How Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

LAUREN WANG: I was on this journey, telling everyone that I met about my idea and asking for help, saying I was looking for a CEO, and I would be CMO.

JEFF BERMAN: Lauren Wang knew that her idea for a new kind of menstrual product had massive potential. She wanted to create a disposable, flexible disc that could be worn instead of a tampon, but Lauren wasn’t sure she could be CEO of a company. That all changed one day while she was out on a run with a dear friend.

WANG: He said, “You know, I’m starting a company, as you know, and I really want a female CEO, and I would love for you to throw your hat in the ring. I’m dead serious.” And it was that moment I literally stopped dead in my tracks, and I looked at him, and I said, “You know what, Dan, I’m gonna do this.”

And he was like, “Do what?”

I was like, “The period thing.”

“You’re gonna do it?”

“Yeah, if you think that I’m good enough that you would hire me, I’m gonna do it.”

BERMAN: Lauren did not look back. She founded The Flex Co. in 2015 and has achieved impressive scale in the last decade. Flex period products are now available in more than 30,000 stores, including CVS, Target, and Walmart. And as we’re recording this in late 2024, it’s the number one seller in its category on Amazon as well. The Flex story is a phenomenal example of how you can disrupt an old-fashioned industry with newfangled designs and marketing that isn’t just unafraid to talk about taboo subjects — marketing that leans into the real talk.

I’m Jeff Berman, your host. After her own health problems caused by tampons sent her down a research rabbit hole, Lauren Wang realized that menstrual products hadn’t really gotten much of an upgrade in the past century. She knew she couldn’t be alone in her dissatisfaction with the two main options: tampons and pads. But it was a complex challenge to turn her bold idea for a new product into reality.

Lauren, welcome to Masters of Scale.

WANG: Thanks!

Copy LinkThe origin story of The Flex Company

BERMAN: Like many of the founders we have on Masters of Scale, you have a non-obvious journey to where you are. Can you talk about where you started and how you began on this journey?

WANG: Yeah. So I moved to San Francisco when I was 25 years old. I worked in tech and nonprofit, and through those two networks, I started meeting some really big entrepreneurs in the Valley.

I’m from a small town in Georgia and really never wanted to be an entrepreneur. My family was food insecure at certain points in my life. I’m the oldest of five kids, the first to go to college, and in retrospect, it always seemed so obvious to everyone else in the room. Like, “Of course, you thought of this; it seems so obvious.” But no one else was paying attention to this space.

I had this one really obvious problem in my life, which was I was getting infections from tampons every single month for 15 years of my life.

BERMAN: Every month?

WANG: Every month.

BERMAN: That couldn’t be comfortable.

WANG: One week with my period, and another week with an infection. Having an infection was extremely disruptive to my life, but I didn’t really know that it was being caused by my tampons until my nurse practitioner in San Francisco said, “I’m not writing another prescription for you for yeast infection medication until you promise to stop using tampons.”

BERMAN: But what are you supposed to do then? Pads — the only option at the time?

WANG: Maxi pads. So I can’t run seven miles with a super-plus maxi pad. So I kept using tampons, kept getting infections.

Fast forward to 2013: I’m at a dinner with eight women, and one of the women starts talking about this product called the cup. There was a woman who was a nurse, and she had just gotten back from Nepal. She was working on a program there where she was basically giving menstrual cups to women in Nepal and teaching them how to use it. And it just sparked this curiosity for me.

And all of the women at the table had switched to the cup. I’d never heard of a cup. I was like, “A menstrual cup? What are you talking about?” But they were talking about 12 hours, and they were talking about the fact that it’s sustainable. And I was very intrigued.

That experience in my life sparked curiosity about the space that turned into this fanaticism, that turned into this hobby that ate up all my time on the weekends.

BERMAN: What does it mean that it becomes a hobby?

WANG: Well, I’m just a very curious person. I started by wondering, “Well, why are tampons giving me infections? Certainly, there has to be a study out there.”

I talked to different doctors, and they all said, “You’re crazy.” It was just that one nurse practitioner: “Tampons are perfectly safe. This is something wrong with your body.” And my doctors from Georgia had told me that for years.

This was 15 years. I tried really hard to solve this problem, but I couldn’t find any research on the internet other than some old studies about toxic shock syndrome, which is something that you can die from but you don’t only get from tampons. And there was no other information about why I’d be getting other types of infections.

The more that I studied it and researched, the more I realized there has not been any meaningful innovation in this space in nearly 100 years.

In fact, the menstrual cup was patented by a woman in the 1930s who was a stage actress. It took until the 2010s for people to even hear about menstrual cups, honestly.

BERMAN: Why?

WANG: Well, first of all, there’s not a lot of money in menstrual cups because they’re reusable products. And we didn’t have internet advertising; we didn’t have social media. Most fundamentally, periods are still stigmatized, and if you don’t talk about something, you can’t identify when there are problems.

I think that stigma is why there has been very little research and funding for women’s health.

Copy LinkInside Lauren’s first steps of building The Flex Company

BERMAN: So we’re in the 2012-2013 range. This becomes an obsession for you. How do you make the leap to this becoming a business? How do you figure out how to manufacture a product? What do you do?

WANG: Well, at the time Evernote was a thing. I had basically a digital notebook where I categorized it by all the different things I didn’t know how to do: product development, FDA regulatory, finance — basically everything other than marketing — manufacturing, supply chain, you name it.

I created a second list of all the smart people I’d ever interacted with in my professional life. I started working at IBM when I was 19, so I collected a long list of people through the years.

Then I made a third list of email addresses and typed up, “I have this idea. I want to make a new period product, and I’m really looking for,” and I would have a very specific ask: someone with expertise in supply chain; I know nothing about it. I need to make my first financial model. I need to know about COGS, right?

BERMAN: Yeah, cost of goods sold, right? And I think part of what’s fascinating about this is, while the network that you had accumulated from 19 forward didn’t directly have the expertise, by putting the asks out there and by exposing “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I want to figure this out,” you’re looking for those second- and third-degree connections. And by maintaining these relationships over time, they’re willing to help.

WANG: Yeah, I found one of the biggest hacks: people can be flattered that you ask for their help, especially if the ask is very specific and time-bound.

I would say, “I would love to talk to you for 10 minutes about supply chain manufacturing because I’m building a financial model.” I was very clear and specific. And that turned into him saying, “You know what, if you can come to Portland, I’ll meet with you for a weekend,” right?

BERMAN: And so what often happens is people say, “Can I get a half hour to pick your brain?” And it’s like, “I don’t have a half an hour. And pick my brain about what?” Right? You want to be helpful, but it’s too generic. So by being specific, it sounds like you got an outsized return on these asks.

WANG: Yes, I did. And then everyone I met, I would tell about my idea. But the most important thing I’m not telling you right now is I didn’t want to be the CEO.

Number one, I didn’t think that I could. Number two, when I quit my tech job, the two people who I still love to this day, who were very close and in C-level positions, pulled me aside and said, “You’re making a huge mistake. You have never even been CMO. How do you think you’re going to be CEO? You should go work for a very small start-up first, try to get a CMO job, and then you’ll get to see what it’s really like to work at a super small start-up,” which, in hindsight, is fair advice, I think, for a lot of different people.

But I was absolutely gutted when, separately, they had told me this. They have since come back and apologized, but I understood that they were coming from a really good place.

So I had self-doubt. I had the people I trusted the most professionally reflecting back to me my own self-doubt. So I asked two separate men who were each running a billion-dollar-plus, multi-billion-dollar company if they would be CEO of my company.

BERMAN: Why not?

WANG: And they smiled. They laughed and said, “You are completely capable of doing this, Lauren.” But I still didn’t believe them.

BERMAN: Wow. So, I mean, Reid Hoffman talks a lot about jumping off the cliff and building the airplane on the way down, but there’s a modified version of that where you’re staying in a job. So, you fully jumped off the cliff. You’re like, leaning over the edge of the cliff, starting to build before you go. What gave you the confidence to leave a job where you had a steady salary, where you had benefits, etc., and go all in on this idea?

WANG: I didn’t feel that I was giving it a fair shake. I felt like the risk in me not trying to create a period company would be worse than the risk of me trying to do it and failing.

I felt deeply pulled from a moral imperative that I needed to do this to serve others.

I grew up in an evangelical household, which probably has something to do with it. I always thought I was going to be a missionary when I grew up. And I’m no longer an evangelical, but I think that foundation for me ties into what I want to do for society or what I believe is my place in this world — to help other people.

So I really didn’t feel like I was doing right by society, doing right by women, to work on this as a side hustle and try to play it safe. I felt like I had to go all in. Otherwise, I wasn’t giving it a fair shot.

Copy LinkWhat is the Flex Disc?

BERMAN: Before we keep going, Lauren, for anyone who isn’t familiar with it, could you just explain what the Flex Disc actually is?

WANG: So the period disc is not a cup. It’s not a tampon. It sits in a different place in the body.

A menstrual cup and a tampon sit inside the vaginal canal, where there are a lot of nerve endings, and you can feel it. The menstrual disc, or period disc, sits further back around the cervix, in a place where a diaphragm would sit.

What’s great about the disc is you can wear it for up to 12 hours. It holds five super tampons’ worth of fluid, which is more than any other period product format on the market.

My favorite part is, when you go to pee, it self-empties. You don’t have to take it out.

A menstrual cup, when it gets full, you have to take it out and empty it. When a tampon gets full, you have to change tampons very frequently. Or a pad — you have to carry multiple products around. With the disc, you only use two disposable discs per day.

BERMAN: Because you can wear it up to 12 hours.

WANG: Because you wear it up to 12 hours. We also make a reusable version that you only have to take out once a day. So it’s a “set it and forget it.” You feel like you’re not on your period.

The reason we went viral to begin with is because you can have mess-free oral or penetrative fun while on your period.

BERMAN: We can say sex.

WANG: I don’t know. TikTok is on me these days about that.

BERMAN: Okay, we’ll call it fun.

WANG: Okay, that’s pretty fun.

BERMAN: So, Lauren, you’ve got to figure out product development. You’ve got to figure out supply chain. You’ve got to figure out distribution. I mean, the whole list of the Evernote notes, right? But also funding, right?

A lot of the entrepreneurs we speak with — founders who are women or are building products that are disproportionately for women — run into a bit of a challenge because most of the capital in this country is controlled by men. How did you get your first round of funding? How did you get the company off the ground?

Copy LinkLauren Wang’s big bet on herself

WANG: Well, if you’re making a physical product — and our product, our first product, the disc, required a custom manufacturing line and space in someone’s manufacturing facility and labor and all of these other things, right?

Even if you have a product design, you still need the raw materials, and you need the actual machine. In our case, because it’s all patented, we needed machinery to be able to build it. So we’re talking over a million dollars.

But when I would go to talk to investors and show them my financial model, they’d ask, “How do you know that people are actually going to buy this thing?”

And it was this chicken-or-the-egg problem: How do I demonstrate demand before I can even make the product? That was a whole problem to solve.

I’ve had so many entrepreneurs ask me that question. And I always say, “I know it feels so unfair. This is your first challenge, and I know it feels like the hardest one. But if you can’t solve this problem, you’re not prepared to be an entrepreneur.”

So I went through a lot of different machinations to solve that problem.

In the meantime, I moved in with my boyfriend. I put my apartment in San Francisco, illegally, on Airbnb. I got caught and almost evicted. At that point, I was very close to running out of money.

Since I had been working at IBM since I was 19, I called Vanguard to cash out my 401(k). The woman — I will never forget — on the line was begging me: “Please don’t do this. It’s such a big mistake.”

I said, “I don’t have any choice. I’m out of money.”

She was just like, “You’re going to pay more than half of this in taxes.”

I said, “I don’t have a choice. I have a product designer I have to pay. I have things I have to do.”

BERMAN: Lauren cashed out her retirement and placed a big bet on herself.

We’re going to hear more about how that bet paid off in just a minute.

[AD BREAK]

BERMAN: Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more at the Masters of Scale YouTube channel.

Copy LinkLessons from Y Combinator

Even after draining her 401(k), Lauren needed more investment to get her business off the ground — a lot more. So she applied to participate in Y Combinator, the renowned start-up incubator. At that time, Y Combinator was being led by Silicon Valley legend and now founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman.

WANG: I got the interview, and I interviewed with Sam Altman. I remember Sam was like, “I don’t know a lot about periods, but it seems like a really big space, and it seems like there’s not been any innovation. And I think you’re going to be the person to do this.”

That vote of confidence from Sam was just incredible.

BERMAN: Yeah. What did you learn most from the Y Combinator experience?

WANG: To do things that don’t scale in the early days.

BERMAN: Can you give me an example of that?

WANG: Yeah, so the best example I have of doing something that didn’t scale: we had a limited production run of product, and we did not yet have our FDA clearance.

We knew that the product was going to be FDA-cleared in the U.S., but we didn’t have it yet. We did, however, have it in Europe. I had this waitlist that I had created for the product where people just gave me their email address and their home address, and then I said I would send them two menstrual discs — two Flex discs.

So I had this massive list of all these consumers that wanted the product, but I couldn’t mail them anywhere in the U.S.

Speaking of doing things that don’t scale: at the time, Icelandair had really cheap flights. So we bought a flight to Iceland for, I think, 200 bucks. Three of us, with suitcases and suitcases full of menstrual discs, flew from city to city on budget airlines.

We got an Airbnb, hand-packed samples, then schlepped these giant bags to the local post offices, mailed them out, and hopped on the flight to the next city.

BERMAN: You were traveling with 20 or 30,000 discs?

WANG: Yes, which are about this big, right?

BERMAN: The size of a silver dollar? Maybe a little bigger?

WANG: No, this. Well… how big is that?

BERMAN: For people listening, yeah, it’s maybe —

WANG: — a friendship bracelet.

BERMAN: Okay, great. Perfect.

WANG: That’s what I was telling customs that I was shipping — friendship bracelets.

BERMAN: Amazing.

WANG: I literally could not think of anything else. And I didn’t remember that you had to fill something out on the form.

So I’m standing right in front of the postal worker, and he’s looking at me filling out this form. He’s like, “What are you mailing?”

The people that worked in the postal office were not happy to see us. We had duffel bags about five-foot-nine — more than half the size of my body — full of these different packages coming in.

And each postage cost a very small amount because friendship bracelets are quite light, it turns out. So it was a lot of work for them without a lot of money, and it was quite awkward.

BERMAN: There was no stamps.com for you to go print all this out and just go drop it all off?

WANG: No, absolutely not. And the mailboxes were not big enough, yeah.

So we went to, I think, seven different cities in maybe eight days because we were in the middle of YC, and we had to go back to YC. But it was enough to be able to demonstrate the traction that we needed by the time we got to Demo Day.

Copy LinkPitching her product at Y Combinator’s Demo Day

BERMAN: Demo Day — it’s the high-stakes capstone event of Y Combinator. Each start-up gets a chance to pitch their business to an auditorium chock full of eager venture capitalists.

WANG: They put me on stage second out of just under 100 companies, and I loved that. I was so excited.

I wasn’t sure how investors would react. There were a lot of gasps in the audience. We got off stage, and they kind of usher you into a hall. If you have any kind of physical product, you have a little table set up.

So we had a table, and I had my little Gina — I call her my anatomical model.

BERMAN: Not Gina?

WANG: Gina, the female reproductive system.

The doors to this hall — it’s like a big conference hall, right? — open, and this herd of investors literally runs in. They rush over to our table, and I’m absolutely mobbed. People are elbowing each other to come and talk to us.

I had this guy walk by and go, “I’ll give you 200K,” and walk away. Someone was like, “That’s Steve Cohen.” I’m like, “No way.”

Then someone else goes — and these are all big VCs — “Did you plant him? Do you know him?” I’m like, “I’ve never met him in my life.”

BERMAN: So the gasps from the audience are not people being like, “I can’t believe she’s talking about this.” They were like, “Holy crap, this is a massive market, and she’s just come up with the solve for the innovation that we’ve been lacking for a century.”

WANG: I don’t know. Maybe a little bit of both.

But I would imagine, being at Demo Day, especially if you’re an investor and this is summer 2016, that you’ve gone to Demo Day for the last 10 years, and all of a sudden there’s someone on stage talking about vaginas. It’s like — you’re probably a little bit shocked.

YC has since done a lot of things for women’s health. We weren’t the very first either. It was just a little bit more unusual at the time.

BERMAN: Okay, so you get through Demo Day. You raise some more money. Is it smooth sailing from there?

WANG: Oh, just easy, breezy.

Copy LinkFrom direct-to-consumer to retail

BERMAN: Where did you hit some bumps along the way?

WANG: So, originally, we launched direct-to-consumer, as one did in 2016. Facebook had just been doing their marketing for a few years, but there was still this kind of arbitrage online to do ads.

BERMAN: You could buy Facebook and Instagram ads incredibly efficiently, put $1 in, and get $3-4 out.

WANG: It was like an ATM. But it’s really hard to hire people that know how to do that. They’re all in demand, and I didn’t know any of them. And I was still trying to figure out all the other things about running a business.

So it took us a little while to get our actual marketing engine running. We did end up hitting a pretty significant multi-million-dollar revenue number in our first year, which was really exciting. But we didn’t have a repeatable, scalable marketing engine at the time.

That was kind of the initial roadblock that we had.

The next roadblock that we had was, we kept hearing from women that they didn’t want to wait for their order to come.

One of the things that I’ve learned — and still learn every single month — is we don’t know when our period’s coming. It comes every 28 days. I’m always surprised. I run a period product company, and I don’t know when my period is.

So I kept hearing from customers, over and over, no matter how quickly we could kind of figure out the shipping, that they didn’t want to wait. They wanted to just go and buy their period product at the store like they normally did.

“I want to go do my Target run. I want to get my Starbucks. I want to buy all my other stuff and get my Flex Disc.”

So trying to figure out how to break into retail was extraordinarily challenging.

Now, it’s far more common for start-ups to work with Target or Walmart or CVS. But in 2016, I didn’t know anyone else. There were only legacy brands there.

BERMAN: Right. So Procter & Gamble and Unilever basically controlled the shelves, and you’re pitching a new product that they have no reason to believe is going to move. And shelf space is incredibly valuable.

WANG: Exactly.

BERMAN: So how did you solve for it?

WANG: Well, let me tell you, learning how to line up your cash flows when you’re a direct-to-consumer business is extraordinarily easy.

A customer orders the product. You get paid right away.

With retail, they’ll order the product, and sometimes you don’t get paid for 90 days. And then your payment terms with your manufacturer or your other suppliers might be different.

So learning how to basically run two totally different business models at the same time was very, very challenging.

BERMAN: Yeah. Complicated accounting, and cash management becomes really difficult because the float can be well more than the 90 days, right? You’ve got to pay for the manufacturing, in some cases, upfront, and you could be on plus-90 terms with a retailer.

WANG: Exactly.

BERMAN: Right. So how did you solve for it?

WANG: So we launched into a major retailer in 2018, and there was a new person on the desk who put an order in that was three times larger than we thought it was going to be.

At the time, we had this tool on our manufacturing line that kept breaking. So we were having production issues that we were trying to parallel path and fix at the same time.

We got an order that was three times larger than we thought, but the fines if you don’t make the order — and we had tried pushing back, but we’re an early company. You don’t want to push back on a really big retailer.

So I didn’t have enough cash to be able to produce their orders. And there weren’t any lenders for a company like mine at the time.

I went out and hired a really experienced controller from CPG that was a referral from a friend. He and I went and talked to a number of banks, and they all wanted personal guarantees.

I had a Subaru lease and an apartment in Venice. Like, what are you going to take? My dog? I don’t even have a 401(k) anymore. Guarantee you what? So that was a non-starter for me.

We eventually found a non-traditional lender that lent us money, helped us get over the hump, but that wasn’t until another year after I was able to demonstrate retail success.

Copy LinkBuilding a resonant brand

BERMAN: So when you’re on this journey, you’re solving these complex retail and D-to-C cash management issues, and you’re scraping by without having to do the personal guarantee on your Subaru lease. It’s still a new product. It’s not something that people are used to using. There’s still, I would imagine, a significant customer education component to this.

As a marketer and a storyteller, it feels like part of where you broke through is in the voice of the brand and your marketing strategy. So, can you tell us about that?

WANG: Yeah. It was really important for me to create a brand that was not fear-mongering to women.

Even though I started the company because I was getting infections from tampons for 15 years, I didn’t want to go out and bash tampons to the world because I didn’t want any person to feel badly, like I was bashing her.

I believe that people should have more choices, that they should have more options, that there should be better research and funding for women’s health. But I don’t want to tell anyone that their personal health decision is wrong.

Something that you put inside of your body, especially inside of your vagina, is extremely personal.

So it was really, really important for me from day one that all of our benefits and all of the good parts about our product were what was communicated, versus taking the approach of just bashing the competition.

Which — I don’t know if that’s the right business decision, to tell you the truth. I think fear-mongering works really well. But it’s just how I’ve chosen to run the business.

And I think nine years in, we see that the brand is really resonating with people. I think it’s working.

Prior to us launching in Walmart in 2022, investors would say to me, “You know, that’s really cute that you work so well in Target. That’s great that CVS is going well. You’re never going to be mainstream America. Like, the average American woman — there’s no way she’s going to buy a period disc. There’s just no way.”

BERMAN: Why did they come to that conclusion?

WANG: Well, because they would say that it’s niche, or that it’s too innovative, or that — you know — they talked to their wife, and their wife doesn’t want to use it.

And I’m like, “Respectfully, your wife is not my target demo.”

They’d say, “Well, my secretary doesn’t want to use it either.”

I’d reply, “Well, we don’t use that word anymore, sir. But okay.”

No, I think it just seemed too innovative, and I think people underestimate women.

BERMAN: Catch us up to where the business is today. How’s it going now?

WANG: It’s going great. This is our best year ever — revenue, profitability, all of those things.

Copy LinkThe study that confirmed “people’s worst fears” about tampons

BERMAN: Right, so it’s your best year ever because you’re making money, and more and more people are buying and using the product. But what’s driving the growth? How are you achieving the scale?

WANG: A couple of different things. One, we have made some changes in our ad creative that have really paid off for us.

At the same time, a big study came out from the University of California, Berkeley, over the summer. I don’t know if you saw it, but 14 major tampon brands, including organic tampons, tested positive for toxic heavy metals like lead, mercury, and arsenic.

And so the American zeitgeist — for the last nine years, people have been suspecting tampons might not be that good for us. Maybe they’ve switched to pads, but they’re unaware that a disc exists.

And all of a sudden, people’s worst fears were confirmed.

What was doubly insulting is this is the first time a test like this has ever come out.

Thinking back to my years of researching “Why am I getting infections and not getting any answers?” — it’s only one study.

We still don’t know how much of these bad materials are being absorbed into your vagina, which is a mucosal membrane. Would you put that right in your mouth?

Some doctors are like, “Well, you get lead and arsenic in rice” — that’s going through your digestive system, right? And it’s not being manufactured. It’s just — it’s a little different.

So I think people are waking up to this idea that tampons actually can be very unhealthy. They could potentially be worse for us than we even know. We just don’t have enough information.

At the same time, people are looking around and saying, “I don’t want to run in a super maxi pad. I don’t want to use a cup,” which, by the way, we make the best-selling menstrual cup in the U.S. now, with the patented design that removes like a tampon.

So I’m not knocking cups — I still like cups — but the disc is what people don’t know about. We have 3% awareness in the U.S.

Copy LinkHow a new ad creative is connecting with consumers

BERMAN: And so how do you grow from 3% to whatever number puts you at monster scale?

WANG: Yeah, we are going to need to invest more on top of the funnel. Over the last few years, we’ve been so focused on profitability and hitting our EBITDA targets.

One big unlock for us has been kind of finding new ad creative. That’s it.

BERMAN: Describe the new ad creative for us, please.

WANG: Funny enough, the ads with me in them are the ones that do the best.

BERMAN: Flex ads that feature Lauren aren’t afraid to speak bluntly about periods. Here’s an example:

FLEX AD: I’ve always had a really heavy period. I used to bleed through a super tampon in just a couple of hours. I was 22, working in corporate America, in the middle of a meeting with the CEO, and I stood up, looked down at my seat, and I completely stained it with blood. It was a nightmare. I’m Lauren Wang, I’m the founder and CEO of Flex.

WANG: It takes time away from me running the company. Yeah, and it’s not something that I naturally just love being on camera or anything like that, but that’s good, and we have a new kind of creative process that we’re using that’s more, I think, scientific than what we did in the past.

Also, in the past, we were so focused on hitting those EBITDA targets that we were a little bit nervous if we did stray too far in ad creative, then we wouldn’t be getting like the bread and butter that we always were getting. But now we’ve found we can get the bread and butter that we are always getting, and then so much more by implementing new processes and structures for creative.

BERMAN: Why are the ads with you working?

WANG: I don’t know, because it’s me.

BERMAN: Yeah, you know your customer. You are your customer, right? I mean, I have to assume that’s a part of it.

WANG: Yeah, I think people really find the brand to be authentic and trustworthy because of some of the reasons I talked about before. Because we’re not trying to preach to anyone, and we’re not trying to scare anyone. We’re just kind of creating this welcoming space for people.

Copy LinkWhat’s next for The Flex Company?

BERMAN: Yeah, what’s next for you?

WANG: Well, we have new products coming out next year, which I’m very excited about. So we’re really deepening our relationships with our retail partners now, where we’re now doing joint planning on innovation, which is a big step forward for us.

In the past, we would just go to a sales meeting once a year and be really lucky to get that meeting. Now we’re kind of in this more strategic partnership field, which I appreciate.

I think international will be something really important for us in the future. I lose sleep over the fact that 51% of the world’s population could use our products, yet they don’t know about us or can’t get them.

We’re going to need more capital to be able to spread the word in order to do that. But in the meantime, we’re very focused on growth and scaling in the U.S.

BERMAN: Thank you so much for joining us today.

WANG: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been so much fun.

BERMAN: Flex is making huge waves in the market for menstrual products by staying fiercely focused on improving their customers’ experiences. It’s remarkable that Lauren scaled a quest to solve her own health struggles into a business with products on more than 30,000 store shelves.

She’s an incredible example of how tenacity can empower an entrepreneur to break through amid even the most entrenched competition. I’m Jeff Berman. Thanks for listening.