892 Lauren Schulte Wang: Founder & CEO of The Flex Company

0:00Kara Goldin:I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin Show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Hiring Pro.

0:46Kara Goldin:Hi, Kara here. For small businesses, every hire matters, but so does your time. I felt that pressure firsthand. You know, a bad hire isn't just frustrating, it's expensive in time, money, and team morale. And yet hiring the right person can feel like a full-time job on top of everything else you're already doing. Sifting through applications, trying to spot the real standouts, second-guessing decisions, it can get overwhelming fast. That's why having a way to save time without sacrificing quality isn't just nice to have, it's critical. Luckily, LinkedIn Hiring Pro is built for that reality. It's your hiring partner designed to help you hire with confidence by surfacing only the right candidates without turning hiring into another full-time job.

1:38Kara Goldin:Posting a job isn't always the hard part. It's finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Their updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language, no recruiter jargon needed. Nearly 60 % of hires find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire.

2:19Kara Goldin:Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Terms and conditions apply. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Golden Show. Today's guest is Lauren Shulte-Wong, who was founder and CEO of The Flex Company, the number one bestselling brand in both the menstrual disc and menstrual cup categories in the US. Lauren started Flex, as it's known, with a simple but powerful mission to make periods more comfortable and to bring real innovation to a category that had seen very little change for decades. And today, Flex products are sold in more than 30 ,000 retail locations.

3:02Kara Goldin:The company has sold over 185 million. Is that right? Dis? That's right. Wow, that's amazing. Achieved profitability and helped reshape not only period care, but also how women's health products can be marketed online. So I cannot wait to dig in to Lauren's story. And yeah, without further ado, welcome Lauren to the Cara Golden Show. So excited to meet you and to have you here. So excited to be here, Cara. Thank you. So for listeners who are just hearing about the Flex company with products called Flex, How do you describe the company today and what makes it different from other menstrual care, period care, whatever you want to call it, products that are out on the market?

3:49Sure. Flex is a modern period care brand. And I say that because there's a family of what we call modern period care brands that have come up on the market over the last decade or so. So if you think about naturals, reusable products, the better for you brands, essentially. and I started Flex 10 years ago because I was getting infections from tampons and pads and I learned that it didn't really matter which format that I used it was the cotton itself that was causing my recurrent infections and so I founded Flex with this idea that we wanted to invest in meaningful innovation to make better for you products that were 100 % body safe and as performant or more performant than the traditional period products like tampons and pads that people are used to using.

4:39Kara Goldin:This message is a paid partnership with AT &T Business. Hey everyone, Kira here. Let's get real about those early days of building a business, not the highlight reel, the actual day-to-day, the friction, trying to manage everything across time zones, across teams, across locations, and realizing how much depends on staying connected. I remember those days at Hint, a retailer call, an order, a decision, all of it. And you realize quickly, connection isn't a nice to have. It's the lifeblood of your business. As a founder, you don't want to think about your connectivity. You just need it to work every time.

5:20Kara Goldin:AT &T Business is a reliable provider for small business owners. For Small Business Month, we celebrate small businesses by helping them run better. This means reliable uptime, easy switching, and smart communications. Powered by AT &T Business, built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Hi, Kara here. For small businesses, every hire matters, but so does your time. I felt that pressure firsthand. You know, a bad hire isn't just frustrating, it's expensive in time, money, and team morale. And yet hiring the right person can feel like a full-time job on top of everything else you're already doing.

6:12Kara Goldin:Sifting through applications, trying to spot the real standouts, second-guessing decisions, it can get overwhelming fast. That's why having a way to save time without sacrificing quality isn't just nice to have, it's critical. Luckily, LinkedIn Hiring Pro is built for that reality. It's your hiring partner designed to help you hire with confidence by surfacing only the right candidates without turning hiring into another full-time job. Posting a job isn't always the hard part. It's finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings.

6:58Kara Goldin:Their updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language, no recruiter jargon needed. Nearly 60 % of hires find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Terms and conditions apply. Today's episode is brought to you by Whatnot. I've been spending time on Whatnot as a buyer, and what I really like is that it doesn't feel like traditional online shopping.

7:39Kara Goldin:You can find great products without paying full price, but you're also interacting with sellers in real time. asking questions, seeing what they're showing next, and becoming part of the community around them. And especially as an entrepreneur, I find what's happening on the seller side really interesting. You're not just putting something on a listing and hoping someone finds it. You're building connections with buyers who come back because they know you and enjoy buying from you. Whatnot is the largest dedicated live shopping platform, whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, even cookies.

8:15Kara Goldin:Sellers are building real thriving businesses. Anyone can sell whether your business is big, small, or yet to exist. People selling on Whatnot sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces. That's because you're not just listing products, you're building real connections with buyers. Across Whatnot, the number of sellers making over$1 million a year has doubled. Consistency pays off. This isn't a side hustle. It's a real path to building something that lasts. Whatnot buyers spend more than an hour a day in the app. That's not just browsing. They're engaged, buying, and coming back. You go live, show off your products in real time, and turn what you love into real income.

9:02Kara Goldin:I love using Whatnot as a buyer. And if you've ever thought about selling, I definitely think it's worth checking out. Search Whatnot, W-H-A-T-N-O-T, in the App Store. Download, and you can start selling right away. So you entered a category that had seen very little innovation in decades. Why do you think so few people questioned the status quo and kind of what you had seen for yourself? I mean, I've heard this over and over again about the cotton and so many of these larger brands. menstrual products. So why is it that we're now just getting to innovating around this? I think, unfortunately, women's health is woefully underfunded.

9:50You see that across things like endometriosis and PCOS. In the period care category specifically, period products weren't even tested using blood until a few years ago, which is kind of crazy. There's been no formal studies on the diameter of the vaginal fornix, for example. Most people don't even know what the vaginal fornix is. A lot of us have our own education from, you know, if we're lucky, elementary school or middle school or high school in health classes. And what I really believe is that, you know, we're taught at a young age to not talk about our periods, to hide our period product. They separate boys and girls in class and they're learning about these things.

10:36And so from a very young age, it's ingrained in us to be ashamed of our periods and to be ashamed of our bodies, which is a natural process that occurs to everyone. And when people have the shame, they don't vocalize what their problems are because we're taught that we just need to grin and bear it or there's all these terrible euphemisms for periods like Aunt Flo or, you know, surfing the Crimson Tide or just ridiculous stuff. And so I think in any category, if there's not an obvious problem, people aren't going to come up, try to come up with a solution to a problem that they don't know that exists.

11:15And I think period care in particular, because it's been so shrouded in shame and taboo and because people are so uneducated about their bodies and afraid to ask questions or afraid to say that they don't know that much about their bodies, that there's just a lack of innovation across period care and a number of other products that are made for women's health. Yeah, so, so true. So how did you come up with the name? It's such a good question. Okay, so Sarah Blakely famously said that, you know, words that ended with X, you know, were great for company names and that consumers liked it. So that was kind of in the back of my mind.

12:02The second thing was I knew that the product is this, you know, disc shaped thing. And at the time, we didn't call it a desk. We were like, is it a ring? What is it? So I wanted something that evoked a benefit of the product, and the product is very flexible. But I hadn't landed on flex. And what I did was I brainstormed a few different names. I picked my top three. And when I would go tell people about the company, every time I would switch which name that I used, and I waited to see which name came back to me. and the first name that came back to me was Flex. And I said, that's it.

12:43Kara Goldin:I love it. So 10 years. So thinking back on those first moments when you decided I'm gonna go start this company, you obviously had this issue that you were trying to solve for yourself first, but what were the first steps that you took to actually figure out, okay, I think I can go do this? Okay, I'm like you, I'm also an accidental entrepreneur. I did not want to start the company. So I didn't really think of my first steps as being, I'm going to go start a company. But looking back, I can say my first steps were, I created a list of questions of all the things that I wanted to research and know about.

13:22I wanted to understand at the time why I set up a Google alert for words like period, menstruation. I would get no hits sometimes for weeks. So there was very little information on the internet about periods, very little news being written outside of scientific, like university studies on occasion, you know, we talk about menstruation. I wanted to know, you know, where period products were made and why, you know, cotton is disruptive to the pH of her vagina. And so it was just really, honestly, a research project. And from there, I started having conversations with women. I would invite maybe like 10 women at a time at this tiny 450 square foot apartment in San Francisco.

14:09And I would make this vegan soup and have Trader Joe's wine and have women come over and talk about their periods. And this ended up growing by word of mouth. And I found that there is just a real interest and desire to talk about menstruation and to talk about our problems related to demonstration that we hadn't really had an outlet for most of our lives. So yeah, it was like the research piece, but also what ended up becoming focus groups talking to our target customers.

14:41Kara Goldin:This message is a paid partnership with AT &T Business. Hey everyone, Kira here. Let's get real about those early days of building a business. Not the highlight reel, the actual day-to-day, The friction, trying to manage everything across time zones, across teams, across locations, and realizing how much depends on staying connected. I remember those days at Hint, a retailer call, an order, a decision, all of it. And you realize quickly, connection isn't a nice to have. It's the lifeblood of your business. As a founder, you don't want to think about your connectivity. You just need it to work every time.

15:22Kara Goldin:AT &T Business is a reliable provider for small business owners. For Small Business Month, we celebrate small businesses by helping them run better. This means reliable uptime, easy switching, and smart communications. Powered by AT &T Business, built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com. Support for today's episode comes from Seed, the company taking a scientific approach to gut health. I'm selective about the supplements that earn a place in my daily routine. If I'm going to take something every day, I want to understand what's in it, how it works, and whether there is real evidence behind it.

16:07Kara Goldin:That's what stood out to me about Seed's DSO-1. DSO-1 is a two-in-one probiotic and prebiotic formulated with 24 probiotic strains to support digestive and whole body health. It also uses seeds via CAP technology, a capsule-in-capsule delivery system engineered to protect the probiotics through digestion and deliver them where they need to go. And this isn't based on marketing promises. In a clinical trial, DS01 was shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and alleviate gas. Plus, it requires no refrigeration, making it easy to maintain your routine at home or while traveling. Make your daily probiotic one of the more informed decisions you make today.

17:00Kara Goldin:Go to seed.com forward slash Kara Golden and use code Kara to get 25 % off. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Hi, Kara here. For small businesses, every hire matters, but so does your time. I felt that pressure firsthand. You know, a bad hire isn't just frustrating, it's expensive in time, money, and team morale. And yet hiring the right person can feel like a full-time job on top of everything else you're already doing.

17:47Kara Goldin:Sifting through applications, trying to spot the real standouts, second-guessing decisions, it can get overwhelming fast. That's why having a way to save time without sacrificing quality isn't just nice to have, it's critical. Luckily, LinkedIn Hiring Pro is built for that reality. It's your hiring partner designed to help you hire with confidence by surfacing only the right candidates without turning hiring into another full-time job. Posting a job isn't always the hard part. It's finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings.

18:32Kara Goldin:Their updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language, no recruiter jargon needed. Nearly 60 % of hires find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Terms and conditions apply. That's incredible. So what were you doing before, by the way? Marketing. I have a background in marketing. So product development, actually getting this made, things like that.

19:15Kara Goldin:I know that's always the piece that so many people just get stuck. They don't know how to go about it. And then they never get it done. They never start. What was that time like and how long did it take you to actually get the products made in order to actually feel comfortable enough and confident enough to launch Flex? Yeah, that was a very uncomfortable chapter for me because I did know nothing about product development. And I had created this list of everything that I didn't know. So I didn't know how to raise money. I didn't even know like financing terms. I'd never built like an operating, like a financial operating model.

19:58I knew nothing about the FDA or manufacturing or product development. Like all I knew is this tiny corner over here called marketing. And I certainly didn't know how to be a CEO. I had met a number of different product designers or founders who had developed either medical devices or things that went inside of the vagina. And I started researching old patents and just trying every different type of period product from around the world that I could get my hands on. And when I finally had a prototype that I was really, really proud of, took it to a manufacturer and the manufacturer was like, Lauren, like, that's cute.

20:38You can make this prototype. You cannot make this at scale. And if you could make it at scale, a customer would never be able to afford what you would have to charge for it. And at that point, I said, you know what, I'm dead. Like, this idea is dead. Like, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm so overwhelmed. Because it's one thing to go to a manufacturer and say, hey, I'm building like a better for you tampon brand. I'm going to buy, you know, organic tampons from you and put it into my box. versus I need to build custom manufacturing equipment with that multi-step process to be able to develop something completely new and novel.

21:16So yeah, that process is very stop and start. I mean, I will fast forward to the conclusion, which is we ended up acquiring, we did an asset acquisition of another product and we leveraged their manufacturing line and their tooling to be able to build ours on top.

21:34Kara Goldin:This message is a paid partnership with AT &T Business. Hey everyone, Kira here. Let's get real about those early days of building a business, not the highlight reel, the actual day-to-day. The friction, trying to manage everything across time zones, across teams, across locations, and realizing how much depends on staying connected. I remember those days at Hint, a retailer call, an order, a decision, all of it. and you realize quickly, connection isn't a nice to have. It's the lifeblood of your business. As a founder, you don't want to think about your connectivity. You just need it to work every time.

22:16Kara Goldin:AT &T Business is a reliable provider for small business owners. For Small Business Month, we celebrate small businesses by helping them run better. This means reliable uptime, easy switching, and smart communications. Powered by AT &T Business, Built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com. Support for today's episode comes from Seed, the company taking a scientific approach to gut health. I'm selective about the supplements that earn a place in my daily routine. If I'm going to take something every day, I want to understand what's in it, how it works, and whether there is real evidence behind it.

23:00Kara Goldin:That's what stood out to me about Seeds DSO-1. DSO-1 is a two-in-one probiotic and prebiotic formulated with 24 probiotic strains to support digestive and whole body health. It also uses Seeds via Cap Technology, a capsule-in-capsule delivery system engineered to protect the probiotics through digestion and deliver them where they need to go. And this isn't based on marketing promises. In a clinical trial, DS01 was shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and alleviate gas. Plus, it requires no refrigeration, making it easy to maintain your routine at home or while traveling. Make your daily probiotic one of the more informed decisions you make today.

23:53Kara Goldin:Go to seed.com forward slash Kara Golden and use code Kara to get 25 % off. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Hi, Kara here. For small businesses, every hire matters, but so does your time. I felt that pressure firsthand. You know, a bad hire isn't just frustrating, it's expensive in time, money, and team morale. And yet hiring the right person can feel like a full-time job on top of everything else you're already doing.

24:39Kara Goldin:Sifting through applications, trying to spot the real standouts, second-guessing decisions, it can get overwhelming fast. That's why having a way to save time without sacrificing quality isn't just nice to have, it's critical. Luckily, LinkedIn Hiring Pro is built for that reality. It's your hiring partner designed to help you hire with confidence by surfacing only the right candidates without turning hiring into another full-time job. Posting a job isn't always the hard part. It's finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to short-listing candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings.

25:25Kara Goldin:Their updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language, no recruiter jargon needed. Nearly 60 % of hires find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Terms and conditions apply. Who were the first hires that you made as you were either getting ready to launch or as you had launched? The team is always the most important aspect really in allowing you to maybe not launch, but definitely scale.

26:13Kara Goldin:So what were those first kind of really, really critical hires that you made? Finance was a really important one since that's definitely not my background. So somebody that could understand cash flow management and just the intricacies of timing of when you pay everyone, like your manufacturers and whatnot. The other one was marketing. We really needed a growth marketer at the time. Meta was just getting started pretty much of, you know, really scaling a lot of these DTC brands in the mid-2010s. And then the third was manufacturing and supply chain expert. And so that person was really responsible for setting up our fulfillment for making sure that our orders are made on time and shortening the shipping windows to our customers.

27:04Kara Goldin:What was harder, convincing investors, retailers, or consumers that Period Care needed this innovation, needed flex, and they needed to give mindshare and potentially money to your idea? Who would you guess? Well, given I can only imagine what it was like talking to most of the investment community. I remember when we were raising money for Hint, I started to figure out after kind of hindsight 2020 that the people who we were trying to pitch early on who said, I need to check with my wife or my girlfriend or my sister about this issue that you're talking about around diet sweeteners because I'm not really a diet sweetener person, but maybe they'll know.

28:02Kara Goldin:And I knew that they would never invest because they invest in what they know. And so I would imagine that. And it didn't mean that it wasn't an issue. It's just that they didn't know enough about it. So I'm so curious about your situation. That story couldn't be more relatable. I've probably had, I don't know, a hundred no's in my 10 years for fundraising in the classic, like, let me ask my wife, girlfriend, daughter. We've even had instances where we've had investors who've learned about our products because they have multiple daughters who are using Flex and all of their girlfriends at college are using Flex and all their sorority is now using Flex.

28:46And they're still like, yeah, I just, I don't really know. I'm just not really sure about it. I'm like, that's fine. I'm not convincing you to try the product. I'm just trying to convince you there's a really big market and it's really interesting and it's untapped and we're profitable and we're growing quickly. Those are the types of conversations. But at the end of the day, a no is a no. And as an entrepreneur, we have to figure out how to get to a yes. And so if we're getting a no, we have to find a better way. Otherwise, we no longer exist. So there's really no excuses for us, unfortunately, if investors are saying no.