S10E1: Using Transparency and Innovation to Transform Wellness with Katerina Schneider and Ritual

I was literally not meant to be an investment banker, but in some ways I think things are meant to be. It taught me to understand companies from the ground up and how they're built. Also a bit of confidence in going into a room with all men and having a voice in the room. And so it allowed me to pivot naturally into being closer to what I was intended to do.

Welcome back to Season 10 of The Room Podcast. Claudia, can you believe it's been 10 seasons?

Madison truly cannot believe it will be 4 years of The Room with you this year. I'm thrilled to be back behind the mic with you for Season 10. For all of our listeners since Season 1, you truly have been with us for some formative years.

If you're new here, Claudia and I started The Room Podcast with the mission of opening the door to the room where it happens. In turn sharing the stories from some of the world's most iconic founders and funders, all in an effort to inspire and educate the next generation of entrepreneurs. And thanks to you all, we were recently listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Media List for 2024.

So why us? We're two best friends who met as product managers in 2018, then realized as we were making career transitions into myself, founder, and Madison, funder, wanted to talk to the entrepreneurs that had built great companies. Since starting the podcast, I founded Pryve, a commerce payment startup, raised venture capital, and have faced a ton of challenges. Madison became a partner at Defy VC, was the first investor in my startup, and is now at Harvard Business School and is a pair VC scout, coming to the table with the fresh funder perspective.

Over the course of 9 seasons, we've had over 88 guests amassing over $50 billion in enterprise value. Ranging from conversations with the former founder and CEO of Zillow, Spencer Rascoff, to Michelle Zatlin, the founder of Cloudflare, Grammy Award-winning artist Ciara, and the creator of Next.js and CEO of Vercel, Guillermo Rauch.

Looking forward, as we continue to expand both online and offline, we are excited to announce the Room Podcast Summit in summer of 2024. The best way to stay in the loop is to subscribe to both the podcast and our newsletter. Which you can find at theroompodcast.com.

Before we dive into today's story, we have a few short messages from our sponsors.

Silicon Valley Bank, now a division of First Citizens, remains fully committed to serving founders, executives, and investors across the innovation ecosystem. As the largest banking team focused on technology, life sciences and healthcare, private equity, and venture capital, SVB is uniquely positioned to deliver specialized lending and financial solutions clients need to reach their ambitious goals. Find out more at svb.com.

Perkins Coie is a leading full-service international law firm known for providing high-value strategic solutions for startups and investors. Lawyers in Perkins Coie's emerging companies and venture capital practice support the most innovative entrepreneurs and investors in fast-moving and high-growth sectors across the country. While addressing the myriad of legal needs that arise when fundraising and scaling their business. The firm's tailored legal services are informed by an understanding of each client's discrete needs. To learn more about Perkins Coie, visit perkinscoie.com.

Welcome back to The Room Podcast for our 10th season launch. We are incredibly thrilled to kick off the season with our conversation with Katerina Scheider, founder and CEO of Ritual. Ritual was founded back in 2015 when Kat had an aha moment that revolutionized the supplement industry. When Kat was pregnant, she went deep to get rid of products with ingredients that were questionable, from deodorant to dish soap. When she realized that these questionable ingredients existed in the prenatal vitamins she was scouring for, she realized she couldn't find a brand that she trusted. And so she built her own. 9 years later, Ritual is a household name and is building the future of daily essentials with transparency first. In today's episode, we dive into Kat's journey and how Ritual's approach is reshaping the way we view vitamins and what we put into our bodies. Key topics in this episode include challenging traditional norms in an industry, the importance of transparency in wellness products, and a behind-the-scenes look at building products that reflect a commitment to consumers. We hope you enjoy the start of Season 10. Let's open the door.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat.

We love to start at the beginning with our guests. You and your family moved to the US as Soviet Union refugees when you were just 4 years old. Your mom went on to work on Wall Street and your father started his own business. Tell us, how has your upbringing shaped your view of the world?

I think my upbringing has had an incredible impact on how I view the world and also just my values. Growing up in Ukraine and then moving to the US as refugees was such a fundamental part of my life. And growing up, we moved to the US with $50 and a suitcase. And my dad became an entrepreneur and I saw firsthand what it was like to follow your dreams and succeed. And then on the other side, my mom barely knew English, went and got her MBA, and then ended up working on Wall Street, dragging me along everywhere she went. And just seeing that hustle, that grittiness, that perseverance, self-determination impacted how I saw the world, but also impacted the values and the culture that have ingrained into our organization.

In that vein of early identity, did you think you were always going to become a founder?

I always knew in my bones that I was going to start something at some point in my life. My dad was an entrepreneur, and then I actually ended up working as an investor, running a fund, partnering with Troy Carter, who was Lady Gaga's manager at the time, and he'd invested in over 70 companies, everything from Uber, Dropbox, Warby Parker, Spotify. And I just surrounded myself with these incredible founders and builders and entrepreneurs, and including my husband, who is a serial entrepreneur. And so I always knew that I loved that energy. I loved being surrounded by these individuals, and I knew that I was going to start something. I just never knew what it was going to be. and I knew that I was the one that was gonna have to start this company.

So you attended Brown and Columbia studying finance and math and ended up starting your career in investment banking. Tell us about these early days of your career.

I worked at investment banking. That was my first job out of college. I studied applied math and economics and really followed my parents' footsteps. They were both mathematicians and had multiple degrees in math and I just loved the idea of not just studying math, but solving problems. And that's what I took away from it. But when I graduated, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was actually in some ways a little bit more creative leaning. Like I went to Brown so I could take some classes at RISD. I was really fascinated by architecture and even jewelry making and eventually fashion. And so somehow I ended up in doing M&A at Lehman Brothers, which ended up being the biggest bank failure in history. And it taught me so much. It taught me how to work 100+ hours a week. It taught me to understand companies from the ground up and how they're built and how they're structured and their balance sheets, and also a bit of confidence in going into a room with all men, all older men, and having a voice in the room. And I was literally not meant to be an investment banker. And I think in a lot of ways the bank failure was horrific and it was an incredible tragedy and thing to witness and see people overleveraged and lose their wealth and, and careers and all of that. But in, in some ways I think things are meant to be. And for me, I was never meant to do that. And so it allowed me to pivot naturally into working in a startup, doing strategy and operations, and being closer to what I intended to do.

M&A, Lehman Brothers probably was not going to be your end state career-wise, and you mentioned moving more into the startup strategy space. You also worked in the music industry. How did you end up becoming the global lead of digital innovation at Universal Music Group?

The most important thing in your career is form really deep relationships. Relationships are everything. Every kind of pivot and move in my career trajectory and even becoming a founder was all based on relationships. And so I actually ended up working for the chairman and CEO of Universal Music, Lucienne Grant. She's still CEO. It was an interesting story because someone I worked with at Lehman Brothers, his wife recommended me for the job to be as chief of staff, right hand on strategy. I only had a background in math and more of this investment banking background, but he wanted someone with a little bit more of this analytical approach to come on his team and partner with him. And so it was really kind of a life-changing moment. Here I was in my mid-twenties and being part of one of the largest record companies in the world, being part of board meetings and shareholder meetings, flying all over the world, meeting artists, meeting CEOs of biggest media companies in the world, and ultimately helping bring Spotify to the US, which was one of the biggest deals that I worked on, convincing the board that Spotify wasn't actually gonna cannibalize digital revenue and it was gonna be incremental using analytical skills that I developed in investment banking and at university. Helped me do that. It was this once in a lifetime moment. And then it eventually became the global lead of digital innovation there, introducing technology companies and startups into the ecosystem of this record company.

Not only at such an early part of your career were you in the room with all these executives making these strategic decisions, but you're also working with startups and understanding how technology is shaping the legacy industry that you were operating in. That probably was a perfect foray into becoming a venture partner at Atom Factory, where you worked with Lady Gaga's former manager, Troy Carter, to spot companies straddling the entertainment and technology sectors. Tell us about the innovation ecosystem at this point in time and how your time on the investment side informed your next leap to founder.

I started to get to know Troy, who was Lady Gaga's manager at the time, and was thinking a lot about what is the future of the music industry and took a look at what he was doing from not just artist management, but creative agency to investment fund and building companies and incubating them. And I was just really blown away. I was like, wow, this is actually the future of the industry. It's not just record sales. It's this kind of 360 experience around the artist as a brand. And so I partnered with him and leading innovation there and then eventually helped to run his fund. He had a really big impact on me because the special sauce of a manager is really giving the artist confidence in a way and bolstering their self-worth and what they stand for in the world. And I think just being around that energy, being around Troy, really impacted my confidence. And hey, you know what, I think I could be a founder too. I, I know I always wanted to, but I had so much self-doubt and he was such a strong motivator and he was like, you can do this too. And I was surrounded by a lot of founders running the fund and I got pregnant. I was 4 months pregnant when I left and started Ritual because I couldn't find a prenatal vitamin that I trusted. And I knew that we deserved better. I knew that we deserved to know what we're putting in our bodies and why. And that was such a pivotal moment for me because I realized, hey, I'm the one to do this.

We've talked a lot about your path into Ritual and the experiences that built you into the founder that you've become and I'm excited to dive in more on this aha moment that was Ritual. I feel like we could spend a whole other podcast on living through the Lehman Bank failure, working at Universal, through the Spotify deal. I mean, so much richness there, so I don't wanna gloss over that too quickly, but we're gonna talk about Ritual and this moment that you're speaking to of looking for a product in market, assuming it exists, and saying, wait, where is this for women like me? So could you just walk us through. That moment of realizing there was a gap here in the market?

It was definitely a moment, but it was also a series of moments before where I had always been passionate about health and wellness. I grew up with a family that were not just self-motivated investment bankers and entrepreneurs, but these health-obsessed individuals. I would say my parents were like pioneers in the wellness industry in a way because they were such researchers and skeptics, but they were also just obsessed with different cultural mechanisms. So we grew up with a Norman Walker juicer. No one had ever heard of press juicing, but we were pressing our juice when I was really young. My mom was into Ayurveda early on, and then eventually she became a macrobiotic chef. My dad will literally spend a week trying to understand which water filter to purchase and so talk to like dozens of people and read hundreds of reviews. And so I kind of grew up in this health-obsessed world and wellness-obsessed world ahead of things becoming trends that was deep inside of me. And so when it was time for me to choose a prenatal vitamin for my pregnancy, I was a little shocked 'cause I actually didn't grow up taking vitamins. There were a lot of herbs and different things that made up our wellness toolkit, but supplements were taboo in my family, kind of snake oil. We didn't believe in them. And so here it was, I had to take a prenatal vitamin. And when I looked at the options out there, I saw everything from a lack of science to a lack of traceability and a lack of even ingredients that belonged in someone's body in this critical life stage. And so that's what led me to reimagine not just the prenatal, but really set new standards in the supplement industry because it was something that people were putting in their bodies every single day. And it wasn't even optional, it was necessary. It was quite interesting and magical, I would say, at the same time.

It's always funny to look back and say, oh, that experience as a kid, I thought it was normal, but now that I look back, that was really distinct. Having a POV on health and wellness from your parents and making that a part of your identity and then prompting you to ask critical questions about the prenatal vitamins you're gonna take. Of course, Ritual and the mission today, and was then, building a foundational health for women, a generation of women to come. Tell us a little bit more about that initial core customer. You speaking to your own self and what you were looking for in the market, how did you think about unlocking where else there were gaps and where you felt like you were uniquely positioned to solve them?

Take a bird's eye view in the industry. The category has exploded. It's gone from 4,000 to 90,000 supplements in the last 30 years. We kind of all know that wellness has exploded. But what we don't know is that there haven't been major updates to regulation. And so you have this explosion, but then the regulation is not necessarily keeping up. What's happened is consumers have had to become their own advocates for safety and efficacy, and that sucks. Thinking every single day, every product I pick up, is this safe? Is it effective? We don't believe that people have to choose and have to live with this mistrust of the category. And so that led us to this idea of traceability around traceable science and traceable sourcing. Let's not tell customers to take our word for it. Let's actually show them proof. And I think the best example of this is we actually launched a multivitamin for women 18+ as our first product. We didn't launch the prenatal. We wanted to earn her trust. And that product is such a great case study as our flagship product of how we're doing things differently in the category and now has a peer-reviewed and published human clinical study. With a leading university, has USP verification, which less than 1% of supplement companies have, and a leading certification on purity and potency. And we also have a patent on the delivery technology. So it's not enough that we know where our ingredients come from, but how are they delivered in the body? It's really rare to get IP in this category, but we did that. And so you think about it, it's this complete overhaul and reinvention of the supplement industry via this one product. And so we launched it, we waited several years, and then our customer was saying, hey, you know what? I really want you to create a prenatal. When is the prenatal coming? And we had earned her trust. And so we launched it shortly after. And now we have one of the leading prenatal vitamins in the US, number one across so many different channels. We recently launched in Amazon and Whole Foods and Target nationwide as well.

I mean, congratulations on those milestones. And we're really excited to touch on the growth Ritual's experienced since its inception. But I wanna go back to that first vitamin for a second. You're touching on the regulatory component and the average consumer might not know, and correct me if I have this wrong, but the FDA doesn't regulate supplements in the same way that it regulates other things we put into our body. Do I have that right?

The FDA does regulate supplements. The challenge is that we just believe that they should have more oversight. And the two areas in particular that we think about at Ritual that we would love the FDA to have more oversight and we've written letters to Congress and are part of our new advocacy roadmap are the term clinically studied and heavy metals. So there's no overarching definition of what the term clinically studied is and you have companies that are misusing that term and then they don't actually have clinical studies on the entire product and if they do, it's certain ingredients but not even the dosages that match those forms. So At Ritual, we actually have announced that we're gonna have human clinical studies on every single one of our products by 2030. This is not a requirement by the category. And then the second area, heavy metals. So there's actually no regulation around health protective measures when it comes to heavy metals. And I don't think companies are intending to put heavy metals in their products, but as a consumer, you have no idea at the levels. And there's nothing kind of protecting you in that way. And so when you think about plant-based protein industry, for instance, is notoriously high in heavy metals, which is why when we launched our plant-based protein, we actually list our heavy metal results on our site. So you can see the amount of lead, arsenic, mercury, all this stuff, which is shocking to people because inherently people believe that nothing has heavy metals in it, but our water has heavy metals. Everything has heavy metals. It's actually the amount that matters, and that's not something we think about day to day.

Thank you for that helpful backdrop. You're peeling back the layers of what's going on behind regulation as a top-level word. It's interesting, any consumer product can only be as efficient and as clean as the supply chain allows for and has that layer of transparency baked in. And so when you were going to launch these initial products, this initial vitamin, how did you guys think about building that supply chain and trusting your suppliers with your customers?

That's a great question. Our supply chain is everything. I think a funny anecdote story, when I was starting the company, I hired a scientist that had been in the industry for decades, and I asked him point blank, where are the skeletons buried in this industry? And that was so critical. It's great to be disruptive, but it's also so helpful to interact or bring on people that are seasoned and have this experience as long as they have a growth mindset. And are willing to change. And he certainly did. And he said to me, you know, I've wanted to use these ingredients and these specific suppliers that are more premium for so long 'cause they're more bioavailable forms and come from plant-based sources and are vegan ingredients like omega-3s from microalgae and D3 from wild-harvested lichen and methylated folate from Italy versus folic acid. A third of people have a genetic variation where they can't properly utilize Folic acid. So the forms really matter. And he hadn't been allowed to use them in formulations in the past at these really massive companies, mostly owned by pharma, because they were expensive and they were hitting a price point. What I said to him was, forget the price point. We're not targeting a price point right now. I want you to create the best product using the best ingredients and have rationale for that, obviously, and create something you'd want your wife to take. It sounds really simple right now, but that was the high-level brief for how we came up with the first product. And we sourced these ingredients from all over the world and really created the first traceable supply chain of its kind. And that's what we became known for in Stemming. You can go on our site and see where everything comes from in the world, down to the supplier information. There should be no secrets.

Your team was really an industry leader in this way about transparency of supply chain and ingredient management. And I think an interesting component to this is really how you all went to market through being a direct-to-consumer brand back in 2015 when these were still on the rise. It's a household name now, D2C, but at the time it was less so. And that identity of customer relationship that you had allowed for the delivery of this information around your supply chain. Walk us through that moment in time being an early mover in the direct-to-consumer healthcare space. And some of the lessons you learned through that process.

We would have not been able to sell our mission if we had launched in retail first. Being digitally native allowed us to go super deep on every level of information there was, from the traceability of our supply chain to the science to the sourcing of our packaging, and really earn that trust. At the time you would go to the shelf, there was no information, and, and people were confused, and there's only a limited amount of space that people can actually list anything about their product. So it hugely differentiated us. And I would say what's interesting now is we just continually move the ball forward on that level of traceability. We're never satisfied and we never stop. After having the first traceable supply chain of its kind, we then also created a certificate of traceability tool on our site where people can look up their products and see even a layer deeper of information. And then more recently, we were the first company in the category to even publicly list the carbon emissions by product. Other companies like Oatly and Allbirds are in that space as well, but it, it just shows you the level of depth that you can get to, I think, being a digitally native brand. And then it creates a halo when we eventually expanded omnichannel to wholesale. I am forever grateful that we are a digital company and that we have a team of incredible folks on the digital side and the tech side and engineers. And I think that's really what separates us. When I created Ritual, it was this idea of how do you elevate a routine to a habit, to a ritual, to something that people take every day. And I would say the digital experience plays a really big role into that habit formation.

Ritual is so much more than a vitamin company. It, as you said, is a habit, it's a lifestyle, and it's really unlocking potential for individuals and women, which is your target market, to be their best selves through health. And not only did the consumer recognize this, but so did the venture capital ecosystem. How you ended up growing Ritual was through raising from iconic investors such as Forerunner Founders Fund and Norwest. The founder journey is one with many steps, and fundraising is certainly a big part of it. We're curious, who was the first person to say yes to investing in you and Ritual?

So the first person was Bryan Zingerman at Founders Fund. Hey, Bryan. He's definitely an iconic investor and sat on a lot of incredible boards. And to his credit, I don't think he fully understood what I was doing. I don't think I fully understood what I was doing when I was pitching him. It was even a different name for a company, but he believed in me and he said that. He said, I know it's going to evolve. I just believe in you. And just go. And it was amazing is that they ended up leading several rounds later on. And I would say the other person that also invested in me early and in Ritual early was Lisa Wu from Norwest. And she saw us present at TechCrunch Disrupt, which is where we launched the company, and which is a guy I want to invest in, in the early seed, and then ended up leading I believe our Series B round, and we had a lot of early investors and we got lucky because they believed in the mission and they believed in what we're doing and they continued to invest in, in future rounds, making obviously fundraising a lot easier. At the same time, I would say I had a challenging time raising early on. I was actually pregnant and even having been an investor, I realized, wow, this is a lot harder to be on the other side. Than I ever imagined.

You know, as to, as a female founder, as a female investor, I think the building a business, thinking about motherhood is certainly top of mind, even if we're not quite there yet. Tell us a bit more about what it was like fundraising while raising a family as well. Any tips for others going through the same process?

It was quite challenging for me. This was 8-ish. Years ago. And part of it was there was no one to look up to, to say, hey, this person had several kids and they raised this money when they were pregnant and they built a billion-dollar company. There were very few role models like there are, I think, today. And there was nobody for me to really talk to. It was weird. And even at TechCrunch Disrupt, where we were finalists, is where we got our start. I had just given birth and I was pumping at the top of broken escalators and closets with wheelchairs in them. And there was no infrastructure set up for women in particular that wanted to have families and grow businesses, like grow humans and grow companies, you know, in a way. It was pretty shocking forging a path in a way for others. And that's how I saw it. And I, and same with the funding. I had investors say, hey, you can start a company or a family, but you can't do both. And I used it as fuel to motivate me and to show other women that, hey, I have 3 kids now and I have a company that crossed 9 figures several years ago and an amazing team at home and at the office. And it's possible to really just follow your dreams if that's what you want.

Well, thank you for being one of those role models that we can now look to. It's like really incredible what you've been able to accomplish, especially when it was really uncharted territory at the time. Zooming out a little bit, as a founder, the journey is certainly full of high highs and low lows. Could you share a little bit more about maybe a moment in Ritual's journey over the past few years where things just didn't quite go as planned?

Every day as a founder, there's high highs and low lows. There's obviously several moments. I do think it's a daily, like a daily practice of, you know, you finish your day and you're like, whoa, which has happened. That was crazy. And I think in some ways, having been an investor, I always think about that. I'm like, wow, that the highs are so much higher being a founder than an investor. And the lows are obviously so much lower because you feel like the weight is on your shoulders. I would say some of the lows in it that I've learned from is we've set such high standards on the product side as a company that I've had to kill several launches, whether it's our heavy metal standards or others. Those have been some of my lowest days or moments where we worked so hard on something that I really think is impactful to people's health, but maybe we've set the standards around protective measures on heavy metals and those products that, and we, you go through a pilot and you're ready to launch and, and the production doesn't come out quite right. You have to kill that product. And so those are the worst moments, but you also learn so much from them. And I learned obviously so much from them and set up stage gate processes in our company. We've hired— we have over 20 scientists in-house from academia and PhDs, and just how to scale and replicate what we've done on the multivitamin side to now the digestive health side, to sleep and beauty and skin health, and really build this platform for traceable wellness. I think if I hadn't had these falls and days where we have to kill— I have to throw out hundreds of thousands of products because they don't meet these crazy standards and amazing standards that we set. I would never learn from that and never understand how to scale this thing.

To your point, it's why having a mission and the North Star is so important to guide tough decisions where you might have to throw out hundreds of thousands of SKUs, but because you have this guiding light, it really helps you stick to your principles as you scale. I'd love to dig a little bit deeper into scaling. You mentioned how being digitally native and starting as a direct-to-consumer company allowed you to go deeper with your consumer, build that level of trust, educate your consumers around your supply chain. But of course, omnichannel is something that is coming up more and more as businesses need to differentiate beyond just a direct-to-consumer storefront. Tell us a little bit more about this decision to become omnichannel, move into retail, build wholesale relationships. What was maybe the first kind of foray into retail for you guys?

Yeah, so we'd built this profitable direct-to-consumer business, which I think is a foundation. A lot of times companies will build the digital business and it's not profitable and they're banking on something else to unlock that level of profitability. That was really key to us to prove that out and we decided to go omnichannel because we wanted to be where our customers were. And now we are reaching so many more customers than ever before and unlock our mission in more ways. So our first foray into retail was really strategic and methodical, just like our product launches. Our first step was actually going into Whole Foods is an advise channel. And so what that means is that people selling the products on the shelves in the aisles actually have a level of depth and information and understanding around the products in that aisle. And that was so important for us because here we had this digital platform that went so deep. And then how do you have somebody then go on shelf and you have limited space on the unit carton? How do you have someone actually educate the consumer on that? And that's been hugely successful for us and I think has had a big impact on our success in that channel where we're leading in so many categories, and they've been an incredible partner because of that. The next move for us was at Target, which is a mass channel, and our consumer shops there, and we wanted to be there. And I think our missions aligned and we got Target Zero and Target Clean. That was another important milestone for us, launching in Target nationwide with our prenatal and our multivitamin. And that also has been a huge success because it was unusual for a product that was more premium that had higher quality ingredients to be in mass retail. And we are basically proving out something more than just launching a product, that the consumer wanted higher quality, more premium products on shelves. And that's proving out to be true.

Well, excited to see the yellow branding and bottles in the local Target. But certainly, even though you are expanding to retail to meet customers where you are, direct-to-consumer is obviously still such a core piece of Virtuall's brand and presence. I think it's not a secret that direct-to-consumer has been a little bit more turbulent over the past year, especially from my POV building in the e-commerce enablement side of things. There has been so much innovation on the tech stack enabling brands to target more effectively, optimize your revenue better, communicate with our customers in ways that feel natural. Kat, tell us a little bit more about Ritual's tech stack.

Yes. So I'm probably the wrong person to speak very technically, but, uh, president is probably better at it than I am. What's interesting is more on the prenatal side. I think one thing that we say a lot is that we're not just selling transparent products, we're selling transparent information. That couldn't be even closer to the truth than it applies to our prenatal audience. And one thing that we've been able to do is actually capture their journey through pregnancy. Our customers list whether they're trying to conceive, they're not trying, they're pregnant, and they're postpartum. And that really helps us serve better content. It helps us serve better products. And another thing that I think about is we don't just launch products, we try to change culture. And with our pregnancy product, we really had a big impact. We saw that half of pregnancies were unplanned, and yet people were only taking a prenatal after they were pregnant, not before. And the first 28 days is when the neural tube forms. And we launched this messaging of thinking, trying when it's time, really emphasizing the need for prenatal nutrition before you are pregnant. And what we've seen and we've been able to capture with our data is that over 50% of our customers are actually in that pre-pregnancy phase, and we're really able to impact culture by understanding our consumers. I think the other thing that really excites me about our technology capabilities is just thinking about our subscriber base, which we have hundreds of thousands of, as our think tank for how we think about launching new products, how we think about evolving our products, and how we think about making things better. That's become hugely impactful and an interesting thing, especially when we've gone omnichannel. You think of how do those two worlds play into each other. And so in the last year, we launched our Symbiotic Plus product, which is a pre-pro, postbiotic in one single capsule. A big part of that was inspired by this think tank. When we surveyed our customers, over 90% of them wanted a product in the digestive health space. But what happens after we launched? We then surveyed them and created a 97-page report post-launch where we could understand, was the messaging working? How do we evolve the product experience and the overall experience better to serve their needs? And so I think those types of touchpoints are things that I'm really excited about to go further. On not just in '23 but '24. Like, how do we go deeper with our reproductive health and pregnancy audiences? How do we really use technology in a way to really further our roadmap? And that has a bigger impact not just on digital but then also physical shelf.

We spoke a little bit about your unique journey becoming a D2C founder and building your brand and building this business that has now scaled beyond just the D2C label. But if I'm a founder today and I'm thinking of launching a brand or CPG product, the landscape just looks incredibly different. And some people think about not just starting first with D2C, but starting first at the omnichannel level or thinking through how to market today with channels like TikTok. Just curious if you look back and look forward simultaneously around the lessons you've learned, what would you tell a CPG founder today to think about?

I would say to think about connecting emotionally with your consumer. I think that is a key. In our category, we saw that people didn't have trust in the category. We could be the most scientifically sound brand in the world, which I think we are, uh, the most traceable brand and have this solid foundation. But if we don't connect emotionally, you don't go very far. And especially the way that media is today, it's so fast that connecting emotionally is everything. And, and it's also why I just mentioned, but We don't think about launching products, we think about shaping culture, and that becomes key to everything that we do and creating almost mini movements around everything that we do. A good example of this is our campaign around trying to conceive. When we surveyed our think tank and, and customer base, we saw that 70% of them were having kind of a challenging time in their conception journeys, whether it was miscarriages or unforeseen challenges. And yet only 4% felt seen or heard in media. And we're like, wow, this is so interesting. I think pregnancy has gotten a bit of coverage and postpartum has, thank God, but trying to conceive has not. And people didn't feel represented during this really trying life stage. And we launched this campaign called For the Real Bodybuilders and we showed what it was actually like for so many people trying to conceive from IVF and the shots to miscarriages and everything in between. And people said that they felt seen and heard for the first time. And it was this powerful moment to really connect with people emotionally, like, hey, we're not just selling products for pre-pregnancy, but we want you to feel seen and heard through marketing. And I think that's really key, right?

It's not just a pre-pregnancy product. There's just so much else that goes into that umbrella of care. And hearing you say some of the challenges that women face, I mean, I have chills. I think Caught in our entry into the season of life where our friends are really starting to think about fertility meaningfully, whether they're hoping to be moms in the future or hoping to be moms in the next 9 months. And just touching on that experience is such a unique one as women and something that businesses have historically sometimes overlooked, maybe because there's not enough women building these types of products for other women. So it's really impactful to get to hear about how your own fertility journey informed what was and what is Ritual, and now how you're pushing the envelope forward to really think through what's next in this space of healthcare for women. So thank you so much for touching on all these components of building a business and the story of being a founder. We'll wrap up here with our hero question that we ask every founder on the pod, and a little bit on the nose today given some of the topics we've discussed, but We're curious, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

The reason is my mom is— she also had cancer, and having been on that kind of wellness journey with her, she's a survivor, but it had a big impact on me starting Ritual and how I think about health and how I think about how I want to live my life. She has always been like a career woman, but also just such an incredible present mom and best friend in a way. That's how I want to be for my 3 girls. The other one is probably some of the women on our executive team. One thing that I've learned super early on is just hire people that are smarter and more experienced than you are. And from day one, that's something that I've done. And our president, who is such a yin to my yang in a way and runs more of the operations and finance, the technical side of our business. Has just been a real true partner over the last really like weeks before we launched the product. And I've learned so much from her to our Chief Impact Officer, who was a former head of mission at Beautycounter and is really pushing legislation in clean beauty and industrial space forward. Learned so much from her and continue to, to our Chief People Officer, who was the Chief People Officer at Sweetgreen and Apple for 10 years. There's just like so many incredible women on our executive team that, I don't know, I continually learn from and, and they're just like great people. They're great mothers. They're super inspiring and I feel super lucky that I get to be around them as I'm also learning how to be a CEO. This is my first time being a CEO of a company, obviously that scale. And so it's been really exciting to learn from these kind of seasoned women around me.

Well, what a C-suite. We should have invited all of them onto the podcast today. Perhaps we'll have to run that back at some point. But you're speaking to the true power of partnerships amongst all people, but also with women. And I know Claudia and I have really benefited from this partnership. It's just really fun to see that thriving in other businesses. So thank you so much, Kat, for coming on today to tell a little about your story, Rituals, and the future of healthcare for women through Rituals platform. It's been a really fun conversation.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode, an inspirational guest. Tuesday, 10:00 AM Eastern, 7:00 AM Pacific. See you in the room.

Silicon Valley Bank, now a division of First Citizens, remains fully committed to serving founders, executives, and investors across the innovation ecosystem. System. As the largest banking team focused on technology, life sciences and healthcare, private equity, and venture capital, SVB is uniquely positioned to deliver specialized lending and financial solutions clients need to reach their ambitious goals. Find out more at svb.com.

Perkins Coie supports the most innovative entrepreneurs and investors in fast-moving and high-growth sectors, addressing their myriad of legal needs. But the firm doesn't just provide end-to-end legal and business counseling to its startup clients. It also facilitates introductions to key advisors and sources of capital. Perkins Coie's interactive website, Startup Percolator, offers access to programs, resources, and rich dynamic content designed to assist entrepreneurs on their startup journey. To learn more about Perkins Coie, go to startuppercolator.com and perkinscoie.com.