ABOUT CLAIRE CODER:

BIO: 

Claire Coder (Forbes 30under30) is a 28-year-old Thiel Fellow and founder and CEO of Aunt Flow. On a mission to make the world better for people with periods, Aunt Flow stocks public bathrooms with freely accessible tampons and pads. Through Claire’s leadership, Aunt Flow launched patented tampon & pad dispensers in 60k+ bathrooms and raised $17m+ in venture capital. 

Coder launched her first company at age 16, designed a bag for Vera Bradley that sold out in 24 hours, and has her own line of GIFs. After getting her period in public without the supplies she needed, at 18 years old, Claire dedicated her life to developing a solution to ensure businesses and schools can sustainably provide quality period products for free in public bathrooms. 

Since 2016, Aunt Flow has worked with thousands of businesses and schools, including organizations like Google, Princeton University, Netflix, and 30+ professional sports stadiums, to offer freely accessible period product dispensers, filled with organic cotton tampons and pads. 

Aunt Flow has donated over 7 million organic cotton tampons and pads to menstruators in need since 2021. 

Claire’s ultimate goal in life is for any menstruator to walk into any bathroom and never need to worry if they start their period, because Aunt Flow period products are freely available!

Claire’s story has been featured in TeenVogue, Forbes, Fortune, and she starred in TLC’s Girl Starter Season 1. Claire speaks regularly surrounding her advocacy work, starting a social enterprise and journey as a female founder. For more information, please visit 

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairecoder/ 

Websites:

• clairecoder.com (Personal)
• goauntflow.com (Company)

SHOW INTRO
Welcome to the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast.

EPISODE 78 … and my conversation with Claire Coder the Founder and CEO of Aunt Flow. 

On the podcast our dynamic dialogues based on our acronym DATA - design, architecture, technology, and the arts crosses over disciplines but maintains a common thread of people who are passionate about the world we live in and human’s influence on it, the ways we craft the built environment to maximize human experience, increasing our understanding of human behavior and searching for the New Possible.    

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD Magazine part of the Smartwork Media family of brands.

VMSD brings us, in the brand experience world, the International Retail Design Conference. The IRDC is one of the best retail design conferences that there is bringing together the world of retailers, brands and experience place makers every year for two days of engaging conversations and pushing the discourse forward on what makes retailing relevant. 

You will find the archive of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast on VMSD.com.

Thanks also goes to Shop Association the only global retail trade association dedicated to elevating the in-store experience. 

SHOP Association represents companies and affiliates from 25 countries and brings value to their members through research, networking, education, events and awards. Check then out on SHOPAssociation.org

When Claire Coder was 18 years old she was at an event and she used a public restroom. While there, she discovered that she had unexpectedly started her period. And… she didn't have a quarter. 

Why she would have needed a quarter and what happened as a result of not having one is the subject of an exceptional entrepreneurial trajectory that has changed woman's public bathrooms around the country.

We’ll get to all of that in a moment but first though, a few thoughts…

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What if you had an amazing idea that you knew was a no-brainer, an idea that provided something deeply necessary, but it seemed that everyone had overlooked it.

What if you had a moment of insight from a personal experience that chartered out a clear path for providing a product and service that seemed to satisfy the deeply under met needs of more than 50% of the population?

And what if when you took this moment of clear mental insight to a group of venture capitalists explaining that this was not just an idea that would not only satisfy a certain customer need but that could be an extraordinarily profitable business operation but when you asked for their involvement, they simply said… “NO”.

And what if you heard “NO” 86 times when trying to get people interested in supporting your idea. Would you give up? Would you have already given up after the 1st or 10th or 50th “NO”? And what if you happened to be an 18-year-old young woman with this vision and enthusiasm and the subject of your VC pitches dealt with menstruation and woman's public bathrooms... How far do you think that would have gotten you?

I could focus in on this intro by talking about the thing that we don't talk about, at least as a guy I can't imagine me and my guy friends would have ever talked about…as a teen, young man or frankly even today.

Which is to say… women and monthly periods. 

I could focus in on this somewhat taboo subject of a naturally occurring bodily function that we somehow sweep under the social discourse carpet, despite that more than 50% of the population has one every single month. 

Or I could talk about the strange discomfort that comes up because somehow, we've made this discussion something to be ashamed about or talked only about between mothers and grandmothers and their daughters. 

The strange irony here is that the other 49.53% of the North American population will end up living with, perhaps marrying and having children with the 50+ percent of the population who has their period every single month and yet, we'd prefer not to talk about it…

But, if I did focus on those subjects, which by the way are not unimportant to talk about, it would potential we derail another story about a passion for entrepreneurship and the overwhelming need to address the needs of a population who are wholly unserved.

It takes a lot of guts to be an entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur is not easy. In fact, there are a lot of people who would say you’d simply have a few screws loose to actually want to be an entrepreneur.

It's highly risky and you carry an extraordinary amount of responsibility. Everything from fundraising and decision-making, planning operations, accepting both successes and failures.

When the entire enterprise is your baby, and relies on you as the key driver of the big idea, it can be incredibly emotionally taxing. The working hours can be extraordinary too. If we think that an average work week is neatly packed into 40 hours, an entrepreneur may end up spending twice or maybe even three times that amount in trying to get their business off the ground.

..and there's constant pressure to keep on pushing forward. One success does not necessarily guarantee the next and so there's this cycle of continuing to push and to make forward strides create product extensions and to expand the brand footprint that is unrelenting. 

This is especially true if folks have lent you money to get your big idea off the ground.

There's also a great degree of isolation that can emerge on the entrepreneurial path. You, and often you alone, are focused on birthing your brainchild, developing it and bringing it to market. This ‘child rearing’, if you will, often happens in times of extraordinary uncertainty and ambiguity. 

In the current state of the world we live in today, ambiguity is the name of the game. What with the pace of change exponentially increasing, government shifting the rules of the game with tariffs and regulations, funding cuts and banning more that 250 words that according to PEN AMERICA are no longer considered acceptable including:

advocacy, abortion, all-inclusive, biologically female, community equity, DEI, female, inclusive, sex, sexuality, vulnerable populations, and woman or women, just to name a few. So if your big idea is squarely focused on women, menstruation and period products, I would imagine it’s tricky.

So, this means that you have to be built for understanding the pace of change the ability to flex and move and be resilient when things don't happen to go your way. Like for example if you are launching a new product line and a COVID pandemic hits that effectively shuts your business down.

You could stop and pack up shop and be done or you could be resilient and change direction asking ‘what do people need right now?, and turn what you thought was going to be a business into a completely different thing that was not at all what you had planned in the 1st place.

As an entrepreneur, you also have to wear many hats. You are at the same time the company owner, marketing and sales rep. You're dealing with HR issues, product design and materials sourcing and assortment planning.

You're often doing customer service and trying to keep them satisfied while dealing with shipments that go missing or supply chains that get disrupted, because of say tariffs, for example, when your products were coming from out of the country and all of a sudden now they are more expensive than you had anticipated.

And you have to be good, I mean really good, at dealing with rejection and failure.

Most entrepreneurs face repeated setbacks, investor rejections, failed launches or people who just don't get what you're trying to deliver - o