The Challenges Female-Lead Startups in the Ecommerce Industry Face
It's no secret that women are taking over the world. And with statistics like one in five e-commerce shoppers being female, it's clear they're making an impact on this industry.
In this episode, I discuss how female lead companies impact the e-commerce industry and how you can attract more of these consumers!
In fact, female-led startups have grown three times as fast as their male counterparts in the past year.
What does this mean for the future of the E-Commerce industry? And what can we do to help more women take control of their futures and achieve economic independence? Listen to the episode to find out!
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The Challenges Female-Lead Startups In The Ecommerce Industry Face
When you are building a product and you've got women as a target audience, it seems obvious in terms of the value proposition you need to provide for them. I'm sure you can maybe talk about the research you did to identify this is a problem, not just that you are facing but a problem that a significant proportion of women face.
Once you address that, it becomes a question of the decision-maker. In some ways, the distributor or the gatekeeper might not be a female that understands the problem. In some ways, a gatekeeper means, “I control the door here and what goes inside this building, in this park, or this neighborhood.” Consequently, that means it could be a man who may not appreciate that the women in this property or this building have this problem. How did you validate the problem set beyond yourself? What advice do you have for all of the people trying to do the same?
I haven't come across a single woman in my life before or during starting SOS that hasn't faced this issue on the go. It is a living issue that every single woman faces. As you leave the United States, it becomes even worse. Access to feminine care is a global issue or the lack thereof. Beyond that personal experience, we did conduct a survey with first founded the company that was coast-to-coast across over 100 of our friends and family and peers across industries and experience sets to see what people's experiences were.
No surprise, the data was overwhelmingly validating the personal experience that we each had. The complexity of our business is obvious, as is the problem we are solving. Fortunately for us, the problem didn't need a lot of validation, but we have our work cut out for us to make sure that this network thrives and becomes the network that we are envisioning.
The truth is that if men were faced with the same issue, this would have been disrupted a long time ago. If men needed to leave the building, ask a friend for products that are going to be used in the bathroom potentially every day or multiple times, and the buildings, companies, and corporations weren’t providing those products, you were forced to pay with quarters, or the machines were empty all the time, there was probably quite negative feedback. The space would have been disrupted.
We're at a tipping point in technology adoption and innovation where the market is starting to appreciate the needs of humans and particularly women.
To repeat this point, it's a problem that women face and have faced. Typically, the folks who are responsible for collecting feedback on commercial properties are typically men. Most women in these spaces haven't wanted to go to the head of facilities necessary to say, “I'm on my period now. I need a tampon.” This is a messed-up situation. We are the voice for all the women who didn't want to have that conversation. We are happy to be doing it. Hopefully, we will change the world because of it.
There's a great book by Alan Cooper called The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Think about inmates running the asylum. If you task prisoners with running the prison and designing it, it is going to be built a certain way. It’s the same way here. If the decision-makers are men, they are going to be having a bias. They are going to build products that they can resonate with.
The magnitude of the problem doesn't sink in, for example, for a woman who needs a tampon in a rush and there's no choice. That is an urgent life-critical problem and a discreet problem, too. It’s not one you are going to be advertising. If you solve that pain point, you generally improve the lives of the occupants in that building. That's not an intuitive insight at all.
A lot of technology seems intuitive to us. The ability to do things on your smartphone with one tap and to get navigation. It took a lot of research and changing the landscape. The industry you are in, which is smart retail, and using vending machines as a way to do that, is ripe for disruption. Going back to the gatekeeper sale, do you find more success when there is a woman executive in charge of the decision? Do you find it works no matter what, as long as you create a logical pitch? Is there logic, emotion, or both involved when you are trying to push your product?
We may have different experiences here, but I don't think that it matters if it's a man or a woman. With a woman, they are going to intuitively understand the problem. You move past that part of the conversation a lot more quickly. With SOS, from the very first moment, we expanded the product set to include more than just feminine care products. Some of the products that we sell were being purchased by men. There's this amenity that was designed and built by women for women.
What's interesting as we think about our expansion over the next years, there's the need and interest on the part of men to participate in using the SOS network as well. Where we originally had thought these machines would exist within a women's restroom, we have evolved our thinking to locate the machines approximate to the restroom. If a man wanted to buy deodorant, wipe, or ChapStick, that amenity is there for them as well. As you can imagine, that made conversations with real estate owners even simpler, because now this is an amenity that's serving their entire population.
This is the advice here for any founders or executives trying to sell a product for women. Do you need a different pitch if it's a man or a woman, or is the pitch the same? What's been your experience?
We typically get to a point of conversation pretty quickly where we have to say the word tampon. Even the founding story is I had my period. Cutting to the chase as we get right to the point. There is a little bit more grace and space built in for some men in the room who may need a minute to be comfortable talking about the topic. We are fine giving that space and time as long as we can ultimately end up with the right outcome which is getting a product in the market and getting access to these amenities improved for women's space.
I would say it is a different conversation. We have learned a lot along the way. Our backgrounds in finance and coming from careers that were built in male-dominated environments facing off with decision-makers who were primarily male, position Robina and I well to be the women having this conversation. We have been in this space and dealing with a male-dominated community for our whole careers. As a founding team, it's been very beneficial to us to have a lot of comfort and level of confidence being in rooms with decision-makers who are men since it's our typical world.
We are at a tipping point in technology adoption and innovation where the market is starting to appreciate the needs of humans and particularly women. You are seeing new legislation passed where you need to have mother rooms as it used to have prayer rooms before. You need mother rooms to breastfeed your baby. In most airports now, fairly visible legislation is moving in that direction.
Going back to the problem you are solving and for the benefit of some of our readers here, it's not just about improving the comfort of your target audience. Sometimes when you run a company, problem-solving is so foundational that this is somewhat of a social mission. Those businesses are the ones that have the potential to transform.
To get to the point here, here's an interesting stat. According to the WaterAid Organization, the lack of water, basic sanitation, and hygiene leads to the deaths of almost 800,000 women globally a year. These are attributed to dying because of the lack of water and hygiene. If you think about this problem on a global scale, it's scary. Here in your market, the US, it's a test bed. What makes it easy, too, is the market size is tremendous. The feminine hygiene market is supposed to hit a $27.8 billion market value by 2027. There are opportunities that entrepreneurs and executives can leap onto their target and go into the segment.
Making sure that products are there where you need them when you need them is the heart of SOS.
People have a bias, especially if they are men. Even some women can have a bias because they are around a male-dominated environment. What's your advice given that there's this wave of innovation and disruption happening? How should someone take that step as you did? You both were successful in the corporate realm. You left the comfort of some of the most prestigious firms in the world to go out there and create a company in a new category.
The simple answer is that we were floored by how ridiculous the state of affairs is for women. That hasn't changed. We still feel that way and are solving that every day. To answer your question about that besides the market and the other innovators, one of the things we acknowledged right away when we started SOS was the incredible evolution of quality in feminine care products.
There are a lot of amazing companies that have built and designed products that are more sustainable and have clean ingredients. There's a huge wave within the beauty world for more clean brands and transparency to exist for consumers. They know what's going into their bodies. We work with an incredible brand, Cora, which has a clean or all-organic feminine care product line within the SOS network.
One of the things we realized had not been solved was getting those products into people's hands when they were outside the house. This idea of this distribution model and transport of goods from Point A to Point B and making sure that they are at Point B when you need them is where SOS inserts itself. There are a lot of logistics to our business. We need to make sure that these machines are stocked at all times.
You are not faced with the same issues as a consumer that you face with the current model, which is machines are often out of stock. The coin-operated mechanism to pay has been resolved with the more digital forms of payment we accept. Making sure that products are there where and when you need them is the heart of SOS, and ultimately, will make or break our company.
We are also betting with a lot of conviction that solving a problem for the most valuable consumer on planet earth, which is women, is a good bet to make. This is a problem that is pervasive, felt, and experienced by women worldwide. We are also spending all the money. The consumer marketplace is eager to reach and access this consumer. We are solving a major fundamental problem for her, which is this access. We feel excited about the mission and also about the value of what we can build.
This was a wonderful insight. It was an absolute pleasure to have you both in the show. How can our readers reach you? Is there any ask you have? We have a whole diverse audience. We have executives at large companies who read this. There are a lot of people in real estate both on the facilities management side and on the investment side. We have got other founders who will find inspiration in this. Is there anything you are looking for from our audience and how can they reach you?
We have a single email that is easy enough for people to use if they want to reach out and talk more about SOS, placing SOS machines in your space, or investing in SOS for the investors that are reading. That email is Founders@WorldOfSOS.com. For those of you that are interested in watching our journey, we have a fledgling but grabbling Instagram account. The handle is @World_of_SOS.
I would encourage you to follow us there and track our progress. To the readers that live in Boston, we live in the City of Boston. We'll be expanding outside of Boston soon. If you haven't already, our machines are spread across town. I would encourage you to go onto our website, go visit one, and let us know what you think.
For good measure, I will add one more ask. If you are interested in learning about how to get the SOS network in your city, in your building, and in your space, we are growing our network. We are looking for great partners to work with who understand the mission of the company and are interested in working with us. Please reach out. We want to have this network coast to coast and would love to do some with you.
Thank you so much for coming up.
Thank you.
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About Zain Jaffer:
Zain Jaffer is an accomplished executive, investor, and entrepreneur. He started his first company at the age of 14 and later moved to the US as an immigrant to found Vungle, after securing $25M from tech giants including Google & AOL in 2011. Vungle recently sold for $780M.
His achievements have garnered international recognition and acclaim; he is the recipient of prestigious awards such as “Forbes 30 Under 30,” “Inc. Magazine’s 35 Under 35” and the “SF Business Times Tech & Innovation Award”. He is regularly featured in major business & tech publications such as The Wall Street Journal, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch.
Important Links
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