August co-founder Nadya Okamoto on growing a period care brand with the help of TikTok

0:03Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Modern Retail Podcast.

0:30on up, Nadia.

0:34Hello, good to see you. Nice to meet you. All right, let me just switch pages. First, let's start. I'm trying to make me awkward. I know, it's one of those things, I've been sitting like this, which has been kind of weird. So why don't you start with just a brief history of August. You guys are a relatively new company, but you guys have been kind of on a rocket ship for the last two years. Yeah, a really fun rocket ship, too. Well, yeah, my co-founder and I, we started raising our pre-seed round our junior years of college. So we're pandemic college graduates, but banded together like March, 2020 to start working on this launch direct consumer June, 2021.

1:13We were direct consumer became kind of the tick tock period care brand pretty quickly and then launched into target earlier this year. Wow. That's crazy. So first did you and your co-founder were you like, we're going to be in period care? Like what was the initial inklings about the company and how did you know how to how do you know how to start it like talk about that um well I've been in the period space for quite a long time I got my first period when I was 12 and I got into the world of period care when I was 16 so in 2014 I founded this non-profit called period the menstrual movement I led it as executive director for about six years and in that time we had distributed like 25 million units of period products and I was kind of leading this national chapter network of student advocates really focus actually on the legislative advocacy side.

2:01So I was working with like every major period care brand either as the nonprofit partner the face their influencer or as a consultant working with them on like next gen insights and just like overall marketing strategy. And so I've been in the period care space for a while and I honestly think that working as the nonprofit partner is what kind of really made me recognize the gap there was in needing better for you period gear, more traceable and understandable supply chain in this space. Obviously, being on the nonprofit side, it also meant that I was having a lot of conversations that were very candid about what users thought about the experience.

2:39And so I think for me, it was the experience of running the organization. And then I published my first book, Period Power, with Simon & Schuster in 2018. And when I was on book tour, I was literally meeting like thousands of people a week, talking to them about how we should, you know, eradicate period stigma. And so it was kind of an obvious choice when my co-founder and I, at the time running a Gen Z marketing agency, we were sitting together constantly venting to each other about the frustrations of having, you know, the big giant industry players as clients and just wishing that we could do it ourselves.

3:16And so that's what we did. Got it. One of the things I find so interesting about August specifically is that you were essentially, correct me if I'm wrong, but you were like kind of TikTok first. Like you made a TikTok account and that is what helped really get the brand out there. Can you just give a little bit of the background about that? Yeah. Well, I think people see me now and like I have 4.1 million followers now. The brand has like close to half a million across all socials. And I think that there's this assumption that like I was a TikToker and then I created a brand, but it was actually like quite the opposite.

3:46Like we were going to start this brand. We raised about$2 million pre-revenue, pre-launch. Like we had quite a bit of pressure of like, okay, we're going to do this. This is going to be a real company. We need to get to a point where, you know, we can get a seed round preempted or something like that. So actually I was not on TikToker at all. and we were pretty much in stealth mode given kind of like my reputation in this space. So it was like launch day, June 2021. And my co-founder and I, we were like obsessing over these metrics that we needed to hit, mainly month over month growth, cost of acquisition.

4:21And this was 2021. So at a time when I think the direct to consumer bubble had kind of like burst, right? iOS 14 changes had gone into effect. Everybody was freaking out about, you know, these direct to consumer models that were spending way too much money, you didn't have authentic brand followings and they just, the loyalty wasn't there. And so we kind of set it up, put it upon ourselves to say, the way we do this is to get like a unprecedented low cost of acquisition for this industry, right? And we were looking and kind of through little birdies, we heard like industry standard was around like$33.

4:58And so we were like, okay, we got to get ours under 10. We ended up getting ours to be around five in those first six months of business. We didn't really spend any on influencers. Our goal was to really just spend as little as we could and focus it mainly on retargeting and not on prospecting, which meant that it was like, okay, we need to figure out how to go viral every single day, multiple times a day. So for like six months, I posted 80 to 100 videos a day personally. And it was just like, I'm going to figure this out, whether it's I figure out how to make the content and encourage other people to, or I need to inspire other people to.

5:33But yeah, I just kept going, and I still make a lot of content. But I archive most of it, and I just really focus on what works well, what doesn't work well. If it doesn't work well in the first 45 minutes, it gets taken down. Figure something out, edit it differently, put it back out. It was just all very quick, real-time things. But in those first six months, we had our seed round preempted, and I had reached that 2 million followers and then we just kind of kept going. You reached 2 million followers in six months? Yes. That's amazing. So just what did you find, like was it that you, like it's 2021 and so that was a really interesting time for TikTok just algorithmically, I would say.

6:13Would you say you were in the right place at the right time and were figuring out how to do it or did you find something and you're like, this is what works, this is what I need to do? I think it's more of like this mentality of recognizing that what works today is not going to be what works tomorrow. And I think that as a new brand, one of the biggest strengths we have is that we're very agile. Like we can, you know, we see if something's not working and you take the ego out of it and you say, well, too bad. We tried, whatever, keep going. And so I think that it's more of that mentality because to be honest, you know, now we're X number of years later, but we're still going viral on a pretty regular basis.

6:51but we're also expanding our definition of what success looks like, right? So last week we launched this big campaign actually with eight other period care brands in the space. And that was kind of a new effort of ours to say, hey, this is what virality in the Gen Z TikTok space looks like. What does it look like to go viral on national broadcast TV, right? And so I think that it's more so constantly trying to expand our definition of what success looks like. I will also say that definitely like going viral on TikTok in 2021 is easier than it is today. But going viral on YouTube Shorts and Snapchat Spotlight right now is key, right?

7:30And so I think that there's like, for me, I just wake up every day and I'm like excited to try to figure out and like gamify these places. I think for the most part, because all these platforms are competing with each other for short form video content. And we live in this attention economy. It is a lot more of a quantity over quality game when it comes to content, which I think Gen Z brands are uniquely well positioned to do because we don't have this like unlearning to do about our relationship with social media. It's like like I literally make videos with my used tampons. Right. And like that's crazy to a lot of like my millennial beauty influencer friends where like everything is so polished and so beautiful.

8:10and like I'm over here like literally yesterday I posted a video that got like 13k likes which was like okay for me where I was like just washing my shorts off with uh cold water and then putting in a tampon it's just like constant content how important like I guess my it it seems like you it is hard to extricate you from the brand or at least when it started so how was that part of the thesis at the beginning. So talk about that. Yeah. I think if anything, it's actually the opposite, which is like, I see myself as like a very, like a big opportunity, a tool for top of funnel for the brand. Right.

8:50But from the beginning, like it was actually a very conscious decision that I did not want to be the only face of the brand. And I didn't want to be like on the website. This is Nadia's brand. Like, I don't want it to be Nadia equals August. I wanted it to be like, I am top of funnel. I'm the August number one fan. Just as the last speaker was kind of talking about how do you tell the founder's story? How do you talk about the values behind the company? And how do you have that, oh, I tried this. You have to try that. I do that full time. I make UGC content constantly. But I would say I'm not actually logged in to the August social accounts.

9:30I don't post directly. We have content interns ranging from age 14 to 23 where they're making content and they're actually, you know, putting out their own viral content. And so I would say, like, I don't want it to be where someone goes to the brand account and it's just like me. If anything, I want it to be the opposite. But when they go to my account, I want it to be like August. Yeah, that makes sense. Can you talk a little bit about because one of the things that August is really focused on is growing community. And so like you have this top of funnel part, which is you and then others. but also you use Geneva, right?

10:06Yes. So can you talk a little bit just like how that was part of the thesis? Maybe for those who don't know, explain what Geneva is and just all of that. Yeah. Well, first I would say that I distinguish like social media is not community. Like to us, that's an audience, right? And the way I describe it is with an audience, it's like this, right? We have the microphone and you guys will get the microphone a little bit at Q &A, but you don't really have a microphone, right? Like, but this is more of an audience where we're speaking at you, there's not really the opportunity for us to get into an in-depth conversation.

10:39Versus community is probably more like the challenge board thing you're going to do later, where like everybody has a microphone and we're all talking about it. And if anything, like the role of us is more facilitating the conversation, creating the space, making sure people feel psychologically safe to be able to share. So from the beginning of August, and a lot of this was actually taken as inspiration from like my nonprofit days where everything was create space users in the middle listen figure out what we have in our resources to serve so from the beginning for two years before we launched it started as just like i message chats with a way too many people and then it became zoom calls and then geneva which is basically like a more aesthetic and free version of slack is the best way to describe it it's also like discord but with better and lighter branding and more like community brand focused.

11:31But we created this space called what we call the inner cycle, which is like a play on inner circle, you know? And so we created this Geneva home and literally we have like maybe 20 different chat rooms from a room called the flow where people are just chit chatting. We have a risky chat where people are talking about like party stories going out. We have one called Heavy Flow, which is for heavier topics, where people aren't talking about periods, but they're, like, asking for advice about being in an abusive relationship, coming out as trans for the first time. They're talking about going through the process of changing schools, right?

12:09Where, like, most of these rooms are not talking about periods, nor are they talking about August. We do have dedicated space called the August Town Hall, where we're specifically talking about product development and otherwise. but from the beginning of August, everything we did was saying, we're going to do this in partnership with the community. That meant literally deciding on a name, deciding on a logo, deciding on a color. Like most of our team members at the beginning, we hired directly from the community because we have these open Zoom chats. I have regular office hours. People are shooting around ideas.

12:41If we like an idea, we just hire that person, even if they're in high school and college, to come on and help us develop it, right? And so a lot of this was kind of in the mindset of, let's, you know, there's this kind of young consumer frustration of all these brands say authenticity and community. What does it look like to kind of actually do that and just exist in this authentic community-oriented way? And so how do you get people to actually do that? Like, where are you finding these power users? Is it hard to, like, I can, you know, I'm coming up from a millennial standpoint, but if a brand was like, join our inner community and we're going to talk about your personal things, I'd be like, hell no.

13:18But like, uh, like how, how is it different with Gen Z? I think it's a little bit, it, well, first of all, like we don't actually market it that much, right? Like we don't make a lot of content that's like, if you want to come chat about personal problems, like come chat with us. It's more like we have a link to it kind of subtly on the website. A lot of it started from like the OG days where we had maybe a couple hundred people. Now there's like 5 ,000 people. And the goal is not to scale it crazily, right? Like these are our super fans. A lot of them, when we have events or otherwise, will encourage their circles to come in.

13:55But I would also say like when a topic comes up, I mean, honestly, before we launched, when like the presidential debates were happening, I was posting on social being like, does anybody want to live post chat about this? Right. And I think it kind of came at this perfect time where social media does feel very overwhelming. We're also a lot more social media platforms like, you know, TikTok and Instagram mainly. They're mostly based on looking at an explore page, right? So it's not really cultivating relationships with people you directly follow. It's constant new people, new accounts, new creators.

14:27And so I think we just kind of put it out there subtly, you know, we're going to have a chat about this in this community. When we were talking about product development, we said, if you guys are open to getting on a Zoom call and giving feedback about pads, we want to get on a Zoom call and talk about it. And the more we do that and they see that the feedback they give, we act upon, we follow up about, I think that that kind of super fandom we see a lot more of. What makes my day is when I then see those community members putting on their Instagram bio and their LinkedIn profile at its August inner cycle member.

15:04Like it becomes this exciting like badge of community. And we definitely are probably maybe the only period care brand that has a lot of fan accounts, like number one, August fan, August tampon fan. I love those. Yeah. Do you promote this on your social accounts? You said it's sort of hidden or like like is there been any focus on acquisition at all or is it just been more word of mouth? We do like I do at them and sometimes they go hyper viral. Sometimes I'll like, if they come up to me on the New York City subway, I'll like make a video with them. But I like make a lot of content where like I know I'll make some, at least a few viral videos having my new see-through tampon purse.

15:43It's gorgeous. And like this is so much content. Like I can just make videos upon videos of filling it up, what I'm putting on my outfit, like putting one in, giving one to you. Kale needs, do you know how to use a tampon? I mean, theoretically. like this could be a viral video I'm just saying it'd be a viral video but like a lot's a lot of it is like it's just a lot of conversation there's a lot of education around it people have a lot of questions some of the most consistent viral videos are where we say hey did you know people assigned female at birth have three holes down there and people are like what did you know that I did okay good.

16:27I wanted to ask, because I think that this is a really interesting point that you make, that it's maybe counterintuitive to what other people said, because you say that social media is not community. And I feel like a lot of brands think of social media as community, or that's how they start it. It's the genesis. If they have a lot of comments and they respond to the comments, that's their community. So can you just go more into that and sort of, do you think that your rule is a generalized rule for every brand or just for August only? I think that it should be the new status quo, right? Because like, I mean, I think a lot of it is once you, for me, like once we started thinking about it in this way of like community is when I have a voice and like they know me, right?

17:11I think I started looking at my relationship with brands differently, right? Like obviously I follow a lot of clothing brands or makeup brands and like you do see the difference of when I'm kind of like honestly on a you know chatting basis with one account versus one I message and I get a bot response and I never hear back or you know in the comment section it's more becomes like an infighting thing so I think we see it differently obviously we we talk a lot about from a scalability perspective. How do we have the genesis of the community magic on Inner Cycle, but have that kind of magic of community care and orientation trickle out to the rest of our audience?

17:56And that's actually perfect for my next question, which is how do you do that? Scale is a really big thing for you. You're now in Target, and you've grown so much over the last two years. How do you retain that essence of a one-to-one part while also going into so many directions? I think a lot of it is showing the community through a lot of the content on social. So whether that be, for example, we launched in Target. So when we first launched in Target, we're in a little over 400 doors. We were like, okay, where are the hotspots that we need to go to? Let's meet up with community members and make content with them in the aisles of Target, right?

18:33And so we would do like interviews with them. We'd meet up. We'll take them on little shopping sprees. We make content about it. And I think people see that like there are community members who started commenting on the account. Then we hang out and then they come do homework at our office. You know, like I think even if it's a few people, that content does really well, you know, and I think even people, you know, seeing themselves in the community member. Right. So I think that there's a lot of showing the community in that way. I think a lot of it also comes down to this like value of care for our community and that community could be our global community right so how we show up in impact how we show up in just how we advocate for menstruators around issues like the tampon tax which is a sales tax on period products that exists in 21 states that considers menstrual products a luxury item like a non-essential good.

19:25Meanwhile, Rogaine and Viagra, products like that are considered medical necessities and don't have that tax. So a lot of it is talking about these sorts of issues that are very near and dear to the community heart and talking about the activations we're doing with the community and then inviting people to be a part of that, whether tangentially, whether on social media or deeper in the community. I actually wanted to ask you specifically about that because that's something I find very interesting where we're seeing a lot of brands do more, I don't know if activism, it's not really activism, but it's talking about public good in a way and talking about things that one might think is boring as like taxes.

19:58Do you find that those do resonate with your communities like when you talk about those types of things? Because I feel like brands have tried to do advocacy in different ways and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. So what are you finding works on that front? I think it's all about how you package it. If I came up to you and I said, hey, Kale, you want to talk about taxes? That's one thing versus me saying, hey, imagine you bleed out of your vagina know once a month you can't you know you or if I put it in something you can understand of like you need to go poo okay and you go to the public bathroom and there's no toilet paper but then someone tells you there's a metal dispenser outside and all you need is three quarters and then you can wipe your butt you know like I think it's just trying to make it in this kind of like fun conversational kind of quirky but like interesting just interesting kind of approach And so I think the more we contextualize it in something that's very personal and something that's very actionable, the more we see, right?

20:56For example, the tampon tax back initiative we launched, it's basically if you live in one of these 21 states and you buy August at Target or from the coalition brands, we will Venmo you back within 24 hours for the tampon tax you're charged, right? That is personal. We're literally offering to Venmo you money that we didn't even absorb ourselves. and so I think that for a lot of our customers one it's also driving sell through a target right it's encouraging people to go buy the product it immediately immediately sets us apart from other brands where it says hey have they ever talked to you about the tampon tax are they trying to make period care more accessible to you we also publicly challenge other brands to join us in on that and so I think a lot of it is doing these things where for customers they're like oh fuck yeah like if I buy them I get two dollars back you know so I think that it's just how you package it making it fun and interesting and the virality component kind of comes as our community members who know about these campaigns before they even launch start posting about it and talking about it and people start to see it's not just Nadia making content or the August page.

21:56It's suddenly like hundreds of people talking about it and it kind of like ripples out from there. Yeah, and I'm going to actually ask a little bit broader question out of this just because this is something I talk with a lot of people a lot. I think that there are a lot of companies that are trying to do what you're doing with things like sustainability or like greenwashing and some they don't hit as much? Do you think that it's just in the way those are being packaged? And this is just your personal opinion, but because you seem to be really good at making things that resonate with people. Or do you think, how would you approach that if you're a company that's trying to talk about sustainability in an approachable way?

22:26Well, I think we also call it out. Like we will literally say, no greenwashing here. Or we'll say like, we are trying to be better than just blanket statements, right? So I think a lot of it is, I mean, we talk about this a lot from a content perspective, which is usually we're trying to optimize performance on a video, right? When that video is about carbon neutrality, people care, but they don't like... It's not going to go viral. Yeah, it's not going to go viral. And so a lot of it, I think, is kind of dropping it in there or just having it on the website in more of a fun way. But it is something we think about a lot where there's so much that we do that we don't talk about online from a sustainability perspective.

23:10but we make that information available in some way. So if a customer does have those questions and they start looking through web content, otherwise they will find information about that and it can be a bit more of a larger conversation. Got it. I wanted to go back to some social questions just because you mentioned this and I would love just to hear how you're approaching that. Obviously TikTok has changed a great deal since 2021, but you mentioned Snapchat, YouTube Shorts. How has it changed? What are you finding works? Like, what are you focused on? What are you thinking about with all of these new video-focused channels?

23:45Right now, it's just constantly figuring out how it's working and how it changes on the day-to-day. I think with YouTube Shorts, you know, it's kind of like a meme when people say, people on Instagram Reels will find out about something on TikTok three months after it happened, and then YouTube Shorts is like nine months after it happened. And so I think that we kind of play off of that, of like, okay, well, we have a huge bank of content on TikTok. how do we just repurpose that across channels, right? So I almost think of TikTok less so as a social media platform right now and more as like a video editing software because like the templates, the trends, it auto-populates.

24:22You can just churn out videos. I literally post all mine and August's TikToks with the watermark still on them, looking a little blurry onto YouTube Shorts. And I think in the last three months, I have 250 ,000 followers on YouTube, right? And like, this is watermark, like we've just tested and tested, realizing like, where does it matter that the watermark is gone and it's a little bit more polished and the sound is actually hooked up? On YouTube, it does not matter because that is early adoption phase right now. So I think it's just constant learning. I think it's also just recognizing how the audience differs, right?

24:59YouTube audience is primarily a lot more international and it's also younger. so people who are under the age of 12 like they're they like can't be on TikTok right so like the other day I was making content in Times Square because we had this billboard and we were in Times Square and this like really really young girl came up to me as I like after I came was walking out and had recognized me because of watching my YouTube shorts right so it's like I recognize like who is interacting with us how they're different just a customer profile Well, yeah, so I wanted to ask, so YouTube Short, pretty much the big change is just they're younger.