8

ITERATE. MEDITATE. REPEAT.

“What you are is what you have been. What you’ll be is what you do now.”

—BUDDHA

NAAMA BLOOM IS APOLOGIZING FOR the blender. We are sitting in the café of her communal office space, WeWork in New York City, where two bearded hipsters sporting nearly identical geek chic eyewear are whipping up smoothies. WeWork is like a kibbutz of cool kids, a collective of entrepreneurs who run small companies and start-ups in a shared office space custom-made for the creative economy. It’s among the bean bag chairs and foosball tables where anyone from the solo publicist to the nonprofit activist to the software engineer can meet and collaborate. Naama, forty-two, a lanky brunette in jeans and a funky peasant top, fits right in. She points to the tiny nose ring she got herself for Mother’s Day this year. “Getting to forty is like fuck you. It’s liberating,” Naama says. “I got my nose pierced for Mother’s Day because I always wanted to get my nose pierced. No one is not going to hire me because of a nose piercing. I’ve proven myself.”

ROCKING THE AD INDUSTRY

Naama has definitely proven herself. In July 2013, she launched HelloFlo, a subscription company that sends “period kits” filled with tampons, sanitary napkins, candy, and other little treats—basically, custom-care packages for your menstrual period. She introduced the world to HelloFlo with arguably the greatest video to ever kick-start a company. The cheeky “Camp Gyno” video, viewed more than twelve million times, shows a precocious tween girl at sleepaway camp who acts like the know-it-all when it comes to girls getting their periods. The edgy script used the word “vag” and proclaimed that getting the HelloFlo candy-filled packages felt like Christmas at camp.

“It was the beginning of summer, and no one knew me at camp,” the girl begins. “I was a just a big random loser. Then things changed. I got my period. The red badge of courage!”

As the sudden expert on the topic, this little camper becomes the insufferable “camp gyno,” hosting graphic “menstruation demonstrations,” barking orders through a bullhorn at fellow campers, and bullying those not in the know. “For these campers, I was their Joan of Arc,” she says. “It’s like, I’m Joan, and their vag is the ark.” But the camp gyno loses her power because HelloFlo arrives in the bunk. It’s a lovely package with tampons, panty liners, and candy that dethrones the Queen Bee.

“All perfectly timed to their cycle! It’s like Santa for your vagina!” the girl cries, flopping down on her bed in defeat.

“Goodbye Camp Gyno. HelloFlo,” reads the text on-screen.¹

The “Camp Gyno” video went viral, and within days of launching in July 2013, HelloFlo and Naama were in the news. It was declared by many in the industry as the best ad of the year and won numerous awards. And it firmly planted HelloFlo on the map as a game-changer in how girls and women talk about their monthly periods. Adios blue liquid feminine product ads! HelloFlo!

A year later, in June 2014, Naama released another video, “The First Moon Party.” This stars another sassy tween—but this time the issue is that the girl hasn’t gotten her period yet when all of her friends have. So she decides to fake it to fit in. She paints a pad with red sparkle nail polish and proudly shows her mom. Her mom knows that she’s lying but plays along and throws her daughter an embarrassing “First Moon Party” to celebrate her arrival into womanhood. Grandpa arrives along with mom’s coworkers to play Pin the Pad on the Period. There’s also bobbing for ovaries, a vagina cake, and a “vagician.”

“Do you know how hard it is to find a uterus piñata?” the mom asks at one point.

The video is clever, silly, and smart. When it came out, my eleven-year-old daughter Lexi watched “The First Moon Party” at least a dozen times. She was obsessed. And that’s exactly the audience Naama hoped to reach. It demystified getting your period. The video made it real, celebratory, and funny all at once. Together, the “Camp Gyno” and “First Moon Party” videos have garnered more than fifty million views on YouTube.²

Goodbye Amex, HelloFlo!

Things haven’t always lined up seemingly so easily for Naama. For nine years, she worked in marketing at American Express. The last four years there she was in a rut. Even though Naama was getting top reviews and bonuses, she couldn’t move up the corporate ladder. She was passed over for two digital marketing positions. Right around her nine-year mark at the company, Naama got pregnant with her second child. During her maternity leave, she started networking with as many people as possible to explore other job options. Friends thought she was nuts for “wasting” her maternity leave, but it made her feel reenergized about working.

“I kept getting feedback at Amex, like you need to be more like this or more like that,” Naama says. “It felt like the culture was asking me to change my personality.”

Instead of changing herself, Naama left American Express and took a new marketing job at a tech start-up. That’s where I met her—I was doing freelance publicity, and Naama was my client. After a meeting one day, Naama mentioned she was trying to launch HelloFlo on the side out of her Brooklyn apartment and asked for my feedback. Would girls dig this? Would moms want this? “Absolutely!” I told Naama. My friends’ daughters were all on the cusp of puberty and were consumed by getting their period and the mystery of when it would happen.

Two years later, I was thrilled for Naama when the “Camp Gyno” video exploded online. The company was born out of the premise that mail-order subscription services can be successful. Modeled after Birchbox and Harry’s Shave Club, Naama envisioned creating a company that could fill a niche in the marketplace for women and girls. “It kind of started as a game,” Naama says. “My friend and I were both working for other people and not happy. We were moms of two young kids with full-time jobs and thought that none of these current subscription companies work for us. So we had an idea of monthly care packages for moms from sex toys to other stuff, but everything we came up with seemed like too much of a luxury. The problem we were trying to solve is that moms take care of themselves last. We were walking down the street, and I thought, what do I have to buy each month? And that’s when I came up with the tampon idea.”

Naama’s friend was not enthusiastic about a feminine hygiene business, but Naama couldn’t get it out of her head. She kept talking to her friends about it. “My husband said, ‘You either have to do it or shut up, but it will drive you crazy if someone else does it and you don’t.’ And that shook me into action,” Naama says. “I didn’t put any money into it. I figured in the beginning it wouldn’t be more than one hundred people ordering kits, and I could go to Costco and buy stuff, pack boxes in my apartment, and ship them. I thought it would take a while to grow, and while it was scaling up I would figure out what I would do.”

The first move was launching a video. The “Camp Gyno” video emerged out of a conversation Naama had over a Thai food dinner in her apartment with a friend and her boyfriend, an advertising copywriter. Naama knew her target audience was ten- to thirteen-year-old girls and their moms. She shared her insight that every girl has a friend who knows more than she does. Naama also talked about her own experience at sleepaway camp, where there was always one girl who seemed to know everything. The ad agency writer immediately said, “She’s like the camp gyno. The girl who gets her period first is the educator and gets out of control.”

The video was born. Calling in favors from friends, cameramen, and editors, Naama paid only $6,000 to have “Camp Gyno” shot and edited. The boldness of the video hit a nerve. Immediately, the response from girls and their mothers was overwhelming. “I got thousands of emails from women around the world, and it made me realize that this is not just a subscription business, but a new way to talk to women about their health. It’s a new conversation.”

Moving from Kits to Content

The concept for HelloFlo quickly pivoted. “I originally thought I was building a product company, but what I ended up building was a marketing channel and a content business,” Naama says. HelloFlo still sells period starter packages, teen kits, new mom packages, and other supplies cheekily described as “one-of-a-kind kits for your lady bits.” But the company evolved quickly, becoming a rich platform for smart, bold content for tweens, teens, and adult women, covering female bodies from menstruation to menopause. The HelloFlo site contains all types of period-related topics and also what it calls “feminspiration,” sitting at the intersection of inspiration and feminism.

As a marketing guru, Naama knew how to talk to her customers to find out what resonates. After the “Camp Gyno” video hit, she took the cues from the girls and women who wrote to her and tweaked her business to reflect what she saw as the real need in the market. This is also where she excelled at—creating a marketing channel steeped in smart content. “What was interesting for me in this big aha moment was that you start out doing one thing, but what you end up doing is what you’re naturally really inclined to do and what you’re good at,” Naama says. “I wound up doing what I was always good at instead of what I was trying to do.”

Naama had never intended for HelloFlo to be her full-time gig. She had envisioned it as a part-time business with consulting on the side. Little did she realize that it quickly would become more than a full-time job, but without the salary. “I figured when it was full-time, it would pay me full-time money. I didn’t realize that there is such a huge gap between one and the other,” Naama says.

Naama was shocked that after the wild success of her videos, she still couldn’t raise venture capital money for her company. And the popularity of the videos didn’t translate into massive subscriptions for the kits, either. While she was getting recognized in the advertising and media world for her compelling content, she was drained by the unrelenting stress of running a small business and operating with a razor-thin margin for error. Her husband David, also an entrepreneur, was trying to grow his start-up too. As two entrepreneurs with two small kids in Brooklyn and mounting debt, it was overwhelming. So in 2015, Naama was thinking of an exit strategy. She had pivoted HelloFlo from a commerce company to a media company. Now she needed a partner.

Reframing the Business and Finding the Right Fit

Naama had been nominated for the annual #Femvertizing Award that SheKnows, a women’s digital media company, gives to brands that show women in a positive light. SheKnows’s President and Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer Samantha Skey is also a Brooklyn mom with two young kids. Samantha reached out to Naama to meet for coffee. As Naama says, it was an instant and mutual girl crush. “I got excited about all the stuff we could do together and over the course of that coffee, I even said to her, ‘You guys should really just buy me.’ We talked about where the holes and opportunities were in what SheKnows was doing, and it fit perfectly with what I know how to do.”

Naama left the coffee date feeling pumped. She called her husband to say that maybe it would turn into something. Still, she knew that these first meetings often feel promising but usually go nowhere—as she says, a lot has to go right. But Naama had a brand that was valuable and aligned perfectly with SheKnows, and she also had a personal skillset that filled a need for the company. And perhaps most importantly, Naama had a very motivated internal sponsor in Samantha Skey. “I realize after observing friends trying to go through acquisitions that you need a very senior-level corporate sponsor internally,” Naama says. “Everyone has competing interests inside an organization and so much work to do that it’s easy to not let something happen.”

In March 2016 (three and a half years after Naama launched HelloFlo), SheKnows Media acquired the company, giving it a much larger home. Naama also got a new job title as Senior Vice President of Integrated Marketing for SheKnows. Six months earlier, Naama had landed a contract to write a nonfiction book about puberty. The week I spoke to Naama, she also told me how thrilled she was to be invited to the White House State of Women Summit. After years of packing tampons into boxes in a small shared office space and hustling for deals, Naama feels like she now has validation. Ironically, it’s not from the start-up tech world in which she initially imagined the roots of her business, but instead from old-line companies in traditional publishing and media that have given her a sense of internal worth. “I really felt rejected by the tech and venture community. I couldn’t raise money, and I felt like no one ever got me there. It felt like the establishment in the start-up world was never accepting of me, and I think I bought into that,” Naama says. “But all of a sudden the establishment in the book publishing world, and now the White House invitation and SheKnows, is acknowledging that I did do something sound. And I think, oh yeah, I did do something! It is worthwhile.”

Naama struggled to be understood by the tech community and raise capital for her business. After an initial fundraising hustle, she stopped trying. But not only did Naama pivot her business, she also reframed what her business was and what she wanted it to be. And when Naama did that, it started feeling more authentic to her. It made sense. She’s not getting invited to elite Silicon Valley events, but she’s going to a women’s conference at the White House. She’s been acquired by a women’s media company—a space in which she clearly belongs.

“At a certain point, I stopped defining my industry as start-up and tech because when I was defining myself as that I felt like I was failing,” Naama says. “I didn’t have a fast scaling start-up that raised a ton of money. Once I realized that I’m not a commerce company and I started saying, ‘I’m a women’s health company because I talk about women’s health, sell products around women’s health, and do education around women’s health,’ it started making a lot more sense to me, and it was more true to me.”

Naama realized she couldn’t shoehorn herself into a tech community that didn’t connect with her, and equally as important, she couldn’t relate to them. “The start-up world idolizes twenty-six-year-old boys who, granted, know how to build stuff, but that’s not my world,” Naama says. “I don’t want to say there is no room for women in that world or for forty-plus-year-old women, but it’s definitely less open to women and people over forty. I just realized, why I am competing in this level? I don’t want to compete with these people. They’re not my people. I also don’t want to run a business that doesn’t make money. What is so great about these start-up businesses if they don’t make money? Business should make money, that’s the whole point.”

HURRY UP AND SLOW DOWN

Three thousand miles across the country, Suze Yalof Schwartz wants to make money too. When she first opened her doors at Unplug Meditation in 2014, she gave away meditation classes for free—a flawed pricing model, she admits. But she’s come a long way. When I sit with Suze in a spartan, white concrete room in Santa Monica, California, next to her chic meditation studio, there is no need to give anything away. Down the hall, pink and violet lights bring calm to a packed room full of people practicing the wildly trendy art of meditation in Unplug’s signature class. Young moms sporting tats mingle with middle-aged men who will be putting on suits and heading to work after thirty minutes of organized mindfulness.

Suze, forty-seven and a mother of three boys, is dressed head to toe in black—still clinging to her New York City DNA, where she lived for twenty-one years. Even after three years in the land of kale and cutoffs, a February wardrobe still means black. Suze says she had a dreamy job in New York where she was an executive fashion editor for Glamour and before that worked for Vogue, ELLE, and Marie Claire. A media darling with a sparkling smile and infectious energy, Suze’s specialty was the makeover. She regularly appeared on Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, The View, and the Today show to work her magic. Suze did everything from transforming a rabbi into what she called “synagogue chic” to making everyday ladies more glam. A fashion editor, director, and stylist, Suze was touted as “the fairy godmother of makeovers” by the New York Times. And then on a whim (or more like a dare), her husband Marc, who always had a hankering to live in L.A., encouraged Suze to be adventurous and move West with him. He landed a new job and found the house and the school for the kids, and in August of 2012 they packed up and headed for the Left Coast.

For Suze, who had always worked full-time, the move left her unmoored. Life in the mommy bubble of kids’ activities, home decorating, and school stuff made her restless and bored. So she began commuting back and forth to New York, working for Lord & Taylor where she taped commercials that appeared in New York City taxicabs. With three young children at home, however, the bicoastal commuting took its toll. She was stressed and unhappy. Suze’s mother-in-law, a psychotherapist, recommended meditation. Suze was intrigued. But every type of meditation she found was expensive and inconvenient. She could either take a four-week trek to a Buddhist temple or commit to an eight-week series of sessions that cost more than a mortgage payment.

Suze realized that accessibility and affordability could transform a mindful and emotional experience that would benefit everyone. So Suze sought to reinvent meditation for the masses and give a makeover to a 2,500-year-old monastic practice. Tapping into what she saw as an emerging interest in mainstream meditation and her own desire to meditate, Suze envisioned a Drybar for meditation—a nod to the inexpensive blowout hair salons where you can walk in and, for a reasonable fee, leave feeling fabulous. She also wanted to model Unplug after the wildly popular SoulCycle spin studio business, based on drop-in classes with no monthly membership required. “Honestly, it started out as a selfish venture,” Suze says. “I knew that I needed meditation the most, and I couldn’t find any place that looked clean and smelled clean and where you could just conveniently drop in when you wanted to.”

Leaning on friends with business experience, Suze cobbled together a rough business plan. She didn’t have a business degree, but she had a deep bench of contacts and bartered her own skills for the help she needed. “I used my career as currency,” Suze says, explaining that she gave closet makeovers or media training to people who could help her, from a graphic designer to an accountant. “I was bartering with everybody. People would say, ‘How can I help you?’ People want to help their friends. When you have a friend who has a dream, you want to help her.”

Suze’s former life helped her in other ways too. She edited and curated every detail of the studio space, including the way classes would be run and how instructors would speak to the participants. She wanted to stay away from the “woo woo” stuff often associated with meditation and instead get straight to the point. The goal was to design a secular, inclusive, affordable version of meditation that resonated with the cool kids and even the guys in suits. At Unplug, there is no incense or sitting cross-legged required. People sit on comfortable sleek black chairs or lie on mats. Suze’s slogan is “Hurry Up and Slow Down.”

The Spiritual Entrepreneur

Today, Suze calls herself a “spiritual entrepreneur.” She still misses Fashion Week in New York but is thrilled by what she is building with Unplug. As it evolves, the business is becoming something that she had not predicted. “When I started Unplug, I kept thinking SoulCycle for chic, stressed-out mommies,” Suze says. “But it’s a really rich experience and so much more. It’s evolving into what is a really cool dinner party. You meet people who are not in your social circle. They’re from really different backgrounds and have really different stories, and that makes it so interesting.”

Since Suze opened Unplug, meditation studios have sprung up in New York City and other parts of the country. As someone who spent a career in fashion as a trend spotter and stylist, perhaps it’s no surprise that in Suze’s move into mediation, she would also be on the cusp of a trend. “I really do I feel like I was hired to be the PR director of meditation,” Suze says. “Did I start meditation? No, but I was the one who started the ad campaign for meditation. It’s amazing. It was nowhere and now it’s everywhere.”

Unplug has evolved since it opened its doors in 2014. It now has more than five thousand people coming each month to find focus, reenergize, and reduce stress, including mindful media mogul Arianna Huffington and new-age guru Deepak Chopra. Suze says that one of the smartest things she’s done is put a black lucite suggestion box on the front desk. It’s the old-school feedback approach, but fitting, given how her mindful meditation business is the antidote to our angsty modernity. Suze says she gets about fifty suggestions a week, from what types of classes to offer to how to make the bathrooms more Zen-like to cell phone policies. “I hear from my customers, which is better than any meeting we could have. They look at my website and give great feedback, and I think, because of them, we are what we are,” Suze says.

Suze is also surprised by how much of her former life in fashion has managed to creep into what she does today. She loves buying merchandise for the store portion of her studio and picking out every doorknob and fixture. She also sees the most unlikely parallels between the rhythm of fashion and meditation. “I’ve been surprised by how limitless this business is and how much it’s like fashion,” Suze says. “It changes every day and it never gets old. Meditation is always a surprise; it’s totally unpredictable—you will never have two meditations that are the same.”

Mindfulness as a Business Strategy

As Unplug expands, Suze sees new outlets and opportunities to bring meditation online and to corporate America. While the ancient root of meditation came from ascetics, not capitalists, Suze has found that the corporate world is gravitating toward mindfulness as a business strategy. Music mogul, entrepreneur, and yogi Russell Simmons is bullish on meditation and thinks everyone in Hollywood and business should practice the art of being centered and focused.³ At the Milken Institute’s Global Conference in 2016, Simmons said, “Money doesn’t make you happy, but happy makes you money.”⁴ Corporate America seems to be listening. Unplug has brought teachers to the Wharton school of business. They’ve held classes for McDonalds, Deutsche Bank, Chipotle, and the NFL.

“I’m not a thinker, I’m a doer,” Suze says. “I jumped in feet first and I didn’t think too much about how I would build this. I learned as I went along about what works and what doesn’t. I was a C student. I’m not a brain surgeon, but I have big ideas. When you really focus on the steps to achieve your goals, you can do it, and so what if you fail at first? You learn and adapt as you go.”

When your business is rooted in meditation, an added benefit is its residual byproducts of calm and focus. And for a woman who tends to be guided by instincts and passion rather than business strategy, Suze has found the perfect muse in her mediation business. “I’m calmer now. I can redirect my emotions from a more mindful place,” Suze says. “Before I make decisions now, my feelings are so crystal clear.”

TAKE ACTION: LET PASSION LEAD YOU FORWARD

Suze had no experience in business or expertise in meditation, but followed a passion and used her contacts and aesthetic sensibility to drive a vision forward. She spent time learning about meditation and talking to people about how they launched their businesses. She leaned on her contacts for both business help and for media attention. She tapped into her core talents and even bartered her skills of media training and style makeovers to get the help she needed to launch her business. She wasn’t afraid to act. She believes that all of us can pursue our dreams—we just need to act. “You can do two things at the same time,” Suze says. “You can work for your company and write your business plan. You don’t have to quit your job while you work on your big idea. Take the time to invest in yourself. Wake up an hour earlier and go to bed an hour later. We can all lose one hour of sleep. Just do it and stop talking about it. You don’t want to live your life looking back and saying, ‘I should have tried that.’ Make it happen.”

Naama didn’t want to look back and regret, either. She too acted and leaned into what she knew well, which for her was strong content and marketing savvy. She also iterated. She talked to potential customers. She even asked me what I thought about her business. Did she strike gold with her video? Absolutely. Having a viral video to launch a business is like winning the lottery. But her success came from taking a concept that had not been done before and speaking in an authentic way to an audience who was ready for it. The important first step for Naama was taking the initiative to leave her company to pursue an idea. “AmEx wasn’t working for me anymore, and I was banging my head against the wall,” Naama says. “You have to listen to those cues. If that feedback feels like it’s asking you to change who you are, listen to that and internalize it. Three years later, I release two viral videos and am on Ad Age’s ‘Creativity 50 List.’ You don’t always have to change; sometimes it means you need to change companies.”

Neither Naama nor Suze had expertise in the business arenas that they were launching, but both had a passion to take an untapped idea to the public. They both had to pivot their initial business ideas to grow. They had to adapt to their audiences. They used their contacts as currency to get noticed. For Naama, it was calling in all the favors she could to get that first video produced, largely for free. Suze used her media contacts to get stories written about Unplug. They both successfully tapped into their natural skillsets and applied them to growing their businesses.

They went all in.

Many women may not want to ask others for help or insight or even to barter like Suze does. But the sharing of resources may be exactly what you need to push your project forward and transform an idea into something real. “I have been a sharer,” says Suze. “I’m happy to give it all away, why hoard? Helping someone makes me feel good.” And all of that sharing has come back to Suze. When she needed it, people were there to help her. Amina Sow talks about sharing her network a part of who she is in chapter 3, and Suze operates in a similar way. The lessons from Naama and Suze are relevant to anyone launching a business, whether online or brick-and-mortar. Listen to your customers. Use the feedback to adapt and iterate what you’re selling. Lean on your contacts and barter resources. Leverage your own talents and skillsets, and remember that your strengths are transferable. And as we discussed in chapter 2, it’s about confidence—it’s the doing that leads you forward.