Female Founded Companies: Lola - feminine products made by women for women
267 Likes, 9 Comments - LOLA (@lola) on Instagram: "#regram via @soniquesaturday: "From tampons & cleansing wipes, to lubricant & condoms, @lola is..."
The rise of female founded companies are growing. Since 2014, the Total Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) among women increased by 10% (according to a report from 2017), and business ownership among women grew 8% in that same three year period. Female empowerment and accomplishment is a huge topic of conversation lately, yet I still feel like most of my day to day centers around businesses that I don’t particularly love and that don’t do anything to support women.
It may not be the new year, but the more I’ve dug into this the more important supporting female businesses had become to me. Over the next 12 months, I’m going to make it my mission to start buying things I regularly need from women-owned businesses. If I switch to one new product a month, by the end of the year, I’ll be supporting 12 independent companies that are women-owned.
That may not seem like a lot, but imagine if we all made that promise? It has always baffled me, whether I was working in music or another industry entirely, that so many women don’t even think about supporting other women on a regular basis. I can’t sit here and pretend I’m not guilty of it, clearly it only recently dawned on me, but I’m passionate about making a change in my life.
So many products that are marketed towards women are not even created by them. For instance, why are men continually designing and distributing bras? Why are the most popular (and dangerous) feminine products distributed by a company run primarily by men (looking at you Proctor and Gamble)? These are people that known nothing about our bodies, our comfort, or what would make us happy.
When I started to think abut the first few companies I wanted to highlight, there was one that immediately jumped out at me: Lola.
Founded by Jordana Kier and Alexandra Friedman, who were set up on something of a friendship-blind date, Lola is a women’s reproductive health company that got started with one product: tampons.
The first time this dynamic duo met, they got to talking about the ingredients in their tampons and realized that they (and most other women) were putting something into their bodies without even knowing what it contains.
Lola came to my attention when I was experiencing increasingly intense discomfort each time I used a tampon. This wasn’t something that happen when I was younger, but as I got further into my 30’s, the discomfort was wildly present.
A good friend of mine had started using Lola recently and encouraged me to give the a try. With her discount code in hand, I started my very first subscription. Their tampons are made of 100% cotton, with zero creepy ingredients that could potentially do harm to our bodies, but more than that they solved my problem.
The second I used Lola it was a breath of fresh air. Almost instantly, there was no more discomfort. Lola, quite literally, helped to improve my quality of life during a time of the month that is already pretty trying.
Since then, they’ve expanded their product offering to everything from condoms to cleansing wipes. One of their most significant missions is to help women stay educated and informed about their sexual health while providing them products that are safe and created with the female body in mind.
Even better, Lola tampons can come with a subscription. Which means two packs of your choosing show up at your door every other month. You never have to think about running to the store to buy tampons again. This is what happens when women design things for women, y’all.
271 Likes, 10 Comments - LOLA (@lola) on Instagram: "When you care about keeping the rest of your personal care routine natural, there's no reason your..."
But a major bonus to shopping with Lola (as if it wasn’t already a huge deal that it’s female-owned), is the fact that they donate to women all over the world who don’t have the luxury of purchasing menstrual products. When you support Lola, you support women in need.
I may not have switched to Lola this month, but they were the first company that made me wonder what life would be like if women purchased from women. It was clear to me that women creating tampons was the most logical thing in the world, but I’d never thought about why they were so terrible before.
This is only the first of 12 months in which I’ll be exploring more women-owned companies to start incorporating into my lifestyle. I hope you’ll come on this journey with me, maybe even share some of your exciting product finds, so that we can support these female founded companies together.
Whether you’re a man or a woman (though I know my audience is mostly women), there’s nothing wrong with being thoughtful about where you decide to spend your money. But more than that, when you find something amazing, share it!
Know of women founded business that should be on my radar? Drop me a line in the comments, and I’ll check them out!
