S6E4: Sarah LaFleur, Founder of M.M.LaFleur, is Leading an Evolution of the Modern Women's Work Wear

Welcome to The Room Podcast. I'm Claudia Laurie, co-CEO and founder of Pryve.

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Welcome back to another episode of The Room Podcast. We are so excited to share another inspiring conversation with the founder of one of our favorite brands, MM LaFleur. Today we sit down with Sarah LaFleur of MM LaFleur. MM LaFleur is a fast-growing professional womenswear company that aims to be the go-to wardrobe solution for modern women. By delivering luxury quality clothing via seamless direct-to-consumer experience. Sarah, having been a professional woman throughout her career, would get frustrated by the lack of comfortable, easy-to-wear, yet stylish choices of clothing that she would wear as a former consultant on the job. Coming to the fashion industry from a very different background, she decided to found MM LaFleur to disrupt and design clothes for women like herself, and frankly, many many of us. Over 11 years later, M.M. LaFleur continues to pave the way for stylish professional women everywhere. On today's episode, we discuss how Sarah's early professional experiences provided a unique point of view for her to disrupt a very age-old industry, the fall of business formal, and the opportunity that has opened up in the apparel market. And finally, the future of D2C from both the brand and consumer perspective. Let's open the door.

Sarah, thank you so much for being with us in the room today.

Of course. Thank you for having me in the room.

We'd love to start at the beginning before we dig into everything that you're doing with Lafleur and the future there. You went to Harvard for undergrad, go Crimson, and went into consulting at Bain and then Technoserve in South Africa. Tell us about these early career years right after college and what you really took away from them.

I would say that my professional identity or trying to find my professional identity was incredibly important to me. So much so that I would say not much else mattered. Of course, like I had family that I loved, friends that I care about deeply. I had a boyfriend then who is now my husband, but I would say back then we would both say that we were dating. Casually is not quite the right word, but we were not each other's priority. The 20s were like all about, I was really just trying to to find myself professionally. And I thought I wanted to go into the humanitarian sector. So that was a longstanding dream of mine since being in high school. I had the chance to go volunteer at a refugee camp in Zambia between junior and senior year. And that really cemented that was an area that I felt very passionately about, but I also realized how little I knew about the world. It was also a really hard summer for obvious reasons, witnessing people who are living in desperate poverty. And it was a real slap in the face. To the face, if you're gonna be in this industry, you better go actually learn something skillful so you have something to contribute when you come back to this place. I went into this manic tailspin of not knowing what to do with my life next. In walks a bunch of management consulting firms and investment banks, and I was pretty clear from the get-go, I, I did not wanna go down the banking route, but Bain came along and I somehow managed to land a job there. And they said, okay, if you're interested in international development or in the humanitarian sector, you should come work for us. We're going to teach you all the basic skills that you need to learn about business, and then we're going to set you off into the world and you can go do whatever you want. And it turns out there was like some truth to that. Of course, in retrospect, I'm not sure that that was the path. If you really want to go into the humanitarian sector, that is like the path that makes the most sense. But they were absolutely right in the sense that they taught me a ton. About being just like a responsible, mature business professional. And I still am embarrassed about how bad I was, like what a bad college intern I was, because I was always huffing and puffing, being like, "Why don't they let me do more interesting things or important things?" But when I was at Bain, I really realized how little I knew. And it was like 3 years of training, being trained on the job every single day. And then coming out of Bain, I knew I didn't want to become like a partner at Bain. So I knew I wanted to leave after my 3 years. It was through Bain that I ended up going back to South Africa through their Secondment program and working for an incredible nonprofit that operates worldwide, but they had a presence in Johannesburg called Technoserve, working with people who were trying to start farms and agricultural businesses down in South Africa. And that was my second try at the nonprofit sector in international development. And to make a long story very short, after a year of doing that, I actually came to the conclusion that is not the sector I wanted to be in. I missed a lot of the fast-paced environment that I had gotten used to being at Bain and being in New York. And I liked a lot of the culture of business. Nonprofit is its own beast that's different from business, requires a whole set of skills and aptitudes that I felt like I didn't naturally have. And the strange thing is I never thought of myself as a business person, but that was the moment where I was like, maybe I'm not a business person, but I like the business environment much better. I like working towards numbers.

I like having clear-cut goals.

and I like seeing results in financials. And even though I, I think of myself as right down the middle, right brain, left brain, I felt like there was a part of me that was like, okay, I feel the business side of me calling. So I ended up leaving South Africa, coming back to New York, and joining a private equity firm for a very brief period of time. And that was before I started MM.

It seems like you've had this kind of the moment of realizing what it is that I love, where do I want to flex more, You come back into New York and you start working in the luxury goods group of the private equity firm that you're mentioning. So you start to get exposed to New York, the world of fashion and retail. Before we dig a little bit deeper into the moment where you say, I want to become a founder, I want to start MM, what was the fashion industry like at that time? And how did your experiences prime you for becoming the founder of MM LaFleur?

I should start by saying I had never worked a day in fashion. And even though I had worked at Bain in New York, and so people think, oh my gosh, you must have been on all these retail cases. I was like, no, not at all. I was on like insurance cases 90% of the time I was there. It was not even remotely close to retail. My mother worked in high-end fashion while I was a child. And honestly, that's the closest I had ever been to fashion. I never even thought I was interested in fashion and it didn't feel like I wanted to be a fashion person and therefore I was starting this business. It was very much, okay, I see a problem with the way the market is as a consumer. Therefore, let me see if I can try to address it. And the category just happened to be fashion. But I will say some of the things that I was really trying to solve for are things that a lot of other people were also trying to solve for. So there has been a lot of shifts in the fashion industry. And just to give you an example, one of the things that I was really focused on when I started is fabrics being easier to care for. And what I mean by that is machine washable or wrinkle resistant. I hated having to take out my ironing board every morning in order to go to the office, I was like, "Oh, I'll wear this shirt. Oh shoot, it has 20 wrinkles in it. I can't wear it. Okay, next shirt." And then, "Oh shoot, it's in the dry cleaning pile because I can't wash it at home." And frankly, once it's in the dry cleaning pile, I'm not going to see it for another couple months. I remember the first time I went to meet with a fabric mill with my co-founder and my chief creative officer, Miyako, and I asked him, "Which of these fabrics is machine washable?" And he looked at me like I was crazy, like I had 4 eyeballs. And he was like, "Are you crazy? Nobody asks that question. I'm going to have to get back to you. I don't know what you're talking about." Like this idea of really thinking about the consumer's life and the life she's leading was not at all a centerpiece of fashion. A lot of that is changing. There are a lot more founders now and a lot more businesses that are more focused on how clothing actually carries people through the day. Also, this idea of not selling through a department store or not being a PR darling. I remember I brought a black dress and I was meeting with this editor, I want to say from InStyle or Marie Claire. Madame Claire. But I remember we sat down for lunch and she looked at one of my dresses and she was like, it's just a boring black dress. And I was so crushed. I remember feeling devastated when she said that to me. Now I understand, like, from a magazine editor's point of view, right? They're always like putting the sparkly dresses, the heavy print, loud colors. The black dress, frankly, is just not something that stands out on a page. But I felt like she overlooked all of the ingenuity that went into that dress, which is the details, like it had pockets, right? It was machine washable. You could just take it out of the machine, hang dry it. You didn't have to iron it. The way Miyako crafted it, Miyako's background, just by way of introduction. So she was the head designer at Zac Posen. She had spent over 10 years in the luxury fashion world, right? Like designing ball gowns for the Oscars. But she brought a lot of that craftsmanship to the clothing she was making. So she always talked about designing in 3D rather than in 2D. And this is like a small detail, but most dresses have just two seams down the side, but often she would create two side panels. So you would actually have four seams. And so it was designed for a 3D, like an actual body as opposed to a piece of paper. And all of that creativity that went into our clothing, like I felt like the fashion world didn't get. And when we went to department stores, we couldn't even get a meeting with a department store, frankly. And so we had no choice but actually to just go directly to the customer. So now direct-to-consumer, obviously like such a big deal, but back then it was relatively nascent. And I would say that's another way in which the fashion world, I think, has changed a lot. This direct-to-consumer just not being a thing back then in a way that it is now.

I'm hearing a true story of disruption, and oftentimes it comes from founders or folks with a perspective that isn't mainstream. And you came with a perspective that wasn't mainstream for fashion at the time, really coming from a problem-solution-oriented Hey, I am the end user. What would I want to wear? What would work at 7 AM on like a Monday morning as I'm running out the door to go to work? And so I would love to hone in a little bit more on that moment where you decided to take the leap to become a founder and start MM LaFleur. We've had a few retail disruptors on the podcast, like Coral Chung of SinRev, who had a very similar perspective.

Yeah, totally. Coral is also like, she also worked at Bain. We just made that connection and we were all also in the same year, so it's weird that we hadn't met before, but there's like a certain— I'm just speaking for myself, but like this idea that I'm a consultant, I can solve anything, which of course is totally not true. Maybe we've got a lot of confidence in ourselves.

So just a different perspective and very much a problem-solving mindset. And so would love to just hear about your decision to solve this problem that you saw.

A lot of excess confidence potentially, but I just, I was like, how hard could it be? It's a dress. I remember I started taking sewing classes. It turns out sewing is incredibly difficult and every garment is hand-sewn. Sewn. That's kind of something that still probably shocks people's minds because everything in this day and age feels machine-made. But like, every garment is sewn by hand. An expert sewer could sew a dress in 4 hours, but it still takes 4 hours to sew a dress. But anyway, I remember taking sewing classes and I was like, ah, so many people have done this, how hard could it be? It turns out it's incredibly difficult. But I really came at it from the perspective of what am I missing in my life? These are the clothes that I want. To make it easier for me to get out of the house every morning feeling really good about myself. A lot of what we talk about is that Superman, Superwoman moment. You could be feeling like total crap, but as soon as you put on this killer outfit that you look amazing in and you get yourself ready, how can you not feel like a million bucks? My mother calls it the power of costume. She says, "Why does a doctor wear a white coat?" It's not because white coat is practical. It's because when you throw on the white coat, everyone looks at you and pays attention to you and listens to you. That is the power of costume. Of costume. So clothing often gets talked about as something quite trivial, but we underestimate the power of what clothing can do for a person, not just in how they want to be perceived, but how they feel about themselves that day. So that's the attitude with which I approached this. I had a lot of self-confidence about how hard could it be, but I knew from the very beginning that I didn't want to be a designer. And I really wanted my partner, my right hand, to be the person who actually knew clothing, who actually understood apparel and good construction and good fabrics. And that is why I ended up partnering with Miyako, who I met through a headhunter. She's Japanese, I'm half Japanese, so a lot of people think we met through this Japan connection, but we met through a headhunter. It's honestly like the best $2,000 I ever spent.

There's so many layers to this proverbial onion of the story of Emblem Le Fleur and your path to starting this company. I just wanna acknowledge a few things you said. One, I don't think there's such thing as overconfidence in being a founder. Maybe rarely there is, but men walk into many rooms with way too much confidence. Confidence and no idea, and that really works, but they don't apologize for it. So please don't apologize for being overconfident and what you've really been able to revolutionize, which is the modern woman workwear. And the synergy I see between your experience and Coral's experience, and as Claudia alluded to a few of our other guests, is really having this optimization hat on to say, there's only 24 hours in a day. I wanna look professional. I wanna look put together. All this other stuff isn't worth my time. I know that I can optimize this better. And you stepped into that for businesswomen everywhere and said, you're welcome, ladies. I'm optimizing your life.

Thank you. I, you know, it's so funny. I feel like I'm supposed to be a Type A, but I'm definitely a Type B. Like, I'm just all over the place at all times. And optimizing is like a really lovely way to put what it is that I'm doing in the morning, which is just like, oh my God, I don't know where the hour went and I literally have 10 minutes to get out the door and what am I gonna do? I mean, I can get ready for a Zoom meeting, give me 2 minutes, I can get it done. But a lot of that, I have my clothes to thank. I have a few things that I'm like, I know if I put this blazer on, I look pretty presentable. These are the tools in my toolkit. I pull them out and it makes me feel like, okay, I got this. I can get through the day. And you talk about workwear, but I think so much of it has evolved in the past 2 years. The way people are dressing has changed so much. What Miyako is really focused on right now is like stretch and comfort and everything. So I've got 3 little kids at home. I've got a huge dog at home. Like when I get home, I just need to be ready to like rough and tumble and like get them into bath time. And so what are the clothes that actually like stretch with me and stay with me? And I don't feel like I need to change out of my outfit, my work outfit every time I get home. We want to make it easy for you. We want you to have— be able to just wear one outfit and not worry about the rest.

And we're excited to touch on that evolution of the modern woman's workwear that has transcended from the last decade in which you started this company through to today and the global pandemic, which has even probably further accelerated our need for comfort. But our listeners who want to be in the room with you as you were having these aha moments about literal product market fit, Could you walk us through some of those early supply chain processes of iterating and designing one of those first garments that really was built in mind for the modern American woman?

For us, product market fit was even more challenging. Every product market fit is challenging, don't get me wrong, but we had two product market fits to solve for, and one was the product part and one was the how do we sell it part. That's actually true of most products, right? It doesn't matter how great your product is. And actually, I don't think I've told this story before, but in the very, very early days, I was in a pitch meeting and we decided to pitch this VC and they were based in Boston, but they said, don't worry, we're borrowing offices in New York, so come meet us there. And so we get there and we get to this building and on the ground floor is A Theory, which to us, frankly, we were seeing that we were eyeing Theory as the competition and the brand to beat. And we were like, huh, this is interesting. We're pitching above a Theory building. And it turns out we actually walked in and the meeting was gonna be inside the Theory offices. Was it the Ganzivort?

The Ganzivort office there?

Yes, exactly.

I interned at that office in 2012.

Oh, you're kidding. That's so funny. So we walked in and we're pitching this VC and we feel super awkward. We have slides up there that's saying, this is what the market landscape looks like and Theory is like the one to beat and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I remember Andrew Rosen walked by and it's a glass conference room. So the VC calls out to Andrew and he says, "Hey Andrew, come take a look at their clothes." And he comes over and he like touches the fabric and he looks at it and he says, "It's fine." Or it's a good nod. "It doesn't really matter what I think. All that matters is how you sell it." And he walked out the door and I really did not understand what he meant. It took me a couple of years to understand what he really meant, but he was absolutely right because the short of it is we launched with a line of 7 dresses and we sold them initially through trunk shows. We didn't have the money to launch an e-commerce site again. So we were like, okay, we don't have enough money to fundraise to go start a website. Let's go create the product first, the physical product first. And when we were selling them through trunk shows, they did incredibly well. And so we were like, oh my gosh, this thing is going to be so easy. We're going to make so much money. Now we're going to launch it online and everyone's going to come buy it. And of course, that's not at all what happened. And we launched the site and it was crickets. We like could not make any money. And ultimately the way the business started to grow, Claudia, very relevant to a lot of what you're doing, was we created the service that we called Benta, where we emailed a bunch of our customers because we could not move inventory to save our lives. And inventory for any retailer is the kiss of death, right? You have too much, you lose. You have too little, you lose. So we were like, we had too much, we didn't know how to move it. And so we emailed our customers saying, hey, and when I say customers, it was like a very short list of women who had bought from us to us through trunk shows saying, "Hey, would you be willing to let us send you a box of dresses and you can keep whatever you like, you can return whatever you don't like, but just would you be willing to give it a try?" We had some confidence that if she put it on herself again, she would keep it. And we launched that initially, this program with those customers who had shopped from us before. And then we launched that program with customers who were lurking on our mailing list, lurking on our newsletter, had never shopped with us before. Through that, we basically made more money in that one week than we ever had up until then. And that was like that ding-ding light bulb moment, that Andrew Rosen moment, if you will, where it was the same product, right? We were selling it online for the exact same price, exact same branding. The product is exactly the same. But as soon as we like shifted it over to this model, suddenly customers were like willing to purchase and our revenue grew 8x over one year. I don't wanna say the product part was easy. It wasn't easy at all. It took us a year. It took us one whole year just to design 7 dresses that we felt really good about. To say like the, the physical product, it's not as though designing that wasn't difficult, but it took us even longer to figure out how to sell it. And that really was one of the hardest parts about starting MM. Not knowing you have this great product, you just suddenly don't really know how to sell it anymore.

The distribution unlock is something that we've absolutely spoken about here before. I know it's something that Claudia is experiencing in real time with her early days of selling her product. And it's really encouraging to hear that subscriptions ended up being one of those key unlocks for you, bringing together the digital-first moments that also intersect in the physical world. And just to orient our listeners around this time period, which many of our listeners are under the age of 30, so hard to remember a time before we were shopping for everything online, but in that era of 2012, 2013, Theory's largest retail store was that store in Gansvoort, and e-commerce was number 2. That shift was happening in real time while you were sitting there telling investors about what you were building. So naturally you faced some resistance, but you've both successfully raised venture capital and built what is now an incredibly successful consumer brand. With that story you shared about some of those early investor convos, would you maybe just take a step back and share a bit about your learned experience there and what advice you would give to founders who are looking to raise today in retail and e-commerce spaces.

I will first start by saying, if it feels hard, it's because it is incredibly hard. I have been told that it has gotten easier, but I'm like, okay, so it got from like impossible to very hard. It's still very hard.

What tips and tricks would you have to any founder today who might also be thinking, I'm I'm gonna disrupt retail and e-commerce.

I hope you do. It's one of those things that constantly needs disruption. Retail is like far from being done being brought into the digital age. There's a certain element in early stage fundraising where you're required to put your biggest dream out there unabashedly, and you feel a little bit embarrassed saying what you're saying. And if you're embarrassed, then that's like probably the right amount. At some point, hopefully you've rehearsed it enough that you're not embarrassed anymore. And then all you're projecting is total confidence about the way the future should be. But if you're not a little bit embarrassed about what you're pitching, then you're probably not thinking big enough, at least for the venture world. And I'm not saying venture is everything. Like I think there are a lot of amazing consumer businesses that built without venture funding, which is maybe like a separate conversation we should be having. But for your idea to be like, to fit the venture model, which is we expect 1 in 10 things to be the thing that carries the entire fund and the 9 other things to blow up, then it has to be that big a dream. And it takes nerves pitching that dream. So that's my piece of advice. I would also say maybe on the flip side of that, all money is green. I truly believe that, and I don't believe that venture money is the only money out there. This idea that like you, you wanna get money from certain VCs but not others is highly overrated. The person of course matters a lot. The individual VC matters a lot, and your chemistry with them and whether or not you share the same values and whether or not you feel like you're gonna be good long-time working partners, that matters a lot. but there's this like weird obsession with certain VCs. The funnel's already so small, you don't need to like narrow it even further. And I, I have found that actually a lot of my most supportive investors have come from the weirdest, most bizarre corners of the world. Don't be so fixated on this idea that you have to go raise money from a top-tier venture firm.

It's really helpful and sobering advice for many of our listeners where ultimately it's about about the people that you're working with, you know, as you're building a business. It's not about a, like a badge of honor that you're flashing around, cuz ultimately that doesn't build a business.

And, and Claudia, that's a really good point. We've raised a good amount of funding, but one of the reasons we never announced it is because I felt like, A, I didn't want that to be the thing we were celebrating. It was the business that you were gonna go build together, hopefully that would result in a celebration. That's one thing. And then the other thing is you've just given up ownership, right, of your company. It's not always a good outcome. For the, the founders or the owners. There used to be this weird trend. I don't see it as much anymore, but it was like every day Business Insider would be like, X company raises X million in funding. That was the news, as though that was like the thing that should be lauded. But I just, I think it puts the focus on the wrong thing.

That makes a lot of sense. And speaking of new startups that are getting made every day, new rounds of funding, kind of the future. I would love to dig a little bit more into the future of the space that you are disrupting. M&M's Le Fur has an omnichannel strategy. You mentioned that 95% of your sales comes from e-commerce, so you are a digitally native brand, but you also have a bit of an in-person experience in store. After the pandemic, there's been a lot of discussion around what the future of retail looks like, and I would love to get your take on what is what is the Storefront 3.0? Where do you see the future of selling directly into consumer is?

I can only answer this question by saying what it is that I'm looking for, which is I'm looking right now for joy because I think there is so little of it right now in our world. Even though our clothes, they're meant to help you carry out a purpose, right? Our tagline is live with purpose, dress with ease. Clothing at the end of the day should be a joyful thing, and therefore the retail experience surrounding it should also be a joyful thing. Beautiful thing. So we had 7 stores, we closed all of them during the pandemic. We've now opened back up 3 of them and hopefully we'll open several more this year. What a lot of our customers can do when they book an appointment with us, you can also walk in, but a lot of our customers book an appointment at our showroom and you are working one-on-one with a stylist. She welcomes you with a glass of champagne and she works with you for an hour saying, here's the best look that I could put together for you. Tell me all your needs. I want this to become the most painless shopping experience of your life. And hopefully you walk away with a lot of items that you're going to treasure for a really long time. We try to bring a lot of joy to that experience, like just make it a really relaxing hour, but hopefully also a fun one. I'm trying to move the brand in a much more joyous direction because I think that is what the world is missing right now and what people are looking for from us.

I'm certainly looking for that. And definitely I really do think about if I'm going to make the effort now in SF where downtown is a ghost town still, frankly, but that's where a lot of the good shopping is. You do want that experience. We want to go for lunch. We want to be able to sit down and grab a matcha or get our nails done and go shopping. Integrating the experiential moments alongside the consumerism is something that I love and is hopefully going to be a continued integrated part of our shopping experiences for years to come. You touched a bit on your own identity as both a woman and as a mother. You're a mom of 3, and you've been quite vocal about your fertility journey, which we appreciate as young women who are asking questions like, should we be freezing our eggs? How do we think about that as we get older? And it's just not a topic that's talked enough about in the probably general work world, but specifically in, in the startup and founder world. So first of all, thank you for being open to chatting about this topic. And we just love to know a little bit more about your journey.

I look back and I'm thinking like, would I have frozen my eggs earlier if I had known everything? And the answer is probably yes. Although, as someone pointed out to me, even egg freezing probably wouldn't have really helped my outcome, which is ultimately a very happy one. It still wouldn't have improved my chances because my problem mostly like lied with the structure of my uterus, to be like very specific. But I say that only because I'm not a fertility specialist, but I'm relaying what I have learned is that fertility is incredibly complicated and there's so many unknowns. And part of that is because the NIH has very little funding that has gone into actually looking into infertility, I think, or women's health. And that's just like a huge issue of sexism that needs to be addressed like more broadly. But I will say among my circle of friends, we're working professionals with incredibly stressful lives. A lot of people are doing some sort of fertility treatment, and I don't think it's a coincidence. I, of course, we chose to become mothers at an older age. I started doing IVF when I was 33, and ultimately I became a mother when I was 36. As of last year, a lot of the laws are changing. And so now insurers who have at least 100 employees have to cover IVF treatments through their health insurance. But paid surrogacy was also illegal in New York until I wanna say 2 years ago. And so there are just like a lot of structural issues that make it incredibly hard for women to become mothers. And then we're not even talking about gay parents, right? Like, gay parents— if you're a male gay parent, you're not going to be able to have your own biological child without the help of a female body. That's a whole nother set of issues. But my husband and I, we've been dating since college. As I said earlier, we definitely prioritized our professional careers throughout our 20s. We didn't get married to our early 30s. We thought it was going to be relatively smooth sailing. It was only through really chance that I ended up seeing a fertility doctor who told me that I had a, a very unique condition called a unicornuate uterus, which meant that I had half of a uterus, which is a congenital condition. And it's still unclear whether that was really connected to my infertility or not, but that's how it played out. And ultimately I went through 3 rounds of IVF. They told me you should try surrogacy. I met my incredible partner, I would say my other life partner, Tricia. Who agreed to become our surrogate and carried our twins for us. And around the same time, I also got pregnant again through— and the reason I tried again, actually, I didn't get like pregnant by, by just like some crazy miracle, which is how a lot of people interpret it. I ended up trying again because the first transfer with Tricia failed. And that was so devastating for me because at that point you're like, oh my God, this is like literally my last hope at having a baby. And even that didn't work. So I was like, I was like, okay, I'm ready to try again. And we tried a slightly different protocol and that ended up working out. I ended up carrying one of our sons and then Tricia carried our other son and our daughter. And they were born 6 weeks apart from one another. We went from 2, or I should say 3, including our firstborn Ruggles, our dog, love of our life. So we went from like a family of 3 to a family of 6 in the span of 6 weeks. Weeks during COVID It was insane. So ultimately it worked out really well. Just part of my speaking up about it is like, it was 3 years of my life that were actually pretty sad. There's no other way to put it. There's so many other good things happening in my life, obviously, but it's just this thing that was like always chronically painful for me.

Claudia and I, you know, are in a stage of life where we are thinking about that seriously, but we know that it is something that can be a challenge, and it not only— that is something that can be an access point for many people. And I'm grateful that there there are a lot of entrepreneurs now out there who are even actually tackling this problem, like the founder of Carrot Health and others who are looking to make fertility accessible. Thank you, Sarah, for everything you shared there. And I'm excited to ask you our closing question, which we ask all of our guests, and it's one of our favorites. We'd love to know who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career.

I have to credit Shira, who's one of my advisors. She was formerly the CEO at Staples, and I've mentioned her name before in this context, When I got pregnant, it was also during the depths of COVID And so my business was in a really difficult place. Like, just imagine we're a company that used to cater really primarily to women who were going to the office, and then COVID happened and everyone stopped going to the office. So like, the company was in a really difficult spot and I felt really nervous about taking maternity leave. And maybe nervous is even not the right word. I felt bad about it because my team was working so hard. Night and day to ensure that we make it through this incredibly difficult time. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm going to check out for 3 months. And I wasn't quite sure what to do about that. And Shira, she has a knack for texting me or calling me at just the right time. And she was like, what are you going to do about your maternity leave? And I was like, I don't know, Shira. I don't really know if I should do it. And she was like, don't be ridiculous. You worked so hard for this. You need to enjoy it. And I really enjoyed it. And I realized that's not the case for every mom or parent, frankly. I know parental leave can be a very difficult period for people. I was lucky enough where my husband also got time off. So my husband and I, not only did we get this like time with our first, initially our son for the 6 weeks, and then with our twins. And then when the twins came, we actually got a nanny who helped us because we literally had 3 babies at home. But yeah, it was insane. It was like the feeding times were like at 7, all 3 of them. 8, but then at 10 the twins ate, then at 11 the eldest one ate, then at 1 the twins ate, and then at 3 all of them ate. It was just like this like insane schedule, but I really enjoyed it and I still think of it as best times of my life. I also have to say I was able to do that because I had this incredible team who really let me take that time off. And my president, Eric, at the time, he ran the house. He was like, give me the keys, I'll see you in 3 months. And, and Shira, she's so successful, has climbed up the ladders at Staples and ran an amazing, phenomenal business. And she also happens to be the mother of 3 kids. And whenever she calls me, even though I know her so well now, I'm still nervous when I talk to her because I don't want to disappoint her. I respect her so much, but she always asks about me and my family and my personal life first. Even though I know how busy she is, and even though I know the reason we usually talk is so that she can give me business advice, but she's actually given me so much more than that. It's just actually a real reminder for me that you actually have to check in with people's personal lives first before you can get to the business stuff, because the personal life is like the foundation to everything else. The business is only as good as everyone's personal lives. She is really the person who's taught me that lesson.

She sounds like a woman we could all use in our life. And thank you so much for highlighting this one woman. Of, of course, there are many more that I'm sure we could spend all day talking about who have gathered around you and your journey to both be a founder, a mom, and an amazing woman. So thank you, Sarah, for taking the time with Claudia and I today to be in The Room.

My absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Room Podcast.

Madison McIlwain.

We hope you enjoyed today's conversation. We also hope to see you next Tuesday at 10 AM Eastern, 7 AM Pacific for another inspiring conversation. Please like, subscribe, join our newsletter, follow us on Twitter and Instagram.

We'd love to hear from you.

In the meantime, we'll see you next week in The Room.

Support for The Room comes from Silicon Valley Bank. Silicon Valley Bank understands these questions can keep founders up at night like Claudia. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has helped high-growth companies through scalable financial solutions, plus insights and expertise that many other banks just can't. Which could be why 50% of US-based venture-backed tech and life science companies bank with SVB. Learn more at svb.com/next. Silicon Valley Bank, built for what's next.

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All opinions expressed by Claudia and Madison and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of The5EC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.