Kier was having a casual back-and-forth with her then-boyfriend-now-husband about what frustrated them as consumers, respectively, and her emphatic response was tampons.“You’re thinking to yourself, ‘I’m on top of most of my sh*t, but this always catches me by surprise’ and why? It’s the one predictable thing that I know is going to happen to me every month.” Nobody was talking about tampons two years ago, which is when Kier came up with the idea for 100% cotton tampons with complete ingredient transparency emerged. She was going to business school at Columbia when she came up with the idea for Lola, and from there, took “this weird detour in a passion that [she] didn’t even know she had.” As it is, there’s so little transparency in the general feminine care industry, so Kier chose 100% cotton as the material because cotton is a natural fiber that is easy to understand. Having casually mentioned the idea of a subscription-based tampon company at school, she was basically laughed out of class. So for her, taking tampons to a more transparent level was enough of a change, retaining what is already a familiar part of a woman’s life: the ubiquitous tampon.
“Starting, building, and growing a company, managing people” is not something Kier could do alone. “Honestly, having a co-founder is like having a spouse,” which is why Kier recommends “dating” your co-founders before marrying them. In other words, she suggests having a trial period like she did with her co-founder. The two spent a few non-committal months during their market research phase to learn about each other’s working styles and figure out whether they’d be compatible business partners. Once they realized they could trust each other, both emotionally and professionally, they got started.
Kier and her co-founder, Alexandra Friedman, raised over $1M in funding, which was more of a surprise to them than expected. Listen to find out how they were able to raise so much money so quickly and how they became the increasing success they are today.