How one entrepreneur turned her passion for women’s health into a successful business with a viral marketing campaign. 

by Paige Pritchard

“TOTALLY doing this if I ever have a daughter!” read just one of many statuses posted to my Facebook feed in excitement over HelloFlo‘s recently released advertisement. The two-minute segment, titled “First Moon Party”, features a teen in desperate anticipation of her first period. After her mother catches her lying about spotty underwear, she deviously retaliates with a no-holds-barred menstruation celebration, complete with a uterus piñata, a fountain of red chocolate, and something called a Vagician.

HelloFlo is a subscription-based online business that delivers feminine products right to your door on a monthly basis for, well, that time of the month. Although the company is just 15 months old it’s quickly becoming a household name with women, both young and old alike. This success is owed, in some part, to viral advertisements like First Moon Party and it’s predecessor, Camp Gyno (in which a precocious camper proceeds to educate her friends on Aunt Flo, only to be thwarted by the arrival of HelloFlo’s Period Starter Kit). The two videos currently have a combined view count of 32,663,741. Even more credit, however, is owed to the business’s small team of bootstrapping professionals lead by HelloFlo’s CEO and founder Naama Bloom. I talked to Bloom about leaving her job to start HelloFlo and how she found support for the business. Launching an online business takes a lot of dedication, determination, and, passion. When it comes to women’s health issues, it’s clear Bloom isn’t lacking in any of these areas.

Paige Pritchard: When was HelloFlo founded?

Naama Bloom: We originally launched the business in March of 2013 and it started as a subscription service for women and girls for their periods. There was this company called Manpacks that sells underwear through the mail for men. My husband and I were talking about it, how it was a subscription for a grudge purchase, and for me I realized that would be tampons. I started thinking about my experience – I’m a mom, I have two kids, I make sure I have food in the house, I make sure kids are off and at day care, and I work outside of my home – so I generally get my period in the middle of the day and have nothing with me. I thought, how excellent would it be if someone could knock on my door a few days before my period each month and say “Here, put these in your purse!”.

That was the initial idea. I started talking to women I knew about it and one friend in particular had an 11-year-old girl at the time; we started talking about girls approaching puberty and what goes on in their minds. Girls are trying to be independent at that age, but then you get your period, it’s kind of a step back because you have to negotiate getting these supplies and things with your parents.

So then I really sort of organized my company around providing a good subscription service for all women and girls, knowing in my head there would be an extra special place for new women entering puberty.

PP: And then came the Camp Gyno advertisement?

NB: About five months after we launched we released the Camp Gyno video. For that we had a pre-order set up for our Period Starter Kit, which was something I was just working on, yet with very little info there was a lot of interest in that product.

Within the past year we kind of refocused and retooled the period starter kit and the regular subscription. We added a post partum kit, added an advice section on the website that just tackles physical changes that women go through without using euphemisms, just using straight talk the way you would talk to your friends.

PP: What has HelloFlo been working on since then?

NB: Our website was re-launched the week before First Moon Party, and we’ve worked the last few months on it. After Camp Gyno, we really started blogging more regularly on Tumblr and found that people were really engaging in content and liked what we were finding. There’s tons of women-oriented blogs and we just kind of pull things that are in a few categories – inspiration, feminism, health – and make it easier to digest. We found that people were really responding so we started doing a weekly email and click through rates were high. People obviously wanted this, and not everyone is going to be a paying subscriber, but we found that people want to engage with the brand and that influenced our redesign.

PP: What inspired you to include the Ask Dr. Flo section?

NB: I get a lot of emails from 12-year-old girls asking when to use tampons, when to expect their periods, how they’re starting to get cramps. I obviously have information on that but wanted it to come from a doctor. One of the doctors on Ask Dr. Flo is Cara Natterson, MD. She’s a Johns Hopkins trained pediatrician and wrote the American Girl book “The Care and Keeping of You 2: The Body Book for Older Girls”. Then we brought on Sheryl A. Ross, M.D. OB/GYN as a source on pregnancy, postpartum, menopause, etc. I want to have content that answers questions in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re reading a medical text; that uses words you’ll understand and internalize. Dr. Ross wrote something on postpartum and we worked on it a lot. I told her about my personal experience, how I was shocked by everything going on in my body. I say let’s tell it like it is so you’re not alone. You have a baby and it’s hard and you’re physically recovering from a major thing – if I had been mentally prepared for what was going to happen to my body I would have handled it better. We want to give the facts in a way that’s not sugar coated but so that people won’t be scared by it.

PP: Back before the kits and the website, how did HelloFlo first get funding to launch as a company?

NB: When I first started working on it I had another job. I left that job and decided to do it full time, and I had a couple partners who did the development work. I really just tried to do it on a shoestring budget. I put some money into it to make it happen and I raised small amounts of money from a couple friends. It’s really been boot strapping and I’ve made it work. It’s funny because the videos make it seem like we’re this enormous company, but it’s really just me and this one other person. This summer we have an intern and the developer who works on the business side of it. He’s a partner, but he’s got another job, so it’s like he has two full-time jobs. We are very scrappy.

PP: What kind of process did you go through for the website redesign?

NB: The website redesign was done by a friend of mine who’s a really talented designer. We stayed in touch, and there are a lot of people like her who have become part owners to the business. I haven’t had money but I’ve brought people along giving them equity.

So it’s good, we’re growing. As a business owner I always want to grow more and faster, you know? I would say this past year has been about understanding the dynamics of the subscription model and thinking the kits through. I feel like maybe I haven’t figured it all out, yet it’s hard for me to acknowledge this. But I’ve only been a business for 15 months, so I don’t have all the answers figured out. I haven’t solved it, which drives me crazy, but we’re such a young company still. You can resell seo and access expert strategies that drive measurable results for clients.

PP: How did you get the idea to make Camp Gyno? Who did you work with to produce the advertisement?  

NB: Camp Gyno happened because I wanted to make a video about the business. A friend of mine’s boyfriend worked for an ad agency at the time doing commercials. I asked her if they would mind coming over for dinner so I could pick his brain and understand how one goes around coming up with a video and getting it done and produced. They came over and we were talking about the consumer insight behind the business and what are the sort of universal things that every girl experiences and I said one of the things every girl has is a friend who knows more than they do. We can all name who taught us how to put in a tampon.

I said I had a friend at camp that was this person and Pete, who ended up being one of the writers, said “Oh so she was the camp gyno?” and as soon as he said it we were all laughing. And the next day he went in to work and told his partner about it and they decided they wanted to write and direct it. So then we went back and forth for a few months, they were writing it, I was providing feedback – they pulled in a production company who read the script and said they wanted to be a part of it. A lot of people ended up working for free because they fell in love with the script.

PP: Did the same thing happen with First Moon Party?

NB: For First Moon Party I was working on the Starter Kit and wanted to do another video. I wanted to do a marketing push around it so I started buying Instagram followers from Social Zinger. I was also incredibly fortunate to form a relationship with Proctor & Gamble, a company that really cares about this base and education. I went to them with the idea, said I wanted to make this video, that it would be great and get people in on the conversation on why we need to have people educate their daughters more on this subject. They said yes, and I had been talking to Pete (Marquis) and Jamie (McCelland) so I went back to them and said here’s the idea.

And so again we got in a room and started talking about what happens around that first conversation, how the mother’s nervous and the daughter’s not interested. I was telling them about an email I’d gotten from a dad months before. He’s a single dad and he’d sent us an email about how once their daughter got her period he asked his female relative and friends to do a dinner to celebrate her. We thought it was the sweetest story and we put it on our blog and Facebook and it spread. A lot of people said it was great, some said it was mortifying, and others started sharing stories about their own celebrations and I learned there was this thing called the First Moon Party. I told them about the idea, about celebrating the fact, and that was the impetus for it. How to get people thinking about the puberty conversation in a way that’s going to be memorable.

I think if you look at both, in a way they’re both very cautionary tales. With Camp Gyno it’s like, do you want the “camp gyno” to talk to your daughter or do you? And with First Moon Party it’s warning that if you don’t talk to your daughter, she won’t know what’s going on. There’s never going to be a not awkward time with this, but let’s make it less awkward.

PP: Those two commercials have both gone viral. Will they also be broadcast on television or are they Internet-only ads?

NB: They’re Internet only. I have no money for paid media advertising, and they’re too long for T.V. I’m not sure if any network would air them.

Part of why both of these have gone viral is they’re not hard hitting buy-this-product-now, they’re like mini movies – they’re character driven movies, and they’re incredibly short. Yeah, at the end of the day we work a product in there, but they’re fun and they’re entertainment.

We could make it more heavy hitting advertising and sell more products, but for me, what’s more important is getting people to connect with the brand. Like of course I want everyone to subscribe to the kits, but I have sort of a broader mission to connect women around women’s health and milestones. And that gives me the freedom to put this out there in an entertaining way to start a conversation.

PP: What kind of reactions to these advertisements have you observed?

NB: There were certain things with Camp Gyno and certain things with First Moon Party that I was worried about having backlash over, but with both of them the reception has been 99% positive. With First Moon Party people have been writing about how the mom is mean and is humiliating the daughter and I thought about that. We talked about it a lot in the making of the script but ultimately what we netted out is that this is a farce, this is not parental advice.

It’s a cautionary tale about why you want to have an open relationship with your child. It was a little risky, so while I’m not recommending people humiliate their children, I think most mothers of tweens and most tweens recognized themselves in First Moon Party. Every mom I speak to talks about the fact that their daughters hit 11 and 12 and stop talking to them. I felt like there were enough truisms in it, and then our job was to use those to sort of entertain and bring up period talk the way people could laugh at it. The fact that people are tweeting with #vagina and #vagician just means it’s a success. We’re getting people to talk about their bodies and these natural functions in a way that feels much less taboo. For me that’s the win.

PP: There seems to have been an uptick in marketing geared toward upending female stereotypes – the Dove® Campaign for Real Beauty, the GoldiBlox superbowl ads, and the recent Like A Girl segment from Always come to mind – why do you think this is? And do you think it’s a good thing?

NB: I don’t think what I’m doing is in the same light as those campaigns. The message of those campaigns is “we’re feminists and feminism is good!” without using the f-word. The message of mine is that I’m not acknowledging “are you a feminist” or “are you not a feminist”, I’m just saying “this is my body”.  It is perhaps feminist to talk in the way my brand speaks, but with my advertising and my site it’s a given topic rather than something that we have to proclaim. We’re just saying we’re beyond discussing whether or not we’re feminist. Let’s move on from that – we’re talking about women’s health and the way you relate to your body. It’s about finding ways to get rid of that taboo.

I think a lot of these campaigns, like the Like A Girl, are really strong and powerful. And obviously I happen to know the people at Always and I know they’re committed to that space. But I do think that it seems like the women’s movement has a certain hipness or coolness to it that many large companies are trying to benefit from. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is up for debate. My gut is anything that promotes equality is a good thing, so whether the end goal is to sell shampoo or a patch or Verizon wireless plan, the conversation is still changing. I think some of these campaigns seem a little pandering, but I still believe the more people hear that boys and girls are equal, and girls can do science, and girls shouldn’t be called bitch instead of boss, I think the more people hear that the better. So if that’s the way we get the message out, I’m okay with it. I also think that consumers are sophisticated enough to understand that.

Covergirl had Girls Can and I really like it and I don’t really like makeup. But I like that it’s featuring really strong, accomplished women in different shapes, sizes and colors, and it’s saying like,  “We’re here and we’re successful and we’re powerful and you can do it too.” To me that’s good, and if they do that wearing Covergirl makeup, to me that’s fine

PP: The HelloFlo ads seem to make menstruation an approachable topic through the use of comedy and a positive attitude toward Aunt Flo. Do you think it’s important to develop an open conversation with women about the topic of menstruation and women’s health?  

NB: I think it’s important. I was very lucky in how I grew up – I had a mom who was incredibly open with me. I knew what was coming, I knew I was going to get my period, I knew what a pad was and knew about tampons. But I still didn’t understand discharge and remember being very embarrassed about it.

And there were other things that I didn’t know that were a little bit scary, and I felt ashamed or embarrassed of them. It wasn’t until my thirties, until I started getting pregnant and started reading books about fertility, until I knew what discharge was. It opened my eyes and I feel like I was secretly embarrassed of it my whole life. Looking back on it, had I known it served a biological purpose and had I known every woman had it, I wouldn’t’ have been embarrassed.

I grew up in a open household though. I had friends who got their periods and were terrified, or they had been educated but they didn’t understand the full implications. Some thought you get your period only once and it’s over for the rest of your life. It’s such a needless heartache and a needless stress and something you can eliminate by opening a dialogue.

And obviously after having two kids I realized “Oh here we go again! Here’s a thing that all of my friends have been through.” I’m wondering why I cannot sit down and why has no one told me it’s going to be painful for three days.

No one’s going to say “By the way, you’re going to have hemorrhoids after a baby, so like when they give you that donut pillow at the hospital, throw it away and buy a better one.”

Had I had that information, I think it would have saved me some agonizing. I think that something that’s part of being a woman; we all have these things, but we’re taught to not talk about them openly. I think the more we talk about them, it’s an easier experience.

I’ve gotten a lot of requests to do things about menopause. For instance, we all know about hot flashes, but there’s a lot more that goes on. It would make it a lot easier for women if they knew they weren’t alone or they didn’t have to wait for their annual exam with gyno to say “Why is sex incredibly painful now?” They’re 50, they don’t want that experience, they just want to be educated.

Paige Pritchard is The Riveter‘s online managing editor. Tweet her @peapodpritchard.

Photo courtesy HelloFlo.