkward at times so could um and instead of like being ashamed about it just like enjoy it yeah and also like honestly if everyone was normal how boring would the world be like imagine a world of just like normal people like i don't want to live in that so bland yeah so vanilla yeah we don't want vanilla we want double chocolate chips well caramel sea salt sea salt caramel yeah literally that's what we're after um so what is your what's your kind of big big big plan with with we are flow where do you where do you want to be you want to be like i'm assuming the number one yeah so our our aim is we're already the number one ego like challenger brand wow and so we who are your competitors in the space like how many sorry you need to know names but how many are you kind of up against?

33:10There's like three other challengers but what we're really focused on are the big guys and so it's the big two that you can't imagine and then the second biggest and then like a third and so we're just sort of like chipping away there to continue to grow market share but yeah we want to get to sort of like a 10 % market share. Yeah. That is the bigger vision. And eventually, like, we think we'll, like, exit to, like, a strategic partner. But even then, I think Tara and I would want to stay on as, like, chief creative officer so we're going to continue to, yeah, just to come up with new products and continue.

33:57Have you got any MPD that you can allude to? This episode won't be live until back into this year, so you've got a bit of time if that's the case so we are in talks with one of our grocery partners to um take on our sexual wellness range okay and there's an arousal gel that we are working on wow how cool that would be uh fun because we want like pleasure is a good thing and we should be able to another stigmatize yeah we're getting banned from socials but it is something that um That is important. And so we're working on that. That one is a, yeah, like, have you seen the new Bridget Jones film?

34:41Not yet, no. It's brilliant. You've got to go see it. I love her. And there's this scene and she's at the till and the guy, one of the teachers of the school that her kids go to. And she's there buying about 10 bottles of lube. And the teacher's like, and the teacher says, oh, you'll have a fun weekend, won't you, Mrs. I can't remember what her name is. but like and I'm like oh okay 10 bottles is quite dramatic like 10 what the fuck's going on there like come on who needs to know do you know what I mean like fair enough if you want to try it's a swab but like it's a bit weird one's fine so like that is that is odd but it like even if you had one I would be mortified mortified I'd put it back I'd be like oh I don't I'm just getting processed well I don't know but you're right that one is a funny one isn't it so yeah that's interesting taking on kind of that space as well yeah and what about have you got plans are you in like how could you bring this to life like in pop-ups like i think it's something that a lot of brands do and something that i think is really great because it gives you a really big touch point with customers and i think there should be it's because it is so taboo it should be like plastered everywhere it's not it shouldn't be yeah so i'm i'm working on the marketing team i have as i said I'm the crazy ideas one.

35:59But we did, I had to actually bring one of them to life in February, end of February. We partnered with Sleazy Pizza. Nice. I don't know if you've ever been there. Amazing pizza. Yeah. But if Flo was a pizza shop, it would be this place. Their tagline is the sauciest 12 inch of your life. Okay. So that's the vibe. I love it. And their branding's all pink and everything. But we had the resurrection of the condom. Okay. I moderated a panel with Evie Flum, who's literally the best on Instagram, and Scotty Unfamous, Tara Scott. And we just had a conversation about condoms because condom use is as low as it's ever been.

36:41SCIs are on the rise. It's the only form of contraception that protects from SCIs and pregnancy. And it's so stigmatized. so we talked about it, we were trying to de-ick the condom but we got to do this event in Sleazy Pizza and I had been ranting about this since we went to Madfest, which is a massive marketing festival, a couple years ago and I'm like, we need to make this happen and we made that happen we worked with Full Fat PR Agency and they did an amazing job so I love doing stuff like that, I definitely want to do more in real life, we always focus on festivals in the summer I think it's a great way like if you forget your tampon or your pad and it comes at a festival there's nothing for you anyway you're always in the middle of nowhere so we love to show up in moments like that and just be a bit of a period hero well if you're going to Coachella can I come I'm trying to get it to Coachella well yes one day we can do a live podcast yeah it was my 30th next year and I said to the girls we're going to Coachella because I'm Zoe and it's going to be Zoe Cheddar and you've all got to wear ginger wigs because I'm redhead so I was like you can't come with your hair colour you're all ginger and we're going to Zoe Cheddar so I just need to get my tickets and then we're off to LA I love the vision, let me know no absolutely but that's ways that we can sort of have that pop up feel we're working on it you need there's so much you can do and you're right, so much takes resource and you know getting the marketing team to think in that way is also like hard and there's so many things but i where do you think it's best to do lots of little things so like whether it's like you know a small event and then another small event and then another small event and then maybe like i don't know another small event or do you think it's go right we're going to absolutely hammer it and here's a 200 grand budget for example and we're going to do the like such a big impact event and we're gonna get reach we're gonna get so we're gonna influence is gonna like massive do it how do what do you think has the best approach when it comes to marketing so I think I don't believe in death by a thousand cuts I'd much rather take the majority of the budget so say like 70 % and do like something big something splashy and and make sure that it's layered so you have like the stunty thing you have some kind of um like we've done fly postering when we've had um like a normal period dramas ad so we won the sky footprint fund a couple years ago won a million pound in ad spend wow on bridgerton called normal period dramas and And so that was live.

39:34But then we had we did like a YouGov survey and found out that like, you know, two out of four Londoners had leaked in their partner's bed. so then we put that up across and it was like catered to hackney and to islington and just put put up those fly posters and then we um got a giant van kind of like led by donkeys and asked our our um asked our community to share their period dramas and we picked the ones we thought were funniest and put on this bright pink truck that rode around central london amazing period dramas and then they got a year of period care for their troubles. We had a window in Whole Foods on Kensington High Road with a giant tampon tub.

40:23Laura, my senior brain manager, brought my dream to life because this is all I ever wanted was a giant tampon tub. And then we went and did street interviews. I did sort of like the educational one, asking people about period facts and then we took um gk barry and charlie marlowe onto carnaby street they had men like showing us how they would insert tampons with their with our tampon microphone it was so ridiculous and we still probably get 50 likes a week on tech talk from those videos yeah um how many years later so it's um but having that sort of layered approach makes what you're doing feel much bigger.

41:02And all those extra things outside the ad was a 50K spend. Yeah. So it doesn't have to be tons of money, but if you do it in a very intentional sort of targeted way, it can feel. And then of course we amplify everything on social. So that's always the key. So I'd rather do something like that. And then you do smaller things throughout the year, but you do want to sort of do that big thing where you can draw attention. And it's much better to have sort of layers across different channels and things rather than, I wouldn't say spend something on just like a big billboard campaign, for instance. And that's the only thing.

41:41Yeah, you need to layer it. Yeah. Absolutely. So I think that's really the key is a little marketing sandwich. Yeah. Multi-layer sandwich. Yeah, that's how I would approach it. Yeah, I agree. I think taking the 70 % spend layering it and then I totally agree with you. I think it can potentially get washed under the water if you're not doing. When it comes to investments, obviously you did your seed round at the beginning. Where are you guys at now with it? Have you got lots of external partners or is it still primarily? We're getting ready to do an institutional raise in the next couple of months.

42:13But we have been angel back up to now. We have incredible angels, everything from operators. So the CEO of Root Health, who is the former CEO of Method UK. The former CEO of Charlotte Tilbury is an incredible advisor for us. And then we have the financing people who can advise and help us prepare for future exits. We have who we lovingly call our Bane Brains, who all have their expertise in consumer markets and M &A and all these different things that are able to advise us and give us their global view on what's happening, both in the UK and US market and then sort of like, you know, wider global market.

42:59And all of that's just really helpful when we're setting strategy and figuring out how we need to pivot as a business, et cetera. So that's been really helpful up to now. But yes, hopefully we'll have an institutional partner that will just help us scale and give me an actual marketing budget because I've never really had a proper one. I'll just pour everything into sort of like sales, OPEX, just to support the retail listings yeah but also that's a massive testament to like you guys then because imagine what your brand would be if you did have the millions like you've done what you've done with little budget but my god world domination is coming it's on route humans of the empire rise up yes i like that and when it comes to kind of the uk versus the us um business is this something that you want to do obviously the US is like a beast of a kind of area to even conquer you I guess you've got to treat every like you know state as a country probably in terms of localizing and also manufacturing and god knows what supply chain etc where do you is there a particular place you want to put your focus and why so for the the UK we want to be like a household name like an innocent so when you think about period care you think about flow in the US we recognize it's just it's a smaller size of a much larger pie so there's um lots of sort of growth to be had there but we're being sensible there it's sort of like we want to be a cult brand um yeah who your your favorite person's favorite period care company yeah it's more the ambition there because you could just set money on fire in terms of marketing and all of that so it's much more of a social first and wanting to um sort of grow um in the green channel and then expand from there but there's a lot more patience that we have with that because we just know it's massive and you need a lot of money to sort of like go quickly and you're going back and forth quite a lot I was just there in March in LA in Austin for Exo West this is massive yeah I've been to Exo West it's cool I love it so fun so big yeah in Anaheim yeah so we go there every year and we had a booth the first couple years which is like a bed for Exo and then the bathroom for Flo which this year everyone was asking for us for it but I spoke on a panel this year and said the first ever panel on sexual wellness and hormonal health.

45:35And it was packed out. Wow. And it was over lunchtime as well. So they were like, you don't know how this is going to go. Yeah. But yeah, they had to kick people out of the room to start the next session. Wow. There is so much appetite for it. It's just making it available and making it like there and, you know, in people's faces and accessible. Absolutely. And less taboo, because it is frustratingly still a bit like that, which is not fair. Yeah. But we're breaking it. You are breaking it. One tampon at a time. One tampon at a time. And team, talk to me a bit about your team. How have you managed kind of the hiring process?

46:09Obviously, like, it's, for a lot of the founders that I speak to, it's their baby, and sometimes bringing people in is really difficult, and delegating and stuff. How have you found that process? Yeah. So, I mean, I've been the roving founder. Tara's always been our CEO. I started off as COO, set up the back office bits, then we hired in a professional COO, Mary, it's incredible. And then I moved to chief people officer and my focus was really building out our recruitment process, our benefits, all of those things, because we were preparing for the team to grow. And then I moved to sort of like run the marketing partner department and build it out as the chief brand officer.

46:47but we I before this I was a director of diversity and inclusion at a large foundation so and I worked in HR this is kind of my jam and so I learned from a lot of the challenges that we had there it's much easier to sort of build a culture from scratch and try to change one that happened by default over 30 or 40 years which is why we spent that time doing all that sort of visioning work in the beginning and so we just really like designed a process it was like a very large spreadsheet that we have where you know you have the candidate information but before we start talking to people or anything I have everyone set the criteria for each stage of the interview so the the screening one is really to sort of like test technical skill but we do ask a question around inclusion and culture because that's something that's really important to us as a company the second one is a behavioral panel and so that's where you're trying to understand how do they handle failure how do they like we're a hybrid team so how do they keep themselves motivated when you have to work from home by yourself etc uh and then there's a task that they'll have to do that's like relevant to the role and the final stage is the meeting with Tara and I and that's um so they can ask any questions they've spent three stages being grilled now it's time for them to grill us but just making sure if there's any questions or doubts that they're able to talk through those things with us um and that process has worked really well for us um because i think it tests all levels but i always say to the team um the process ends at probation and there's certain things that you just can't test for in your room it is inherently sort of like a flawed tool of recruitment but it it is what it is the best that we we have to work with and so you know so there's been some cases where it's like this isn't a fit because a lot of what you might see about the brand is lots of fun but we are all working very hard people think the team is much bigger than it is but for a really long time it was only eight or nine of us um and so just and also it's like it's a lot of uncertainty working at a startup and so in your head you might be like yeah i think i'd really enjoy a startup but maybe you enjoy the like stability of being at like a maybe you want a medium-sized corporate rather than a large corporate is more your speed and it's just very different if you need structure here you're coming in and we have grown and obviously set lots of structures and things in place but there's still an element of being able to come in and be a really strong individual contributor that's not for everyone and so every process sort of teaches us something new but I have sort of come out of the weeds of that and but sort of trusting the process and

49:46our commercial VP Caroline called me her people whisperer so I am that person on the team where like if there's some kind of like people management issue or challenge they come and talk to me about it and so I'm happy to continue to play that role definitely I think yeah people is such a big thing isn't it because if you don't have the right people in your business it's really hard to like grow it to where you want it to be yeah and the mindset like yeah corporate versus a bit more entrepreneurial and that kind of like fight or flight startup spirit that you need um it's really key and period periods we are talking about periods but that's not the question okay tampons versus pads what's better what's why so there's there's no better it's personal preference which is why we have the products that we have is so you can choose what works for your flow so i can speak for myself um it's actually period pants which we launched we did a collab with the Netflix show Sex Education four years ago what was just so perfectly aligned like their tagline was messy as normal and they're like for nice messy assignments and so we did a co-branded product line with them and did this period pants and then our senior brain manager Laura joined and did a video that our bum went viral and so they all sold out but period pants are revolutionary I think you just wear them to bed you're not laughing about with a pad moving anywhere so I wear those basically for my whole period.

51:21Do you still do that line? Yeah so we did we did ones that just uh were purely branded because those were like sex education ex-flow interesting I need to get some of that so they're in Holland and Barrett I think they're on promo right now okay um also on our website as well and um so i use those definitely at night or like you know when you know your pair is meant to show up but you don't know what it is it's great because if you're wearing those and it comes it's fine you're safe um on heavy days i will use tampons just because um yeah it's just very heavy and we gotta control that and then on lighter days like I'll use like a liner or a day pad and everyone's flow is different so what we were hearing from a lot of our communities they needed heavier and we had members on our team who have Picos or Endo and weren't able to use some of our products because they couldn't didn't have the absorbency they needed so we've just put out an ultra long night pad that's about this long and we have a super babe pack of tampons is coming out in june um that's a super and super plus and um yeah so we just want to have that option like our period pants go from small to 3xl so really size inclusive as well um so you have something for everyone so it's not better or best i can say sort of statistically uh there's a real socioeconomic divide when it comes to tampons and so they're really only use in Europe, the UK, US and Canada.

52:58US, Canada, UK prefer an applicator tampon, which is what you're holding. But we also make a very cute miniature version, a non-applicator. And that's actually what I prefer. And that's very popular in Europe. And everywhere else in the world, it's really pads and liners. So it's like, of the global market, it's like 70 or 80 % is pads and liners. and that's shocking when you think about it like the plastic that's going into the world circulation but also like other microplastics in our bodies like come on no no no no good well thank you so much season for coming on it's been like fascinating like wow like so much to learn and actually just such an insane product and everybody out there get your organic tampons today thank you so much sorry this was funny