Lola tampons

Lola is the company you need to have on your radar, pronto. Here’s why: it’s about time we all stopped submitting ourselves to frantic last-minute trips to Duane Reade every month for tampons. Yeah, we’ve been having them every 28 eight days for the last say, 15 years but we seem to get caught out every time. It’s this cycle (see what we did there!) that inspired Jordana Kier and Alex Friedman to intervene and launch the subscription tampon business last summer.

As they started investigating all things feminine hygiene, it struck them just how little most of us know about what our tampons are made from and where they come from. At a time where we all obsess over provenance and all-things organic when it comes to our food, it’s crazy that the majority of us are non-the-wiser about something so intimate. The reality is, tampon companies aren’t obliged to disclose each and every ingredient used to make their products and, well, a lot of them haven’t changed much since our mothers started using them, which is something the duo is on a mission to change.

We sat down with the LOLA founders to discuss everything from why we need to stop shying away from talking about periods and how their 100% organic cotton tampons are the best on the market. Once you go LOLA, you don’t go back…


Lola tamponsEARLY START & LIFE BEFORE LOLA

JORDANA: I learned lessons of entrepreneurship firsthand from my family. I grew up surrounded by entrepreneurs: my grandfather, Ralph Kier, who came to the U.S. from Cuba with his wife and four kids (the eldest being my dad) when he was 34. He had nothing then. He moved his family to North Carolina and slowly built a small textile factory into a large company that my dad ended up running. I’ve heard stories of building something out of nothing my whole life. In my 20’s, I got my hands dirty in the business world for the first time. I spent a lot of my life focused on music (I am a classically-trained pianist) and my lifelong dream was to one day run Lincoln Center. After college, I worked at the opera in New York and ended up on a four-person team negotiating the company’s union contracts. I enjoyed everything from the nitty-gritty analytics to the high-level strategic thinking that the negotiations required. Inspired by those experiences, I left the role to attend business school at Columbia to continue to broaden my management skill set. Once immersed in the tech-focused, entrepreneurial community at Columbia, I changed direction from the arts to focus on tech-enabled consumer businesses, spending time interning at Rent the Runway and Quidsi and watching firsthand how others built massively successful ecommerce brands.

ALEX: I grew up in New York City with two full-time working parents who gave me the best childhood imaginable – full of quirky family activities, strong role models and freedom to experiment without fear of failure – but who also made it very clear that one day soon I would be expected to support myself. I have always admired my parents for creating a safe space where I could grow and learn, but then demanding I take advantage of these benefits to succeed on my own. When I lead, I want my team to know they have support – I’m there for them whenever they need it – but to also realize that I expect them to be individually empowered to drive success of an outcome. I worked in a handful of business strategy, investment and start-up roles before co-founding LOLA, most recently Flurry Analytics, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2014. Almost every job I’ve had has come with a script for half the work, and the rest I’ve had to come up with on my own. When I invested in venture capital managers, I had a clear framework to evaluate their investment capabilities. But there was also a more subjective determination – based on things like judgment and character. I like coming up with a framework from scratch and then executing against it. We do that every day at LOLA – align on short-term goals, sketch out a path to get there, and then execute. Of course, you can’t have a plan for everything and my previous positions have made me comfortable knowing that sometimes, you just have to roll with it.  

ON HOW THEY MET (OVER BEERS &, WELL, TAMPONS)

JORDANA: We were introduced through mutual friends and we instantly bonded, sharing our gripes with the feminine hygiene industry. Among other things, we wondered why we found ourselves making frantic last-minute trips to the drugstore each month for tampons – we knew we needed them, yet somehow we were almost always unprepared. That’s when LOLA was born as a modern solution to feminine care, founded with a simple and seemingly obvious idea – you shouldn’t have to compromise when it comes to tampons. We started working together on the business more than two years ago and launched the company in July 2015.

ALEX: We co-manage the business and make all key strategic decisions as a unit, but on a day to day basis split the business into two parts: operations and growth. Jordana manages the operations or largely “inward-facing” areas of the business, meaning logistics, product development, finance, human resources, and customer service. I manage the growth or largely “outward-facing” areas of the business, encompassing brand, marketing, public relations, customer experience, and web product. As the business grows, it’s been very important for us each to have ownership and be able to drive forward in different areas of the business, but it’s also been critical to our success to date that there are two of us weighing in at a high level across every aspect. Our co-founder set-up has been an incredible advantage for LOLA, because everything we do has the opportunity to have two brains and two pairs of hands against it to achieve our (often incredibly lofty) goals.


Lola tamponsLOLA 101

ALEX: We’re a company by women, for women modernizing the feminine care industry. Made from 100% organic cotton, our products are hypoallergenic and don’t contain any synthetics, additives, or dyes.  Just this month, we launched a new non-applicator tampon option, in addition to our original compact, BPA-free plastic applicator option.  In addition to full ingredient transparency, we provide women the freedom to easily tailor the absorbency assortment – each box of non-applicator and applicator tampons come in a customizable assortment of 18 – and frequency of deliveries (1,2, or 3 boxes each month) to fit their schedules. We recently introduced super plus to our range of absorbencies to provide our customers even more options for customization. 

ONY WHY THEIR SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE IS A NO-BRAINER

JORDANA: We realized we could help fill a void and meet a need in the feminine care market. Subscription services had been popping up across categories for a while (from food to beauty to clothes), disrupting industries across the board. It’s easy to see why the model is popular – it provides consumers an easy and automated shopping experience and cuts out familiar hassles, like last-minute sprints to the drugstore for a tampon. LOLA is a convenient way for women to receive what they need, when they need it. Each box contains 18 tampons – the standard breakdown is 6 light, 6 regular and 6 super, but we provide women freedom to easily tailor the absorbency assortment, choosing any breakdown they’d like of light, regular, super and our new super-plus option. We offer one box for $10 and two or three boxes for just $9/box. Our goal was to create a service we would want to use ourselves, so we make it easy to adjust, skip or cancel deliveries at any time.

SO WE EAT ORGANIC FOOD BUT DON’T KNOW WHAT WE’RE PUTTING IN OUR BODIES…

Feminine care as a product category has been very under-researched, which is quite scary to think about. Without the appropriate research or information around ingredient breakdown, how can you make smart decisions? Many women – us included, just a few years ago – simply hadn’t thought about what was in their products or questioned why they couldn’t figure out what’s in the mainstream products we use. Since launching in July 2015, we’ve been both surprised and flattered by the overwhelming number of women willing to share their own personal stories and engage in a larger conversation about transparency in the industry. A lot of women seemed to say they just kept using the same feminine care brand their mother supplied them after their first period and never looked back. We’re proud to have opened up a dialogue on a topic that, for many reasons, has flown under the radar for way too long.

SO WHAT’S ACTUALLY IN OUR TAMPONS, THEN?

As we began to research the industry, it quickly became clear to us that the most pressing issue in this product category was lack of transparency about the ingredients that went into tampons. Trying to figure out what went into the products we had been using since we were teenagers was a guessing game and we were shocked to learn that although the FDA regulates feminine care, it doesn’t require companies to list all the ingredients in their products. Big brands do the bare minimum and rarely disclose the ratio of ingredients in their tampons, which is typically a blend of the artificial fibers rayon and polyester, among others. The lack of transparency in the marketplace is why we decided to source our own product for LOLA instead of merely building a subscription service offering existing brands. We wanted to create a better product for ourselves and our friends.


Lola tamponsIT’S NOW TIME TO DIVORCE YOUR TAMPON BRAND OF CHOICE…

When we launched LOLA in July 2015, the feminine care industry had been stale for a long time. We think the lack of options has a lot to do with a traditional lack of demand – but now, that’s changing. Because the FDA doesn’t actually require feminine care brands to list their comprehensive ingredients, a box of tampons at the drugstore might just say what the product may contain. Since most of us never bother to look at the labels on tampon boxes, women simply don’t know what’s in the products they’re buying because they’ve never thought about it. That’s exactly why we set out to educate women and start a conversation.

WOMEN TOOK TO INSTAGRAM TO SHARE THEIR LOLA TAMPONS, GUYS

JORDANA: We were thrilled! At launch, we encouraged our customers to post their own #lolashelfie and were so encouraged and excited by what we saw. The existence of social media makes it easier for women to team up, start a movement and realize they aren’t alone when it comes to traditionally taboo topics. We’ve seen women comment and engage on our Instagram page more and more over time as they’ve realized periods are something that we all can relate to. We love seeing customers take photos, tag us, and say things like, “This bathroom is pretty enough for LOLA!”. It’s amazing to see such positive reactions from our community.

ON GETTING REAL ON THEIR BLOG

ALEX: We’re incredibly proud of The Broadcast. It’s a real destination for information on women’s health, tips for living a healthy and balanced life, and conversations with trailblazing women we admire. We launched it to help our audience realize it’s OK to speak up more about previously stigmatized topics, so we try to cover a range of issues that some women might not have felt comfortable discussing openly before. We hear from our customers every day that they are so thankful they now have a brand they can turn to for questions about their periods and reproductive health. Women call us to ask basic questions about their cycle, how to make informed product choices, and we even have have the occasional woman who calls us from a bathroom. For us, launching a blog was a natural next step to allow us to connect with women through a different channel and open up the conversation across a spectrum of women’s health topics that too often go undiscussed. Part of opening up the conversation is creating a safe space for women to engage on these topics, and The Broadcast will hopefully become that destination for many women.


Lola tamponsSTART-UP CHALLENGES

JORDANA: The biggest one is education – a lot of people mistakenly assume that tampons are already made out of cotton, so it really starts with raising awareness. We’re proud of the conversations we’ve started and the stigmas we’re removing, but until recently, women were not as likely to discuss menstruation given it isn’t the “sexiest” topic. If we don’t talk openly about it, women remain unaware of the lack of transparency in the industry. So when we first launched, we were bringing not only a new product to market, but also a new way of thinking to market. Just as women consider what’s in the food they eat, the shampoo they use, the diapers they put on their babies, they should also be thinking about what’s in the feminine care products they use. This has been an awakening for many women we talk to, and through this awakening we were able to prove out our concept and the market for our product.

ALEX: Another challenge as a quickly growing company has been taking this one day at a time and realizing that we can’t say yes to every opportunity or request that comes our way. We have this feeling of “let’s do it all!” but we know that’s not the right way to evaluate decisions. We just need to be flattered when some of these things come up, but stay focused on the best path for the company.

ON THE FUTURE

JORDANA: We’re excited to have recently launched LOLA Gives Back and look forward to expanding the program. For many women in need, menstrual hygiene products aren’t readily available every month. As a feminine care company by women, for women, we’re aiming to change periods for the better – for everyone. In order to improve access to feminine care, we’ve partnered with Support the Girls, Distributing Dignity and Simply the Basics, three amazing regional charities dedicated to providing products to women in need across the US. Through our program, we’re able to provide tampons, pads, and liners to shelters for homeless women, domestic violence survivors, and foster care children across the country. To date, we’ve donated over 100,000 feminine care products, which is something we’re really proud of and is the start of what we hope to be a long term and impactful relationship with our charity partners. Longer-term, our overall goal for LOLA is to provide a better feminine care experience in a relatable, straightforward, and transparent way. We’re excited about product launches in the pipeline and our grand vision is to provide every product for all women throughout their entire reproductive cycle. We want to empower women to make proactive and informed decisions about everything they put in their bodies.