Lauren Schulte Wang: Founder & CEO of The Flex Company

Episode 892

What happens when you stop accepting the status quo and build the solution you wish existed?
Lauren Schulte Wang is the Founder and CEO of The Flex Company, North America's leading menstrual disc and cup brand. After years of believing her discomfort was simply part of having a period, Lauren realized the products—not her body—were the problem. That insight led her to build a company focused on reimagining period care through innovation, comfort, and education.
In this episode, Lauren shares how she challenged a category that had seen little meaningful innovation for decades, built a profitable company with products now sold in more than 30,000 retail locations, and helped change the conversation around menstrual health. We discuss product innovation, building consumer trust, competing in retail, balancing growth with profitability, and why solving a real problem is still the best foundation for building a lasting brand.
Lauren also shares what it was like taking on Meta, Google, Amazon, and other platforms over restrictions on period care advertising, the lessons she's learned as a founder and leader, and why she believes there's still enormous opportunity to innovate in women's health.
It's a conversation about entrepreneurship, resilience, challenging outdated assumptions, and building products that genuinely improve people's lives.
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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up. That I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be. We just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don’t get knocked out. Knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin Show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go! Let’s go! Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin Show. Today’s guest is Lauren Schulte Wang, who was founder and CEO of the Flex Company, the number one best-selling brand in both the menstrual disc and menstrual cup categories in the U.S. Lauren started Flex, as it’s known, with a simple but powerful mission to make periods more comfortable and to bring real innovation to a category that had seen very little change for decades. And today, Flex products are sold in more than 30,000 retail locations. The company has sold over 185 million. Is that right? Dis.

Lauren Schulte Wang 1:23
That’s right.

Kara Goldin 1:23
Wow, that’s that’s amazing. Achieved profitability and helped reshape not only period care but also how women’s health products can be marketed online. So I cannot wait to dig in to Lauren’s story. And yeah, without further ado, welcome Lauren to the Kara Goldin Show. So excited to meet you and to have you here. So excited to be here, Kara. Thank you. So for listeners who are just hearing about the Flex company with products called Flex, how do you describe the company today, and what makes it different from other menstrual care, period

Lauren Schulte Wang 2:00
care, whatever you want to call it, products that are out on the market. Sure, Flex is a modern period care brand, and I say that because there’s a family of what we call modern period care brands that have come up on the market over the last decade or so. So if you think about naturals, reusable products, the better for you brands essentially, and I started Flex 10 years ago because I was getting infections from tampons and pads, and I learned that it didn’t really matter which format that I used; it was the cotton itself that was causing my recurrent infections. And so I founded Flex with this idea that we wanted to invest in meaningful innovation to make better for you products that were 100 body safe and as performant or more performant than the traditional period products like tampons and pads that people are used to using.

Kara Goldin 2:54
So you entered a category that had seen very little innovation in decades. Why do you think so few people questioned the status quo and kind of what you had seen for yourself? I mean, I’ve heard this over and over again about the cotton and so many of these larger brands’ menstrual products. So why is it that we’re now just getting to innovating around this? I think unfortunately women’s health is woefully underfunded. You see that across things like endometriosis and PCOS

Lauren Schulte Wang 3:30
in the period care category specifically. Period products weren’t even tested using blood until a few years ago, which is kind of crazy. There’s been no formal studies on the diameter of the vaginal fornix, for example, most people don’t even know what the vaginal fornix is. A lot of us have our own education from, you know, if we’re lucky, elementary school or middle school or high school in health classes, and but I really believe is that you know, we’re taught at a young age to not talk about our periods, to hide our period product. They separate boys and girls in class when we’re learning about these things, and so from a very young age, it’s ingrained in us to be ashamed of our periods and to be ashamed of our bodies, which is a natural process that occurs to everyone. And when people have the shame, they don’t vocalize what their problems are because we’re taught that we just need to grin and bear it. Or there’s all these terrible euphemisms for periods like ant flow, or you know, surfing the crimson tide, or just ridiculous stuff. And so I think in any category, if there’s not an obvious problem, people aren’t going to come up try to come up with a solution to a problem that they don’t know that exists. And I think period care, in particular, because it’s been so shrouded in shame and taboo, and because people are so uneducated. About their bodies, and afraid to ask questions, or afraid to say that they don’t know that much about their bodies, that there’s just a lack of innovation across period care and a number of other products that are made for women’s health. Yeah, so so true. So, how did you come up with the name? Such a good question. Okay, so Sarah Blakely famously said that you know words that ended with X, you know, were were were great for company names, and that consumers liked it. So that was kind of in the back of my mind. The second thing was I knew that the product is this, you know, disc shaped thing, and at the time we didn’t call it a disc. Like we were like, “Is it a ring? Is it what is it? So I wanted something that evoked a benefit of the product, and the product is very Flexible. But I hadn’t landed on Flex, and what I did was I brainstormed a few different names. I picked my top three, and when I would go tell people about the company, every time I would switch which name that I used, and I waited to see which name came back to me. And the first name that came back to me was Flex, and I said, “That’s it. I love it. So 10 years. So thinking back on those, you know, first moments when you decided I’m going to go start this company, you obviously had this issue that you were trying to solve for yourself first. But what were the first steps that you took to actually figure out? Okay, I think I can go do this. Okay, Kara, I’m like you. I’m also an accidental entrepreneur. I did not want to start the company, so I didn’t really think of my first steps as being, I’m going to go start a company. But looking back, I can say my first steps were I created a list of questions of all the things that I wanted to research and know about. I wanted to understand at the time why I set up a Google alert for words like period menstruation. I would get no hits sometimes for weeks, so there was very little information on the internet about periods. Very little news being written outside of scientific, like university studies on occasion. You know, would talk about menstruation. I wanted to know, you know, where period products were made, and why, you know, cotton is disruptive to the pH of your vagina, and so it was just really, honestly, a research project. And from there, I started having conversations with women.

Lauren Schulte Wang 7:35
I would invite maybe like 10 women at a time at this tiny 450 square foot apartment in San Francisco, and I would make this vegan soup and have Trader Joe’s wine and have women come over and talk about their periods. And this ended up growing by word of mouth, and I found that there was just a real interest and desire to talk about menstruation and to talk about our problems related to menstruation that we hadn’t really had an outlet for most of our lives. So yeah, it was like the research piece, but also the what ended up becoming you know focus groups talking to our our target customers.

Kara Goldin 8:16
That’s incredible. So what were you doing before, by the way?

Lauren Schulte Wang 8:20
Marketing. I have a background in marketing,

Kara Goldin 8:23
so product development, actually getting this made, things like that. I know that’s always the piece that so many people just get stuck. They don’t know how to go about it, and then they never get it done. They never start. What was that time like, and how long did it take you to actually get the products made in order to actually feel comfortable enough and confident enough to launch Flex?

Lauren Schulte Wang 8:51
Yeah, that was a very uncomfortable chapter for me because I did know nothing about product development, and I had created this list of everything that I didn’t know. So I didn’t know how to raise money. I didn’t even know like financing terms. I’d never built like an operating, like a financial operating model. I knew nothing about the FDA or manufacturing or product development. Like all I knew was this tiny corner over here called marketing, and I certainly didn’t know how to be a CEO. I had met a number of different product designers or founders who had developed either medical devices or things that went inside of the vagina, and I started researching old patents and just trying every different type of period product from around the world that I could get my hands on. And when I finally had a prototype that I was really, really proud of, took it to a manufacturer, and the manufacturer was like, “Lord, like that’s cute. You can make this prototype. You cannot make this at scale. And if you could make it at scale, a customer would never be able to afford what you would have to charge for it.” And at that point, I said, “You know what? I’m done. Like, I like this idea is dead. Like, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m so overwhelmed because it’s one thing to go to a manufacturer and say, ‘Hey, I’m building like a better for you tampon brand. I’m gonna buy, you know, organic tampons from you and put it into my box, versus I need to build custom manufacturing equipment with that multi-step process to be able to develop something completely new and novel. So, yeah, that process is very stop and start. I mean, I will fast forward to the conclusion, which is we ended up acquiring. We did an asset acquisition of another product, and we leverage their manufacturing line and their tooling to be able to build ours on top of it.

Kara Goldin 10:48
Who were the first hires that you made as you were either getting ready to launch or as you had launched? The team is always the most important aspect, really, in allowing you to maybe not launch, but definitely scale. So, what were those first kind of really, really critical hires that you made?

Lauren Schulte Wang 11:08
Finance was a really important one, since that’s definitely not my background. So, somebody that could understand cash flow management and and just the intricacies of timing of when you pay everyone, like your manufacturers and whatnot. The other one was marketing. We really needed a growth marketer at the time. Meta was just getting started, pretty much of you know really scaling a lot of these DTC brands in the in the mid 2010 s. And then the third was manufacturing and supply chain expert, and so that person was really responsible for setting up our fulfillment, for making sure that our orders were made on time, and shortening the shipping windows to our customers. What was harder, convincing investors, retailers, or consumers

Kara Goldin 12:00
that period care needed this innovation needed Flex, and they needed to give mindshare to and potentially money to your idea. Who who would you guess? Well, given given, I can only imagine what it was like talking to most of the investment community, I remember when we were raising money for for Hint. I started to figure out after kind of hindsight 2020 that the the people who we were trying to pitch early on who said I need to check with my wife or my girlfriend, or my sister about this issue that you’re talking about around diet sweeteners because I’m not really a diet sweetener person, but maybe they’ll know. And I knew that they would never, they would never invest because they invest in what they know, and

Lauren Schulte Wang 13:00
so I would imagine that, and it didn’t mean that it wasn’t an issue. It’s just that they didn’t know enough about it. So I’m so curious about your situation. That story couldn’t be more relatable. I’ve probably had I don’t know 100 nos in my in my 10 years for fundraising and the classic, like let me ask my wife, girlfriend, daughter. We’ve even had instances where we’ve had investors who’ve learned about our products because they have multiple daughters who are using Flex, and all of their girlfriends at college are using Flex, and all their sorority is now using Flex, and they’re still like, yeah, I just I don’t really know. I’m just not really sure about it. I’m like, that’s fine. I’m not convincing you to try the product. I’m just trying to convince you there’s a really big market and it’s really interesting and it’s untapped and we’re profitable and we’re growing quickly. Those are the types of conversations. But at the end of the day, a no is a no. And as an entrepreneur, we have to figure out how to get to a yes. And so, if we’re getting a no, we have to find a better way; otherwise, we no longer exist. So there’s no there’s really no excuses for us. Unfortunately, if investors are saying no, it’s like I’m not doing a good enough job pitching. So knowing what you said that an investor wants to invest in something that they really understand, and knowing that there’s no real comp for menstrual disc, which was our first our first product, like how do you go about solving that problem? And one of the benefits of our product is that you can have intercourse mess free. It’s not a primary reason why we created the company. Obviously, I created it because I was getting infections, but it’s just one of the benefits is mess-free intercourse, and I knew this, and I was like, okay, I’m going to try a different angle with these investors, and so I started saying like, hey, Bill, do you enjoy having sex with women? Uh huh. You know, have you ever been rejected because she was on her period? Oh yeah, definitely. I’m like that feels terrible, Bill. Let’s do something about it. This is a product for you, and they’re like, “Oh, interesting, got it. Then I talk about you know, and there’s no innovation, and by the way, has all these other benefits. But like, that was such a big unlock for us on the fundraising front. That’s so interesting. So, so Flexus now sold more than 185 million discs. Looking back, what was the first sign that this wasn’t just a crazy idea, a niche product? It was a movement. Well, we went viral all over the world when TechCrunch wrote an article about us and put it as like the main article on their homepage for 48 hours, and this is in the heyday of TechCrunch. No offense to TechCrunch, I still I love you guys, and we very depressingly didn’t know that they were going to write it, and our website wasn’t live yet. We only had an email sign up, and we got like 200,000 email signups in a very very short time period, and I’m like, wow, people really are interested in this. They’re interested in something new, and then our growth just skyrocketed right out of the gate, which was really exciting. So we thought not to say that we haven’t had our difficult years or difficult times, but yeah, it was apparent early on, especially from not just like the the the scale, but the actual letters that our customers would write us. I’m at the office right now. Our refrigerator is covered with graduation announcements, wedding invitations, handwritten letters that people send to us saying that Flex has changed their lives and all the different things that they can do as a result of using our products. And to me, if somebody says that your product is life changing, that’s really testament to finding that product market fit. It’s something that people can’t live without. I love it. So I know that I’ve I’ve read or listened to some of your interviews where you talk about how you’ve had to fight some of the social media companies out there and streaming platforms over restrictions on period care advertising. Did you ever think like this is ridiculous?

Lauren Schulte Wang 17:16
We’re literally fighting to use the word period, and what did those battles teach you about advocating for your consumers and actually getting your message out there? Yeah, it’s surprising to me. I mean, I knew from my friends who are female founders of sex toy companies, for example, that they, you know, are super banned across everything, or they have trouble even opening bank accounts. Like that was known. It was really surprising to me that most of these platforms considered periods sexual content, or if a user would flag it as sexual content, everything comes down. And so we’ve calculated through the years we’ve lost over $4 million in just like measurable revenue, not immeasurable revenue, from this happening over and over again. It happened this week on a platform that we had, like our best performing ad right now, got taken down, and all, and and so then we spent a week fighting them, which is you know time that we’re not using to serve our customers. What it taught me is that it just taught me so many things. It taught me that periods are more stigmatized than I even realized, and they continue to be. I live in my little period bubble, and I forget that people are still embarrassed of their period sometimes, or that people on the internet might see, you know, red blood and in an ad versus a blue liquid, and think that that’s really offensive. Yet we do watch movies and films all the time with all kinds of red blood, and for some reason nobody seems to you know be up in arms about that. So I don’t know. I think it’s really important for us to represent our customers well to be that voice of the customer, and we’ll continue going to bat for them over and over again because it’s the right thing to do.

Kara Goldin 19:03
So Flex is now sold in more than more than 30,000 retail location. What’s one lesson about retail partnerships that every consumer founder should know? And I know it’s like the first time you go into a buyer to try and sell in your product, it’s

Lauren Schulte Wang 19:23
like a-it’s

Kara Goldin 19:24
just this big unknown, right? And then you-you just learn so much. But what would you say are the biggest lessons, like the things that have really helped you to get into that many retail locations? The

Lauren Schulte Wang 19:38
first thing I would say is don’t go into like I learned to like not go into retail until we were absolutely ready. Interestingly, in that time where we went viral early in the company’s history, I got an email from our target, our category target buyer, and she’s like, “I want to carry Flex right away. I got on the plane and flew out to meet her, and I very politely told her in person, “No, thank you. We’re not ready yet. I’ll talk to you next.” A year rolls around. She’s like Lauren, you know, I want to meet with you. I want to carry Flex, and I fly out and meet with her again, and very politely say, “Thanks, but I can’t. And we did that kind of dance for years because I wanted to ensure that we were ready from a manufacturing supply chain perspective, that we were ready from a marketing perspective, because if if you don’t have your marketing flywheel figured out online, you’re never going to do well in retail. Like it’s really really hard these days to be a brand that’s only unless you have a gazillion dollars. You have to figure out your digital strategy, and it doesn’t all have to be digital paid. It could be organic or whatever, but you need to have some kind of flywheel where you understand your cost of acquisition, you understand your COGS, you understand your margin, and you understand where your customers want to buy your products. So the time that I decided to go into retail was after you know growing exponentially for three years, and we kept hearing from customers, no matter how quickly we shipped, no matter how you know how much better we got at solving that problem. That people just want to buy their period products in store for the most part. They want to go to Target and get their Starbucks on a Sunday and do their Target run and walk quickly down the aisle and grab the thing. You know, grab their their period product as a part of their regular life. They don’t want to wait. You know, get on their period and go online and order a product and wait for a couple days to ship. But this doesn’t really fit that particular use case. And I think the other thing that I learned, the most painful thing that I learned, Kara, was around just like managing cash and inventory and that whole situation was really really painful for us. And thankfully, now there’s so many other experts out there that you could get advice from or people that you could hire. But at the time, I just didn’t know anyone. I knew nobody in my network. None of my investors knew nobody. I didn’t know anyone who had ever done anything in retail, and so what happens is you get this really large retailer order. You have to obviously like pay for your manufacturer for that, and then it takes time for the retailer to pay you. And so that whole flow of cash and inventory was a really big challenge. I would say, do not go into retail until you have a really good handle on that, and you’ve got a really, really experienced finance person on your team. Yeah, I totally agree.

Kara Goldin 22:30
Well, and it helps to get profitable too because lots of lines of credit will start to open up when that occurs. What ended up happening in terms of your raising money and investor side of things, you touched on that a bit, but I’m curious about that.

Lauren Schulte Wang 22:46
Yeah, I mean specifically on this topic, I had to raise like emergency funding from our existing investors and use VC capital to fund our inventory. I 10 out of 10 don’t recommend our investors are incredible. I’m super grateful to them because we made it happen. But it was, you know, it’s not really a situation that any founder wants to find themselves in. We raised $20 million over the life of the company. Our first investor was Y Combinator out of San Francisco, which is a tech accelerator, very unconventional for a CPG company, they really believed in us and they believed in the problems. So we did that in summer 2016, and following that, raised money. Our last price round was in 2020, so raised a good bit of capital upfront that helped us fund manufacturing supply chain operations, figure out our marketing engine, hire great people, all of that stuff. So it’s been a good run.

Kara Goldin 23:42
That’s amazing. Did you actually go through the Y Combinator program too?

Lauren Schulte Wang 23:47
Absolutely, yes.

Kara Goldin 23:48
That’s amazing. We’ve had a number of founders on this that primarily have been through Y Combinator versus. There’s a few other ones, actually TechStars and a few other that people have done, but Y Combinator in particular, people have just been thrilled with. It’s like a boot camp, right? Did that really, really help you?

Lauren Schulte Wang 24:09
It helped us tremendously. Not only with connections to investors, which was super helpful, but they just had phenomenal, phenomenal advice. I mean, there’s things that they taught us that we use every single day here, and it’s been 10 years since we went through the program, which is really amazing. And at the time that we went through it, Sam Altman was the president, which you know nobody like now people know who Sam Altman is, but at the time, you know he’s just this young whiz kid who you know was running this thing, and Michael and Dalton were our group partners, and they went on to lead YC there. So I just felt like we had these like incredible, incredible mentors that have been extremely supportive and very responsive, and we owe a lot to them. So what advice would you give to found? Tackling categories that people think are too uncomfortable or too boring to disrupt, knowing what you know today, too boring to disrupt. Is anything too boring to disrupt? What advice? I would say. I mean, my advice is always just get started. You know, just get started and talk to your customers as much as possible. Stay really close to your customers. You’re never too big to talk to your customers in a very manual way. You don’t need to sit behind your desk. Just actually get out there and talk to people and build based on their needs. And I think as long as you’re doing that and you’re building something that people really want, you’re going to win regardless of the category, and I think one of the most rewarding, fulfilling things for me is helping people feel more comfortable in their own bodies. That has fueled me through this last decade, and I think it’ll fuel me for another decade to come. Lauren, thank you so much for joining

Kara Goldin 26:00
and sharing your story, I love your story. Love the Flex products, the Flex company, and it’s really proof that some of the biggest opportunities come from solving everyday problems, particularly for for women. For everyone listening, we’ll have all the info in the show notes. Be sure to check out the Flex Co and follow Lauren to see what she is working on. So definitely, thanks for listening to the Kara Goldin Show, and thank you, Lauren, for joining us here today. Lauren Schulte Wang, founder and CEO of the Flex Company. Thank you so much, Kara. I had a great time. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin Show. If you would, please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal best-selling book, Undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint: We are here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now.

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