The Live Lightly Podcast

Jessica (00:00)
Welcome back to season two of the Live Lightly podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Franklin. I'm here today with Susan and Reshmi. And I can't wait to get into this conversation because it's about so much more than the clean non-toxic period care products that they've created. It's also about challenging the way that we think about women's health. Welcome to the show, Susan and Reshmi. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Susan (00:23)
Jessica, we really appreciate being here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Jessica (00:27)
Before we get started on talking about OVO and the sister company from which it came, 149 Technologies, I'd love for each of you to take a few minutes to introduce yourselves and to share how your personal experiences have shaped the values behind these companies.

Susan (00:45)
Well, thank you, Jessica. I'm Susan Hannah. I'm CEO of 149 Technologies, the parent of OVO, the brand, right? And I'm an engineer by training. I was born in Canada, grew up in Canada, immigrated to the US, and in my travels landed here in Singapore. So I spend part of my time here, part of my time in the US now.

I'm co-founder for 149 Technologies and of course OVO. My background with a PhD and an MBA has always been at the intersection of new technologies and business models. And what we are trying to do with 149 is saying how do we create a new business model to create social impact

Jessica (01:32)
Can you take us back to that moment where you decided to join forces and bring this into life?

I feel like we need that background story.

Susan (01:43)
and I'll start with a little bit of context of...

of how this is a long journey for me, many, many years. So as a student, I had an opportunity to go to Africa. And it was an incredible experience. I was working on a project that a medical doctor had started from University of Ottawa. And he was particularly looking at nutrition in children. so there was a village hospital that was there. And there was a problem, which was that women were, when they bring

their loved ones to the hospital, they had to then find fuel to cook for those loved ones. Because it's not like the hospitals that we have today. You go, you cook, you take care of your loved ones, your family comes with you. And so they would travel quite a number of hours to a receding rainforest, because the rainforest was being cut back in order to have fuel. And so he asked me, said, why don't you build a biogas digester? And that's what I went to do. I went to build a biogas digester, which is basically producing

methane from waste. And in the process I also had a chance to work at the hospital and support, you know, what the doctors were doing, the nurses, sterilization, helping with some procedures. And that summer it was, I'd never seen so many women die in my life. It was really quite an experience, the situations that we saw I went through.

And it stuck with me. I went back to school, right? So I was in my fourth year. And I went back and I talked to a professor. And this professor was Amali Ali from South India, from Kerala. And his name was Professor Unni. And I said to him, I said, Professor Unni, I really want to go back. And he said, don't go back. He said, get your experience here in Canada. Finish your engineering. Finish getting your experience. And then over time, if you want to go back, go back.

And I can understand, you know, Jessica, why he would say that. there's a... I guess that as young people, there's this sense that sometimes young people are naive, right? And that they're idealistic. And that, you know, what do you know? You're coming from a developed country. Yes, my mom is Jamaican, my dad's Egyptian, but they were immigrants to Canada. So I'm a first-generation Canadian.

But the experiences and the knowledge that we have in the developed world about what the developing world goes through, can be the things that we implement and what we think about and what we can do not always very helpful. And we've seen that historically, right? So I can understand why he would say that. But nonetheless, it was something that stuck with me for years. It wouldn't let go. And so fast forward, I started my own AI company. I exited that AI company.

went to work for a pharmaceutical company and of course I'm working for that pharmaceutical company. I came to Singapore and I saw a lot of women's health startups struggle to get to market. Venture capitalists invest in them and then they say, okay forget about India, doctors, so and so. Go to the US or go to Europe where I can get my exit because once these VCs invest in you they have to find a way to get their return on their investment.

And very difficult to do that in Southeast Asia or other areas like this. The San Francisco and the area that you're in, California, New York, right, those are the areas where people are investing. They're comfortable with those types of risks, longer term healthcare type investments, even though, and I'll give you some of the statistics, women's health is not very well invested in, right? So it stuck with me, and as result, I said, I know, I have to do something about this.

This is something I made a promise, right? There are friendships that I made, relationships I made, and I said I would come back and I'll do something, right? And so for me, this is like how much experience do I need? I have enough now, time to go back.

Jessica (05:52)
I love that. And Reshmi, can you take us back how did your experiences bring you to this place where you wanted to be a part of something like this?

Susan (05:58)
you

Yeah, so it's interesting because I grew up in a small part of India that is really special. It's called Kerala. And in Kerala, women actually have a higher place in society, right? So in fact, two generations ago, we used to take the mother's family name.

as your surname, right? So coming from that context, it was only later in life when I left Kerala for my higher studies, I went to masters to one of the other states in India and they had a women's rights club, right? And I was like, what's going on? You know? So it was only as an adult did I get the perspective that there are many areas for women that need support. And since then, after my masters, when I was at INSEAD, I've always been

a mentor to women entrepreneurs, women from underprivileged backgrounds, always realizing that many women did not have the privilege that I have to compete or to be on the world stage as a person, right, as equal to everybody else. And there was a lot of taboos related to health, related to who they were that they grew up with, right. And my mom being a gynecologist.

I was told that, you know, your period is a normal thing, you just go and do everything that you're supposed to do, right? So I think when I met Susan and she was mentioning about the space that she wanted to make impact in, it resonated because I also realised that on the other end of the spectrum, as a woman who came from a more privileged kind of setting, it's my opportunity to also give back.

Right? So it was just an opportunity and I saw what she was doing and the more we talked, we also saw an opportunity to weave in my interest of new business models and innovation into that to think of this as how do we test out new business models to scale this while we make a change so that we can build a sustainable company that is built on a different set of business principles and even values.

right and we will tell you more about

Jessica (08:22)
it's crazy how the two of you had completely different backgrounds and you've come together to create 149 Technologies. Now before we get into the product line that came from this, tell us just a little bit about 149 Technologies and what you're doing there with that

I feel like we need a little bit more background before we can jump into OVO because OVO is a result of 149 technologies.

Susan (08:54)
Yeah, thank you, Jessica. So the aim of 149 Technologies is ultimately to bring lower cost women's health innovations to market and make those affordable and accessible for everybody, not just the privileged. And our thesis to do that, right, and we've described a little bit of the challenges and the problems with women's health and getting women's health solutions to market. And what we realize is that this requires infrastructure.

structure.

It's not just money that can be thrown at women's health solutions, especially when it comes to low-cost innovations. Low-cost innovations, when they're pushed over to the US or Europe, or even when they're birthed in the US and Europe, they ultimately become higher cost. Why? Because the mechanisms of private capital are such as to maximize your margins. And to do that, they want them to land in reimbursed markets. These are markets where the government or

insurance pays as opposed to out-of-pocket pays and that naturally that whole system results for a variety of reasons and mechanisms in prices being higher, right, and more things being more expensive and it starts from the grassroots up from the cost of labor and everything else. Now,

So what do we do with that, right? So the infrastructure that we're building is really in three layers. The first layer is what we call our consumer layer. That's why we birth OVO.

And the idea of this consumer layer is that when women's health startups come to market, we want them to land on a consumer and customer base that is friendly, that's already established. Otherwise, when they come to market, they have to have their own digital media, social media landing, they have to have their offices, they have to do their FDA registration, they end up having to acquire customers and the cost of that customer acquisition is expensive, the growth of that is expensive, all of that is expensive.

that ultimately ends up requiring more investment, which means that you have to pay back more money to your investors and things become more expensive, right? And it changes the affordability profile. So by having that consumer layer, right, that first layer of infrastructure, we believe that that will help companies and we said, let's start with the menstrual pad. Why? Because that's the beginning of our journey. That's the beginning of our, I would say, touch point with ourselves.

women, what does it mean for me to develop as a woman? Like how am I biologically different than this other male species, right?

And it's also the source of a lot of problems. So think about it, like, you know, what if, and we're talking to a startup that's doing this, what if you could do HPV testing in a pad instead of having to have Pap smear? And we've seen it in California, there's people looking at menstrual blood as a source of stem cells, right? So there's something, and then there's PCOS endometriosis, there's all these things that happen along that menstrual hygiene pathway that if we can become that

trusted partner, we can help bring these lower cost solutions to market. So that's the consumer layer. The other layer is the execution layer.

And what we mean by execution is shared services and experts, right, that can help you with if it's more than general wellness, if it's something that needs clinical trials, pre-clinicals, if it needs market access, regulatory, legal, finance, all the pieces that come together to actually bring a business about. A startup and a founder may have expertise in one area, but not in all those areas of business. So by bringing those different areas together at a lower cost,

we could help them get to market faster. We've curated the experts, right, for them. They don't have to be an expert or try to be an expert in everything, which we know is not possible. And then the third layer of this after that is what we call our intelligence layer.

And so we're actually rolling out a tool called ScalpFast, which we all know healthcare is very complicated and it's what's called based on a capability graph. That's to say every group of companies, every organization, you, me, every individual, we have a set of And some of those capabilities are the ones that are table stakes and some of them are very differentiated.

You bring those capabilities together and you make a fingerprint of the company and you make a fingerprint of the VCs out there and you do a matchmaking. So we become a match.com, a founder and funder. And then we also help them land into the ecosystem so they know who do I partner with. And I'll let Reshmi explain a little bit about the business model of 149 and why we say partner and why 149. Yeah, so.

149 and I'm sure some of your listeners are also wondering why 149, right? Why is the company called a number? So what's interesting is as we would, we've been brainstorming this concept for years before we actually built the company. And as we were thinking, one of the concepts that, so I've always personally believed in partnerships, in an open innovation and in all my corporate

roles have put in place some kind of a partnership to enable scale up or reduction of costs or access to talent or access to new technologies. So we started talking about this and we came across there's an author called Safi Baqal who's written a book called Loon Shots. So it was a book I bought in the airport.

you know for my reading on a flight and it was all about research done, you know on the number why do organizations stop behaving like agile startups as they grow and why do they then start, you know getting into corporate politics, the power games, why does this transition happen, right? So he was examining that and he calls upon a number called Dunbar number, which is 150 and

This is research that has been done first on primates and essentially has been shown that in any system, usually when you look at the animal environment, if you have more than 150 people, numbers, so what happens is the relationships start to change. You don't form very good intimate relationships anymore. So in fact, when Facebook was launched, it was...

you were limited to having 150 contacts on it. So there is a scientific basis to the fact that if you form more than 150 relationships, you're not forming meaningful relationships. Then how do you then resolve it with the fact that as an organization scales? Of course, you need more and more people to run the organization because the business is growing, you need all the different functions. That's when we came up with the idea of partnerships. We said, what if we kept 149 with

less than 150 people, hence the name 149. So, Susan's come on board as employee number 149 as CEO and we're counting backwards. And what we're doing is we are now partnering with other organizations, marketing, branding, regulatory, legal, instead of having it in-house. And we're building how the interfaces should look like for seamless integration and to operate well.

What we also see is as this organization scales, we will have a lot of young people who are working in the organizations. It will become a talent development pipeline for them. They become leaders. They get to now say, OK, I'm going to run this partnership and this division or I'm going to work with this partner. Right. So spin out. Right. So there's a lot of opportunities we see coming down the line. Of course, it's hard. Right. I there's a reason we as you scale, as you have more money, you bring everything inside because you

can then build your organizational culture, values, a way of working software, everybody works to make one seamless machine. So we're kind of challenging that status quo and saying, how do we actually build an organization that's built on human relationships and values that transcend these borders of an organization?

Jessica (17:34)
And Susan, I think that you talked.

about OVO and why you decided to start there with period care products and why it was such an important place to begin.

Susan (17:44)
I think that the beginning of our journey, right, and I remember my mother's an obstetrics nurse. And as an obstetrics nurse, she was very proactive with me in terms of, and part of that was at a time when women got pregnant, they were kicked out of their homes.

And so my mom actually worked, she volunteered. We were living down the street in Ottawa, Canada, down from a Catholic center that would bring these women in when they were pregnant because they got kicked out of their homes so that they can be taken care of and eventually give birth and give their children up for adoption if that's what they wanted to do. So my mother often would have people around the table. And she would be talking with them and engaging with them and helping.

them through their pregnancy and with life. And so I was really informed by that experience. But on top of that, she would say, okay, and now for your sex education, she gave me this binder and tapes and everything else. And I realized I had a very privileged opportunity in a way to be able to go through that and understand my body. And understand how to care for it, what's appropriate, what's normal.

what's not normal. And I had it from a very reliable source, right? Because it was medically informed. Now what do we have? We have the internet and there's all kinds of information that's out there. And we don't always know what's real and what's not real, what's truth and what's not truth.

It takes a lot of vetting of the source, of the authority of that to figure things out and it takes a lot of time and sometimes it's time we don't have and we're triggered by what we see and by the stimulus. So I wanted to start there because this is an amazing opportunity for us to start to lay the groundwork and the foundation that we have to have as women that can really change our lives forever, right? You think about it, some of these women that got pregnant that didn't even

know what they were doing and realizing the implications of that or were ending up with HIV or something else. And so there's a sense that I have of this

It's a desire, responsibility, it's a mix of passion that we should be giving agency and empowering people to make decisions about their bodies. And I want that to be the best informed decision making as possible. And so to be on that track of having something that I use every month, it means that we have contact, we have the opportunity to have contact with somebody that's engaged with the product every month. It's not like they bought it off the

shelf and it's sitting on my desk and eventually it's going to, sorry if this has got plastic in it, I think it's beeswax. But you know, it's sitting on the desk and then it's being used and it's thrown out.

or recycled, this is something that you have every month. You open up the box, you look at your packaging, your ordering or whatever it is. It's an opportunity for that consumer journey touch point in education. That was one of the reasons why, you know, for me it was really important to start there in terms of that journey and that touch point early on. And then as I listened to Reshmi's story, it was very interesting to see a little bit about your experience with this, right? Historically,

and realizing that this is not a story that's historical. I won't tell you how old she is. You wouldn't believe me anyways. But you know, like how this history is being played out even today. And I don't know, Rishmi, if you could, if you would want to share that. Yeah, no, happy to. Yeah. So when we started talking about bringing to market menstrual pad, right, I shared some of my experiences growing up as a child in India.

So I'm trained as a classical dancer and that meant getting up early every morning, two hours of practice, going in after school, practicing, six hours on the weekend, dancing and things like that, right? So again, I mentioned earlier that my mom's a gynecologist and I was raised to think that periods are a normal thing, but...

At the same time, I observed around me that many of my classmates would take time off, right, because they would consider themselves sick when they got their periods. And the other reason was that for how active we were and maybe the heavy flow that some of us had, we did not have access to products like we have today in the market in a small town in India. So...

So girls didn't feel comfortable to play sport or do things because they were always worried about, you know, leaks and things like that.

And my mom's solution to that was, I mean, she was a gynecologist, a doctor, so she had access to, you know, how to make bandages and things like that. So she actually used cotton and cloth to make these huge, I mean, I still remember they were huge, huge pads for me, right. Now, looking back on it, I mean, I really don't know how I moved them, right. They were huge, but they...

it was, it did its job, right? I I would wear it, I would go to a six hour dance session and not change till I came back home. By the way, we're not advocating for wearing a pad more than four hours. But it was really, you know, for me, I've seen that shift, right? Going from there to then just, you know, having

thousands of products for choice and then realizing that when I pick these products I don't know anything about them. I go into a store, I look at the products and my criteria is still the same I had as a little girl. I heavy flow, I want a bigger one, the next few days I want a lighter one and then of course I add in the other layers that are important to me.

I like pretty things, so okay, which one's wrapped beautifully, which one has a nice picture on it, and this was essentially how I made my decisions, right? And we're talking about a person like me with a gynaecologist as a mom, educated, you know, working as a senior leader in corporate, making these decisions based on just flow and look of the pad right? So...

This led to the conversation that there's a lot of work to be done in just education. I mean, just to tell people, just like you read your food labels, how do you read the labels of these consumer products that you buy?

Jessica (25:10)
Yes, I think that as consumers, have been led to believe that everything out on the shelves at the grocery store is safe for us. And it's just not true. And conversations like this will help to raise awareness and When we're talking with our girlfriends, we can start talking about what ingredients are in

everything that we're using because it's really important. as consumers, we generally underestimate what it takes to truly create something that's intentional.

with the materials. And so can you take us through what this required behind the scenes from sourcing the materials that aligned with both your standards, but also navigating the manufacturing challenges that I'm sure happened and any industry pushback that you may have experienced. And also the realities of building something that's both safer and

more sustainable.

Susan (26:09)
So we have a silent partner in India. And he is like a master researcher in terms of identifying opportunities and products and sources. And he is also a big, I'll say, proponent as well as I'll say he has a lot of experience in the area of quality, okay, quality management. Let's leave it at that.

And so we had a lot of support on the ground to do that sourcing, to do the research, do the exploration and the analysis and the assessment. And why, I mean, we did both India and China, right? There's a variety of reasons why perhaps we chose India over China in terms of manufacturing capabilities and sources and things. Part of it is proximity, ease of access. Part of it is because of who we know and our connections, obviously. And that sense of,

If you have somebody on the ground, really makes a difference to make sure that you can check everything out appropriately. And we made our trips there, right? So we made our own trips and our own assessment. having somebody there that can walk down the street, so to speak, no, it's not really down the street, India is big country. But go and knock on the door and say, hey, you know what, let's take a look at this. It's super, super valuable. The other piece to that that was super helpful

is being able to have access to information about the backgrounds of the people that we work with. Not because you're doing, not like it's a background check, but to know where they were educated, how they were educated, what their value systems are. So it all begins with the people and the partnerships, right? In terms of those value systems and the capabilities. Remember I was talking about capabilities and this capability map, As an intelligence layer. We had to do that manually

Jessica (27:59)
Mm-hmm.

Susan (28:03)
didn't have the tool but even with the tool you still want to be able to check and do things in that way. Capabilities begins with your values right in many sense and and your mission and your values and then you build your capabilities around there. So in terms of the materials there's a lot of and and we'll talk about this more in the master class we're not perfect right so I'll say that OVO is not a perfect brand and there is room for improvement.

There's room for improvement in all different kinds of areas, but we were able to be plant-based, right? So we have bamboo, we have wood-based pulp, it's FSC, so we know it's certified, sustainable. But I'll give you an example of one of the things that I'm not happy with. I'm not happy with the fact that we're still using bamboo viscose, right? Because viscose is process. It's not the most environmentally friendly process. And so as we look at the

life cycle analysis of the product, there is work to be done. There are some other areas that we'll talk about in the master class that have to do with your release paper.

and having to make different choices and decisions around the glues and the trade-offs that you make with stability and other things like that. Everything has to be tested. Now the good news is that when we test, we test against the standard E-N 13432-2000, which is a European standard for industrial compostability. All to say that...

We use standards as a measure to say, okay, this is where we are at and what do we need to improve on that? And we are making some improvements. So we are in the process of identifying some startups that we're going to be working with that have some interesting solutions around these different areas to make it even better, right? And this is like, this is an evolution. It's a journey, right? But what I want to encourage

just as companies and businesses to do is one is to be transparent about the product, right, the standards that you're using, the materials that you're using, and to be transparent about what you're trying to do to make the improvements.

Because there's no such thing as a perfect product and I don't think that there ever will be. And there's an element of personalization that will also happen along the way because not every product is best for every person, right? So a lot of people are using menstrual cups. We would like to be able to provide menstrual cups. We're looking at doing that. But not everybody, it doesn't work for everybody. It doesn't work for everybody all the time, right? We know that you use a product and for some it's

for a first few years and then they get irritation. So it's not be all and end all for every product and we are always geared towards what do we need to make our lives healthier and more comfortable as women and less costly because the pink tax is real, right? And so the other thing that we're going after, even as we work with these startups, is how do you drive the cost down? How do you drive the cost down? How do you have more sustainable, affordable models?

Jessica (31:23)
I'm very impressed with how many certifications and we will go into detail about the materials in the master class, but you've got a lot of certifications under your belt Can you talk about...

what that process in terms of time, research, auditing, and persistence, like what that was like for you to go through all that. Because that seems like it might have been almost harder than finding the materials and the manufacturers.

Susan (31:54)
Yeah. So we were fortunate in that.

When you're dealing with a manufacturer that has quality management systems in place, they're ISO certified, they're FDA registered, et cetera, it shortcuts many of those processes, but there's still a filing to be done. Anytime we make a change, right? So for instance, we're dermatologically tested. Anything that results in a change to that, we'll have to do that testing again. And that's not a cheap test, right? That's 30 to $40,000 just to get

that test done. By the way, that's an inexpensive clinical trial. Clinical trials can cost upwards of three or four million dollars, And per trial, per location, per site. So it's expensive to...

put standards in place and it's expensive to maintain those standards and that necessarily has an impact on the cost of the product, which we have to realize.

which you can manage with volume, can manage with intelligent supply chains or different, but there's only so much that you can do, right? And so when you look at these products on the shelf and you see the very, very, very cheap products, sometimes it's because either they don't have the standards or they have the volume. And they're made with a lot of plastics and cheap materials that the volumes are there to support the less expensive, but you pay, right? And it's what I call a

tax just like the air that we breathe right it's it doesn't cost me anything to breathe this air but if I put a tax on clean air it might actually I might find might appreciate the breathing a little bit more right and it's the reason why we have challenges with water with air because these are all things that when they're polluted it's like could you blame right and who pays a cost and who bears the cost of that and we're doing

the same thing with our products. It's going to landfills, there's microplastics, it's in our brains it's in our bodies, it's affecting our health and who do you blame? All of us.

all of us, right? And so the costs are hidden. And so we realize that sometimes when you go to those standards, you're unhiding those costs. And that can cause a problem because the costs that are unhidden is directly borne by the person that's then paying. It's not spread across society and somebody else has to pay and worry about it, right?

Jessica (34:33)
I didn't realize that it's that expensive to get certifications.

Susan (34:40)
Yeah, so FDA registration in the States. And this is for a class one, we're in the States, we're a class one medical device. PADS are not a class one medical device anywhere. Our cost this year was 15,000 US just to get FDA registered.

Jessica (34:43)
Mm-hmm.

Susan (34:59)
That went up from 12,000 or 11,000 year before and every year it gets more expensive. And so the registrations, the certifications, by time you come to market, you spent a ton of money. And that's not including if you're building your own manufacturing plant, right? We won't even go there.

Yeah, and I think in addition to the cost, right, I mean, you are a person who's been many years in the medical field in large corporates, and you know where to look, you know where to go to do these filings, Imagine if you were

a 25 year old out of college saying I want to create a company, I have this idea and I want to make impact and then trying to do all these filings. The cost of course is the first hurdle but let's assume it's a fantastic idea and you have the money. I'm sure this person will spend six months trying to figure out what are the certifications needed, how do I get them, where do I go to do them, how do I go about it and then when they're stuck they might not even know how to...

know, resolve it. So, so we, I mean, even with our years of experience, we found that we had quite a bit of, I mean, it wasn't that straightforward, right? So there was quite a bit of processes that we had to go through. So we understand why a company like 149 that exists to help startups now with this experience of bringing over to market could then help them to get over this barrier.

super easy, right? Because we are there to help them. But to be sure, know, the certifications is for us, for our value standpoint, right?

I was having a conversation with the other day. We're having, of course, with the war and things that are going on, there's all kinds of supply chain issues. And so we're looking at plan A, plan B, plan C, right? One of the comments from a person was, well, we can just use this pad from this location over here, right? And we'll get this guy to build it. And they can manufacture to our specifications and da-da-da. I said, yes, but do they have certifications?

to do all the certifications again.

yes we do. Yes we do. need it, right? Because I need to know that what is going between your legs or my friend's legs or my niece's legs is safe. I need to know that, right? And I can't be there testing every single pad. So there's got to be a standard, there's got to be a certification process, there's got to be audit, there's got to be these things so that I know how it's

impacting my community. And if every business did that, it would be a different planet.

Jessica (38:01)
Well, thank you for having standards. because most companies just don't.

There's a lot to this. Were there any moments during this process where the complexity felt so overwhelming that you questioned whether or not you could keep going?

Susan (38:15)
know,

the technical stuff is the easier stuff. It's really the easier stuff. I think the hardest stuff are the partnerships and the digital marketing. Digital marketing is tough, Jessica.

Jessica (38:33)
It's terrible.

Susan (38:33)
it's really tough, right,

to find the right audience, to have the algorithms, to feed the algorithms the food that they need, and to make sure that as you're feeding the algorithms the food that they need, that you're staying true to your values around the science.

You know, so I see all kinds of things on the internet like I was looking the other day. You guys have probably seen this, right? Where people were holding pads up to the light and they're like, oh, the pads are moldy. The pads are moldy. And so I'm showing Rashmi this and Rashmi goes, she goes, this is not mold. It's just the padding and the pad. It's not evenly distributed. The manufacturing process just didn't evenly distribute it. And I was like, yeah, and how do you communicate that to people?

of that because what's trending?

isn't necessarily the truth. What's trending is things that are, you know, oh my god, like this is like shocking, right? And so the question is that if you want to feed the algorithms, you have to play into that trend and those key words in a certain way. And how do you do that and maintain your values is a conversation I'm constantly having with our teams. It says, no, we're not going to hype that. We're not going to do it that way. How do you ride the wave without being part

of the garbage that is in the wave, you know. And so this is the line that we tread and what will help us is super educated customers.

Jessica (39:58)
You

Yeah, I agree. It's interesting to hear you say that your biggest obstacle is marketing and social media. Truly.

Susan (40:19)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because, yeah,

because there's really so much out there that you see every day. And you're thinking, of course, you want to have the differentiation, right? And you also want to grab attention, right? Because you've got a product out there. And at the same time, you have all these, like Susan mentioned, right? All these constraints that we've set on ourselves because of who we want to be. And

Jessica (40:45)
Mm-hmm.

Susan (40:47)
And again, I mentioned this earlier when we talked about a company bringing everything in-house to standardize values.

And there's a reason I said that because we're finding that when we find a partner, like Susan mentioned, it's not the technical capabilities, right? We're having coffee with them, we're sitting down and talking to them to make sure that person won't take the shortcuts that we wouldn't take, right? That person will also then make sure that he or she is being really true to the value that we bringing to market. So we've now...

kind of built this methodology where once we identify partners, once we see that okay, the technologies are good, we either take them out for lunch or coffee, we sit down, we have a chat, and very often we try to dig a little deeper into who they are as people, right? Because we recognize that that coherence of who you are as a person in your private life, you will bring that into your work life and you will bring that into your execution.

So to your question to have we ever had really tough days, it's been when that coherence was missing, right? When we met someone who we thought was fantastic, we were building a partnership, putting things in place, and then the person says something and they're like, we might have to stop working with this person, right? So that's been a few hiccups along the way, but one that we are aware.

of the importance of and why we're doing what we're doing and we wouldn't do it any other way. You have to get comfortable I think with conflict, a little bit of conflict right, which not everybody is comfortable with. But I'll give you like one example and sometimes it's just a matter of educating the partner and working with them. So once you know the values are there, sometimes it's just a learning process right. So

We were doing some work with Ecovision. Ecovision is a company in Zimbabwe that does water filtration. We're partnering with them, signed an MOU to help with education of schoolgirls. And also we were supporting a water summit that they had launched. And so part of what we did in our digital media was to have a video, et cetera, right? So we had our digital marketers make us a video. But when I saw the video...

I talked to Morgan who you've met who is in California and I said, Morgan, was like, this looks like AI and it's a male synthetic voice. I was like, this is a water summit. AI is a huge consumer of water. I was like, I'm not sure that I want an AI video talking about supporting a water summit with this. Can you please talk to, you know, our partner and let's fix it. And I was a little bit of push because of course,

Jessica (43:41)
Mm-hmm.

Susan (43:45)
You know, that was easy for them. Make an AI video for a water summit. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. Let's go find some reels, take it, piece it together, do it differently. And you know, part of what we haven't talked about with OVO is we also plant trees. Why do we plant trees? Because we know that we're consuming, right? And we plant trees for the purpose of...

the pads to offset the cost of pad. We're also planting trees to offset our own carbon footprint in the course of generating what we do from a digital marketing standpoint or otherwise. Now we haven't done a full life cycle cost analysis to say, okay, how much are we using and how much do we offset and how much is the company that we're working with offsetting as well because many of these companies are doing a variety of different types of sustainability projects to offset that. But we try to do what we can, right?

Those are the little small choices along the way when Reshmi is talking about coherence, that we say how do we maintain that coherence and how do we work with our partners to understand our values and the importance of maintaining coherence.

Jessica (44:52)
clearly you're a values based business and more women are beginning to question the products that they use.

Susan (45:01)
think it's how do you make the decision based on complete awareness of what your product is doing for you? Right. I talked about how I would go into a store, look at the millions of offers out there in terms of sanitary pads and just make my decision based on size for flow and color, right, for pretty looking one.

because it sits on my shelf, it sits in my handbag, it's individually wrapped, it's got colorful wrap around it. Okay, so it's a nice accessory to have. And there's nothing wrong with liking pretty things, right? I like pretty things and, you know, both women and men these days, think, into accessorizing and all that. Nothing wrong with that. But how do you see beyond that when you are buying products related to you?

your health related to ourselves and we often talk about this and we say the cultural shift in food has happened. So we know in the 80s, right? I mean, we would drink sugary drinks, we would eat cookies, we would eat out of a can and we thought it was all okay. Right? And now we don't do that anymore. So that shift has happened because and I work in the food ingredient space as part of my corporate role. There's been a...

lot of lobbying, a lot of education, a lot of training that's been going on in that space to educate consumers on what's good for your health, what should you be looking at on the labels and in fact many large companies are looking to eliminate certain products which would have been totally okay 20 or 25 years ago. So that shift that happened in the food space

That's what we're hoping that will happen in the personal health care space. What we're hoping is that a woman who is buying mascara, for example, will look at it and say, should I be reading the ingredients on this before I buy this? And do I have a choice? And are there companies out there that are making sustainable products with ethically sourced, with components or ingredients that are better for me? So that's the shift, I think, with makeup.

with the clothes that we wear, with our feminine hygiene products, with everything that has been marketed just like food was marketed in the 80s, right? You eat something that gives you pleasure, right? And now we're buying something that gives us pleasure because we're just looking at it and it's pretty. So that's the shift that we're hoping to contribute to make in the women's consumer health space.

Jessica (47:49)
Yes, question everything. That is my motto. And finally, ladies, for women listening who may feel called to create meaningful change but feel intimidated by how difficult systems can be to disrupt, like you're talking about, what would you want them to know?

Susan (48:06)
I've always been a firm believer that to make a big change, you just need to start to make one small change every day. Right. So you just need to make a little step every day. If you want to run a 5k, you start by running 100 meters. Right. And then you add on to it every day. And then before you know it, you're doing a full blown marathon. So

I think very often when women or anyone for that matter is really passionate about a problem and say, okay, I want to do this. I also want to do this. Very often the big problem in itself seems extremely overwhelming, right? And there's every reason not to do it. my God, how am I going to do this? There are big companies doing this. Can I make this by myself? Who will help me? Where will the money come from? And

My advice would be just pause, just pause and say what's the one thing you can do today to take you towards the next step. Is there one thing you can do? Is there one phone call you can make to a friend to say, hey, what do you think of my idea? Right? And can you build on that feedback? And when you put it like that, you say, okay, a phone call to a friend, that I can do. And I say, yeah, focus on that. Right? And then when you get the information from your friend,

focus on what comes out of that call. Right? So you just break it down into one thing that's possible for you to do. And I'm sure that everyone listening to you is capable of making that one phone call. So just do it.

Jessica (49:47)
That's wonderful advice. Susan, do you have anything to add before we close out today?

Susan (49:52)
No, I think she said it all. Thank you.

Jessica (49:57)
You

Yes, I agree. and that's how I feel about the journey when we are starting to look at the products that we have in our homes surrounding us and we start to feel overwhelmed because pretty much everything is plastic. And we know now microplastics are

entering into our systems and they're not, great for our health or our hormones are causing disruptions. So just starting with the one thing and that's why I'm creating this master class is to take a look at the products that make a big impact if we were to swap out, one thing at a time.

And when I was looking for feminine hygiene products and I came across your brand, I was super excited. So thank you for doing the work and sticking to your values and having those high standards because those are the same values that I hold when I am looking for products to bring into my home.

to surround myself and my family with. And my standards are super high as well. And I don't compromise. And so this master class that we're now going to move into is part of my offering to people to help make that journey.

a little bit easier because it can be daunting and overwhelming

And Susan is going to break down all of the materials that you may not be aware of that are in the products that.

you're using because there's not a lot of great options out there. So if you haven't yet joined the master class, please do so. There's a link in the description below. And I

I also have a special discount that they are offering to all of our listeners. So that link will be in there as well.

Susan (51:44)
Thank you, Jessica. Thank you.