On a mission to end period poverty, with Unicorn co-founders and co-CEOS

Denielle Finkelstein and Thyme Sullivan are on a mission to make high quality period products available in restroom stalls across America. In this episode, they sit down with host Sam Saperstein to talk about the company they co-founded, Unicorn.

The Triple Co

Denielle and Thyme call themselves the Triple Co to reflect their stats as cousins, co-founders, and co-CEOs. They both had successful careers in corporate America—Denielle spent 20-plus years in fashion with Ann Taylor, Coach, and Kate Spade, and Thyme worked with beverage and food giants Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Nestle for 27 years. But as Denielle explains, “I'd gotten to that amazing C-suite job, that job I'd always dreamed of—and I was completely unfulfilled. I was working in a toxic environment. I had sort of lost that love of learning and the passion and really where that purpose was.”

She made the decision to walk away from her corporate career, and before long she reached out to her cousin Thyme who was similarly feeling unsatisfied and ready for a transition. Thyme says her background as a “grocery geek” provided inspiration for the idea of producing high-quality, organic tampons and other period products. “Going up and down the aisles for years on end, I just saw as everything was changing to organic and to sustainable and non-GMO and gluten-free and transparency became so important,” she tells Sam. “Yet when you got to what is called the feminine care aisle, and saw the period products, it looked like you were shopping back in the seventies. There'd been little innovation, and nobody was talking about it.”

Once they started researching and learning facts—such as the stat that in the U.S., one in four girls has missed school or work because she didn't have access to period products—they were even more motivated to start a business in the category that “nobody else wanted to talk about.” It didn’t hurt, Denielle says, that they’re perfect complements for each other: “Thyme came with an amazing, amazing pedigree with sales and operations and supply chain, and that complemented mine and where I came from as this brand-building and this marketing background.”

The challengers become disruptors

While providing quality, organic period products was the motivator, it wasn’t long before Thyme and Denielle zeroed in on a mission to address period poverty. Thyme says that their mission was always to advance women in society, and they didn’t initially see themselves as disruptors. “A disruptor by definition is more like an Uber, your Netflix, your Airbnb, it's something that's never been done before,” she says. “When we started this company, we were much more of a challenger brand. We were challenging the category, challenging the transparency and the efficacy and better getting access to better products for women. But we've actually evolved into a disruptor and we're incredibly proud of that.”

Specifically, they wanted to disrupt the outdated period product machines in public restrooms. “A lot of places don't [offer period products] because the big metal machines are very expensive, they're difficult to install, they're difficult to service from the staff, they don't hold very much product,” she explains. “They certainly don't hold quality products. Nobody has coins, and often they're broken and empty. And we were thinking long and hard about that's a real problem, and the solution goes even deeper.”

They spent a year and a half developing a low-cost, low profile dispenser that goes in the stalls, right next to the toilet paper. Then came the fun of fundraising—or as Denielle says, the non-fun. (“We have a phrase that there's no fun in fundraising, and it is real.”) The two had what they call a summer of un-love during which they spoke to about a hundred VCs without success. Then they found Barbara Clark, who they say changed their trajectory overnight. She not only believed in their mission and offered funding, she provided expert advice in terms of how they should shift their pitches to other VCs.

Another huge break came last summer when JPMorgan Chase became [one] the first big organization to adopt their dispensers. It started when they found CEO Jamie Dimon’s ear during his annual summer bus tour. “So everybody's asking about Bitcoin and world economics, and we're like, we know you got daughters, we want to talk about period products,” Thyme says. “And he listened. We had a good enough elevator pitch and he understood as a father of daughters and granddaughters.”

 

Full transcript here