Mimi MacLean:
Welcome to the Badass CEO podcast. This is Mimi MacLean. I'm a mom of five, entrepreneur, Columbia business school grad, CPA, and angel investor and I'm here to share with you my passion for entrepreneurship. Throughout my career, I have met many incredible people who have started businesses, disrupted industries, persevered, and turned opportunity into success.

Mimi MacLean:
Each episode, we will discuss what it takes to become and continue to be a badass CEO directly from the entrepreneurs who have made it happen. If you're renewing your career, dreaming about starting your own business, or already an entrepreneur, the Badass CEO podcast is for you. I want to give you the drive and tools needed to succeed in following your dreams.

Mimi MacLean:
Welcome back to the Badass CEO. This is your host, Mimi MacLean. Today, I have on Lauren Wang and she launched the Flex Company in 2016 with the dream of transforming the lives of people with periods. After suffering from chronic yeast infections for 15 years related to tampon use, it dawned on Lauren that it was time to change a status quo, not just for herself but for menstruaters everywhere. She stood out to create period products that were innovative, sustainable, and made for the 21st century.

Mimi MacLean:
Lauren frequently speaks on women's health and entrepreneurship and has been featured in Tech Crunch, the New Yorker, Wired, the Washington Post, and NPR. Lauren is a member of YPO and a graduate of Y Combinator. She gives back to her startup roots by mentoring entrepreneurs through both organizations and with the Norrsken foundation. Prior to founding the Flex Company, Laura spent over a decade marketing, leading consumer brands for companies including Coca-Cola, Upwork, and IBM and advocating for issues she's passionate about. She was the first in her family to graduate college, working full time to earn her business degree from Georgia State University.

Mimi MacLean:
Thank you for joining us today on the Badass CEO. Please go to thebadassceo.com to sign up for our newsletter so you'll be notified of our next podcast. You can find out all my resources and tools that I use there to help support the podcast and all the expenses that go with it. Thanks again.

Mimi MacLean:
Okay, Lauren, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. I'd love to start out because you were in corporate America for a long time, for a decade or so and working for some great companies. At what point did you like, "Okay. I wake up and I'm not going to do corporate job anymore. I'm going to become my own boss and start my own company."?

Lauren Wang:
You're absolutely right. I mean, I got my GED at 18 and started working at IBM at 19 which is not a really traditional career path. I really didn't want to be an entrepreneur but I was suffering from yeast infections for over 15 years and took me that amount of time to figure out that my tampons and pads were causing my yeast infections. When I started talking to other people about my period problems, I heard all different types of period problems from different people. Most people weren't getting infections but everyone kind of dreads their period. Through those conversations, people started asking me to make better period products for them. After getting texts from fourth degree, out of state strangers, I eventually got the courage to quit my corporate job and pursue making more sustainable, healthy period products full time.

Mimi MacLean:
So wait, when you quit your job though because I think it's a big decision for a lot of people. At what point do you forego security for a high risk? As we all know, a lot of ventures don't work out, the odds are stacked against you. At what point did you mitigate that risk? Did you have a product when you left? Did you already know the name of your company? At what point did you say, "Okay. I'm ready to do this."

Lauren Wang:
I knew the name of the company. I had been kind of working on it as a side project for two years. The issue with making a medical device is you actually need quite a bit of money to build your own manufacturing line. You're not white labeling a product. If I were doing a tech company, the risk is a lot lower. You don't need to purchase inventory, you don't have to buy really expensive manufacturing equipment, and go through the FDA process. It's a little bit different for everyone.

Lauren Wang:
For me, I thought that I had saved up enough money. I was desperately wrong and almost went bankrupting myself before I got my first check from my Y Combinator. But yeah, I think for me it was really a calling and as cheesy as it sounds, I felt like there were so many signs that were cropping up all over my life and it was happening for a couple of years. Eventually, I just felt like I was ignoring the universe and I needed to just do it. I just needed to do it and try it and see and you're absolutely right, I was plagued with anxiety because I knew over... What is it? Over 90% of startups fail.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. Within, I think, the first five years or something. Crazy.

Lauren Wang:
Yeah. The statistics are really stacked against us. But I knew that doing it as a side hustle, it was never going to go anywhere either because I didn't have my full focus on it.

Mimi MacLean:
No, it's so true. Someone told me once that if you want to go take a leap, it's almost like being in a trapeze artist. You have to let go to get to the other handle. You can't hold on both and still-

Lauren Wang:
Correct.

Mimi MacLean:
Trapeze. You got to let go to be able to grab the other one so at some point, you have to let go, right?

Lauren Wang:
Totally. It's like becoming a parent. No one is ever ready to become a parent, right?

Mimi MacLean:
That's true.

Lauren Wang:
I have a little one and I have another little one on the way and I felt so scared before she was born and I wasn't ready and everyone said, "You're never going to be ready. Do it." It's the same thing.

Mimi MacLean:
The same thing.

Lauren Wang:
It's the same thing.

Mimi MacLean:
That's great. That's great. Is there anything you've learned so far that you look back and you're like, "Okay," over the last... Was it three or four? No, it's been 2016, right? So the last six years you're like, "Gosh, I wish I knew this when I started." What has been the biggest surprise challenge for you?

Lauren Wang:
Learning to believe in myself, hands down. As cheesy as that might sound, I think the messages that corporate America gives to young women tend to be a little bit conflicting. While I did certainly have a number of people in my life who were very supportive to me throughout my career professionally, there were probably an equal number of people who were not so positive and all of those microaggressions over a span of 10 years can really get to you.

Lauren Wang:
That I had to find confidence within myself, I had to believe in myself, and I had to kind of get over the fact that I was from a small town in Georgia and I got my GED and that my family really struggled a lot financially and that I didn't go to this like Ivy League school and I was a Silicon Valley outsider. I had to get over those things and celebrate the things that I was really good at and still be really honest with myself on all of my shortcomings and work on the things as appropriate. But that confidence thing, I think, is really critical for a lot of women that I talk to in starting a business.

Mimi MacLean:
True. Because I think it's like that imposter syndrome where people feel like, "Wait, I don't belong here. I don't..." I think that's one of the things that a lot of women struggle with. They tend to undersell themselves and men tend to oversell themselves, right? I think it's interesting like looking for financing, right? Because you said you self-financed it, almost got yourself to go bankrupt. So your first financing was through a competition, is that what you're saying?

Lauren Wang:
Yeah. I went through a program called Y Combinator. It's not a competition but it is a startup accelerator. I think they're the original startup accelerator in Silicon Valley. It's super competitive. It's really a sad statistic. They emailed me last week to see if I could help try to get some more women to apply. Last year, less than 10% of their teams that they funded had female founder in it. Part of it is the numbers game, there just aren't enough women starting businesses right now. But for me, going through that application process was initially just to help create my business plan and be able to articulate to a venture investor why what I was doing was a huge multi-billion dollar market. But that did lead to that very first check and before then, I had cashed out my 401k which I do not recommend to anyone, the woman on the phone when I was cashing it out was begging me not to do it.

Mimi MacLean:
It would just compound, right? So you lost all those years of compounding.

Lauren Wang:
I lost all those years of compounding, my tax bill was almost bigger than what I actually got out, it was bad. I was AirBnb-ing my apartment and staying with a friend and my landlord found out and almost evicted me. It was like a series of really, really bad choices. But going back, I think I did need to show investors some kind of traction. And even though I couldn't buy my own manufacturing line and even though I hadn't developed my product at scale, I did have prototypes, I did have renderings, I did have some contractors that were working with me to bring the business forward. And so, I needed my own kind of personal savings to be able to do that. I didn't have a lot of savings. Like I said, I was not wealthy. I did not come from a background... No one in my family, none of my friends helped me. But you would be surprised that even being able to scrape together a little bit every single month adds up over the course of 10 years.

Mimi MacLean:
But you also are probably amazed at how much everything costs. People don't realize to do the prototype of the box probably was like, "What?"

Lauren Wang:
Yeah.

Mimi MacLean:
It costs so much money. Everything always takes twice as long or three times as long and three times as much money.

Lauren Wang:
Exactly.

Mimi MacLean:
So when you finally talk to investors, I mean obviously, most of them are men. They probably don't even understand, that's probably for them like, "Ah, wait, we're talking about what product?" right? Because it's like, I'll bring stuff up to my husband when we're thinking about investing in something and if he doesn't understand it, it's very hard for him to focus and be like, "Okay, we're going to invest in it." Men just have a hard time, especially if it's female products. Did you find that to be the case?

Lauren Wang:
Yeah, that was definitely the case. I found a way to kind of overcome that because, at the time, there's also very few CPG investors generally so people weren't investing in personal care products or consumer products. There were private equity funds but that's a very, very different type of business and type of investor. But there weren't a lot of venture investors focused on CPG brands generally. What I found, to your point, is I had to find some kind of common ground with men and periods which sounds like a stretch but there was one feature of our products that I knew that men could really do and that was you can use our product for mess-free period sex.

Lauren Wang:
I'm a bisexual woman so period sex for me was actually never an issue unless I was dating another woman and we both had our period on a different week and that's problematic for your sex life. But I knew for men that a lot of heterosexual men had been rejected for sex because their partner was on their period. So I would kind of start my pitch that way and say, "Do you enjoy having sex with women?" "Uh-huh (affirmative)" "Have you ever been rejected by a female partner because she was on her period?" "Uh-huh (affirmative)." All of them said yes. And then, you have them nodding and then you're like, "Okay, I got a product that solves for that and it's a multi-billion dollar market and oh, by the way, there's been no innovation in period care in over a hundred years," then you're on a roll and then you got them actually listening to you.

Lauren Wang:
But I would say to anyone, that's pitching male investors, talking about the market size, talking about the business traction, talking about things that they understand and can relate to, even if it's a product that is so far outside of the realm of their comfort or experience, you can find that commonality and make it an effective pitch. It just took me getting a lot of no's to get to that point where I had to take accountability myself and be like, "Well, I got to find a way to get them nodding." That's how I did it.

Mimi MacLean:
I like that. I got to find a way to get them nodding. So you had this idea and it was definitely new and novel. So how did you find an actual manufacturer? Did you have to find someone to do a prototype and then you found someone like, "Okay, this is what I want to do." How did that work?

Lauren Wang:
That was a multi-year process that would probably take your whole podcast to get into all the details. I cold called, I think, over 53 manufacturers in North America. I really wanted a partner that was local for sustainability and safety reasons. I wanted to be able to go and actually touch and feel and see the product and see it being made and see the facility know that it was clean in a clean room and all those things.

Lauren Wang:
I resolved to actually starting to show up and stand in the lobby until somebody actually talked to me and that eventually worked with a manufacturer in the Bay Area. They didn't know this at the time, but I hadn't raised money yet. So then, I had to go and scramble back to investors and say, "Yes, I have a manufacturer and this is how much it's going to cost to make." But first I had to get a manufacturer to give me a quote for how much it would cost to be able to go and raise money to say, "Okay. I have 10,000 pre-orders this is how much it's going to cost to make it. This is how much money I'm going to make." But that contract fell through when I was in the middle of Y Combinator so I ended up having to go and buy another company which is a whole other story so that I could get their manufacturing line, basically, is what I did.

Mimi MacLean:
You bought another consumer product company?

Lauren Wang:
I did, yeah. Because I wanted their manufacturing contract because there are so few manufacturers that make medical devices in North America out of the types of materials with the manufacturing process that I needed and I knew that this one was the best in the world, not just North America, but in the world. But they had exclusivity with somebody else so my weird way around it was going and buying that other business.

Mimi MacLean:
My gosh. And so, your investors were okay with that, to give you the money to go buy the business?

Lauren Wang:
Well, I took the little bit of money that I already had and I negotiated this really crazy deal where their company had been unprofitable for 20 years and I made it profitable in the first three months and I used the profit from their business to pay for the acquisition of their business which was kind of wonky. But because I was able to negotiate that deal, then all these investors were like, "Who is this girl from Georgia?"

Mimi MacLean:
Oh my gosh.

Lauren Wang:
This is so unconventional like, "Here, here's a check. We don't know about this weird period thing that you're making but we trust that you're going to be able to figure it out."

Mimi MacLean:
That's amazing story. And then, were you afraid as you talked to the 53 different manufacturers that they were going to steal your idea?

Lauren Wang:
Oh yeah. I was very scared about it but ideas are a dime a dozen so it all comes down to execution.

Mimi MacLean:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). No, it's true. So what makes your execution that much better than everybody else's that has worked? Are you super organized, are you... What's the magic sauce?

Lauren Wang:
I wish I could tell you the magic sauce. I mean, I think the biggest thing that makes anyone successful is accountability. If you take personal accountability in all the things and you find ways to just not make excuses but to have a very sober view of your reality and your set of circumstances and to be able to focus on the positive and to problem solve around that reality, whatever the obstacles may be, that is, I think, what leads to success.

Lauren Wang:
For us, that reality is... I mean, that's how I operate as a leader, that's how I run the team in terms of us listening to customers, us, like our customer obsession, and how we integrate data into every single thing that we do is our secrets sauce and what's led to our success. A lot of companies and businesses say that they're customer obsessed and customer centric but there is a little bit of an art to listening to what people are saying. I think motivating and incentivizing our team to not take critical feedback about the business, the product, or you critically, but to learn from it and grow from it and take accountability and own it and kind of move forward from that obstacle. I think it's a lesson that can be learned, like I said, for leadership or for businesses.

Mimi MacLean:
No, it's true to always just be learning. So you have this manufacturer, you bought a company, now you have it manufactured, and you're like, "Okay, where am I going to sell it?" Did you try to then go direct consumer? Did you try to find pharmacies? What was your strategy to get it out?

Lauren Wang:
Yeah. So this is the days we launched right after Dollar Shave Club had sold their business to Unilever and direct to consumer was hot, hot, hot at the time so we launched direct to consumer. That was a very real, viable business that there was still an advertising arbitrage on Facebook when Facebook used to be really hot, Instagram was very new, TikTok wasn't even a thought in someone's head yet. Maybe it was and we didn't know about it. But yeah, direct to consumer was the quick and easy way to go. After growing and growing and growing the business was just exploding up into the right, I kept hearing from customers they wanted to buy the product in retail. A lot of people don't track their periods unless they are trying to not get pregnant or they're trying to get pregnant.

Lauren Wang:
Obviously, that's a smaller target audience for us. Going back to what I said about listening to customer feedback, I said to the team, "We got to start selling in retail. We just have to do it. We have to figure out a way to do it." And so, we became omnichannel in 2018. It is now very hot to be omnichannel but in 2018, it was super controversial. Almost all of our investors, not every investor, but a lot of them are like, "Are you crazy? That's a totally different business. Retail is dead. Brick and mortar is going the way of the dodo," and I said, "Okay, maybe it is but I got to follow our customers." But that turned out to be just a really incredible business decision because we're now in over 30,000 retail doors and as cost of acquisition is rising in direct to consumer, we have this massive, massive retail footprint and we're able to meet our customers where they already shop.

Mimi MacLean:
Yep. And your gross margin already included going direct to a retailer?

Lauren Wang:
Yeah, it did. Yeah, it did.

Mimi MacLean:
Okay. Because sometimes people don't, they're like, "Oh, I'm going to go direct to consumer," thinking like, "I don't have to worry about my gross margin or my gross profit." And then, when they decide to go try to sell it at Target-

Lauren Wang:
Then you have a problem. Yeah. That's such a good point. We solve for that because I... This isn't advice I would actually give to most women who are starting a business, especially when you're in the earlier days, get to profitability as quickly as possible. Again, at the time in 2018, profitability was like a cuss word. But again, I think because I am pretty risk averse as a human from my humble upbringing with my family, I wanted to know that I had a viable business. I couldn't sleep at night feeling if we were overspending on things like marketing. Even if we were growing, growing, growing, like crazy, I wanted to know that I would always be able to run the business securely and wouldn't be counting on an investor to come in and give me that next check.

Lauren Wang:
Because in our space, in the period care space, there just weren't a lot of investors. There wasn't a big universe of people that wanted to write me checks. I didn't know if I would be able to raise a Series A or a Series B or a Series C. So I figured, all right, I want to grow at a healthy clip but I want to do so in a way that is sustainable and viable for the long term so that if anything were to happen, look at COVID, look at all these things that have happened over the years, then I can self sustain and run the business.

Lauren Wang:
So to your point, we had phenomenal margins out of the gate both in direct to consumer and in retail. That took a lot of pushing and negotiating on the part of retail to command the margins that I know that we deserve because the product works really well. But that is what has created a sustainable business and to me, it's all in service of our customers so that the product can be more available at more places. We have actually lowered the price, I think, pretty much every year since we've launched. As we're achieving economies of scale, we're making the product more and more and more affordable for consumers while preserving our profit margin.

Mimi MacLean:
Did you have a viral video in 2016? Were you trying to follow the shave clubs? Can you remember that video that they first came out with?

Lauren Wang:
I did. I wish they had a viral video. No, we did not have a viral... We have since had many viral videos but no, we did not have a viral video. We did go viral for a weird reason. The editor in chief of Tech Crunch was in an investor pitch and I didn't know he was in there and he heard me talking about this being a new product for a mess-free period sex. He thought it was super interesting and he published a feature on us on the homepage of Tech Crunch for a full 48 hours, it was the main cover story. Tech Crunch said that we broke the Internet and this is the beginning of 2016. But the saddest part is, our website wasn't live yet, all that we had was an email sign up.

Mimi MacLean:
Oh no. Because you imagine the sales or if it was on Amazon Now and that happened? Click here!

Lauren Wang:
It was heartbreaking.

Mimi MacLean:
Every mother would be getting that for Mother's Day.

Lauren Wang:
Exactly. I got a lot of heat from a lot of feminist podcasters that were like, "Oh, it's so heteronormative." I'm like, "Okay, I can see maybe how you would say that but if you knew that I was bisexual and if you knew why I had to pitch it this way to investors, you might understand a little bit better," but you got to do what you got to do to be able to-

Mimi MacLean:
Everyone's got to relate if they're going to open up their checkbook, right? They have to relate. You had mentioned before that very few women are starting companies. Why do you think that is?

Lauren Wang:
I think it's a very nuanced complicated thing. I think one is really around that confidence thing. For career oriented women, I think the feedback that we get can sometimes be very contradictory. I think that's one thing. Another thing is, I found a really hard time finding a co-founder. I was out around, I actually wasted a lot of time talking to people trying to find a co-founder. I had asked women that I had worked with for a number of years to be my co-founder and what they would tell me is, "Well, actually my husband is kind of the breadwinner and I want to have kids and I don't really think I can have kids and run a company." That seemed to be like this common thing that people would say to me over and over again.

Lauren Wang:
But I think part of it too, is there were very few women at the time who were running companies who had children. I think since there's been a new crop of a lot of different female entrepreneurs who have children and they're doing both, I think it's the feedback that we kind of get in the workplace that makes us feel like we're not quite good enough and that glass ceiling coupled with not having a lot of role models to be able to feel like if you want to have kids, and not every female CEO or every female executive or female career woman like wants to have kids, and that's totally fine too. But for those who do, I think more people should know that you can actually do both.

Mimi MacLean:
Well. Yeah, it's true. Because I always felt like I always kind of shunned away from corporate America. I worked in corporate but I always thought like, "Okay. I want to have kids." I always thought it was more difficult to actually have a job and have to report into New York city every day and have a family and commute. That's why I always wanted to be an entrepreneur so that I can make my own rules and where it's going to be and kind of create my own lifestyle, right? I looked at it as the opposite.

Lauren Wang:
So smart. I think that's brilliant. That's absolutely brilliant. And yeah, I think that a lot of women who start businesses have the most progressive paid parental leave policies. For example, we let anyone, and we especially encourage the dads in the company to take advantage of a full three months, full paid doesn't matter which state you're in, it's not just a California thing. We want people to be taking that time to start their families because the government doesn't give it to us.

Mimi MacLean:
Do you find though with that generous rule that's not mandated, it's your choice, does it hurt you? Are you able to sustain your expenses? Is it like bottom line at all?

Lauren Wang:
No, it doesn't hurt. I mean, it's expensive, certainly, but so is our... What our insurance broker would tell me is, way above market, gold-plated, top tier health insurance coverage. I view healthcare as being a human, right? I think it's more of from my personal values. If I made sure that I built the business in a way that was profitable enough, then I'd be able to pay employees really well, have phenomenal healthcare, have phenomenal benefits so that people don't have to worry about their day to day living and their lives. That is more coming from my personal values than the business bottom line. Does it hurt the business bottom line? I'm sure it does, but I just think of it as a cost of doing business because it's the way that I want to run my company.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. But I bet you, if you do the actual, if you were able to, you probably can. But the turnover, your turnover is probably less than other companies because they value how you treat them.

Lauren Wang:
Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. I think we're able to attract different talent or better talent because people know that if they decide to start a family while they're working at Flex, that's something that we're very supportive of.

Mimi MacLean:
Yep. Okay. So last question, is there anything that you would... Any advice tips to anyone who's starting a business, deciding to leave corporate America to start their business, or any kind of advice for trying to help women get past that only 1.7% of women ever reach seven figured number?

Lauren Wang:
Oh, that statistic really breaks my heart. My advice would be just to... It's so low, it's so tough to read, just get started. Like I said, there's really no perfect time and there are a million books that you can read and podcasts you can listen to and YouTube videos you can watch, but nothing replaces actually going and getting started and trying to get that early traction to be able... If nothing else, to at least prove to yourself that this thing that's been growing in your mind and on your heart and that you've been telling your friends and family about this idea that you have, no one can make that come true except for you. I just encourage people always to go ahead and get started and that might not look like totally quitting your full time job until you have enough savings, that's okay too, it took me a couple of years. But know that there is never going to be a perfect time and you are just going to have to make that leap one day just like the trapeze example or maybe just like having your first child example.

Mimi MacLean:
Yes, exactly. Lauren, thank you so much. This has been amazing. I just want to make sure everyone has the website. It's just Flex or Instagram @useflex but your website is flexfits.com.

Lauren Wang:
That's correct.

Mimi MacLean:
Great. Well thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Lauren Wang:
Thanks. I had a blast so nice talking with you.

Mimi MacLean:
Thank you for joining us on the Badass CEO. To get your copy of the Top 10 Tips Every Entrepreneur Should Know, go to thebadassceo.com/tips. Also, please leave a review as it helps others find us. If you have any ideas or suggestions, I would love to hear them so email me at mimi@thebadassceo.com. See you next week and thank you for listening.