In our Perelel universe, the idea is that what if women’s health was taken seriously? What if fertility support was accessible? What if the fourth trimester wasn’t an afterthought? What if hormonal wasn’t a bad word? What if research reflected our bodies? So we’re calling on Congress to essentially to direct the NIH to deploy more equitable funding for women’s health research. Within the first 24 hours of releasing our campaign video in partnership with Mandy Moore, we saw over a million views.
Thain Gioia: Our petition got 9,000 signatures in less than a week.
As female founders of a company focused on women’s health, was there ever a moment at which, or have you struggled to bring men on board?
Taylor: So we do love men.
Thain Gioia: We do. We have some male investors. But we started fundraising in April of 2020, and it was probably the worst fundraising environment you could ever approach. It was a lot of older men and we got asked a lot of times, “Well, how big is this market really?” We’re like, “Women. The market is women. It’s 50 percent.” And they’d be like, “I mean, how long have you been pregnant for?” But it’s also, it’s not just like you poof, you’re pregnant and then poof, you’re not pregnant.
Taylor: Also it wasn’t even just about pregnancy. It’s years of the journey. We want to support women throughout their whole life cycle and they just didn’t care.
Thain Gioia: It was crazy. There’s 4 million live births a year. There’s 40 million millennial moms. Even if we just had to be only moms, it’s a 4 million market size. And they’d be like, “Well, I just don’t know if the opportunity is big enough.” Or they’d say, “Let me ask my wife what she thinks.”
Taylor: That was the worst response we got.
Do you have a favorite product you now sell?
Taylor: One of the products that I think is most near and dear to us isn’t a bestseller by any means, but it came out of a phone call from Tori one day as she… Yeah, if you want to share the story.
Thain Gioia: We launched a recovery support pack and at the time I was going through a pregnancy loss. I had to go to CVS to get pads and get a heating pad and all of that stuff. And I was just like, “This is just is so shitty. We need to do something for this person.” I was totally alone, I hadn’t really shared my pregnancy with anyone. I had no control over this moment. And we were like, “That moment needs to be seen. We need to give her something different.” I didn’t want to take my prenatal, I didn’t want to see a baby on a bottle. And we just knew we wanted to create something that was very specific to see the moment and also to see her. In the early days, when we were a little cash strapped and couldn’t launch a product, we created a program and so anyone that notified us that they were going through a pregnancy loss, we sent them a candle and a handwritten note that we were writing.
