Womansplain

Classical oboist turned Wharton MBA and healthcare VC Lisa Rhoads couldn't find a white shirt that fit, cost less than $1,000, and survived a spilled glass of wine, so she and her daughter Bryn, a Parsons-trained stylist, rebuilt it from scratch as The Anteros. They redesigned the collar, cut, and button spacing for women and sourced from a sister-run Italian mill and ultra-fine Australian Merino. Free shipping at theanteros.com with code WOMANSPLAIN. We talk about getting into closed European mills, the double button at the chest, three to five rounds per color, cutting the wholesale markup with an affiliate-style model, natural fibers without the fearmongering, a petite pant that's reproportioned instead of hemmed, and running a company between Italy and New York. The inaugural Womansplain Summit is October 16 at The Malin Chelsea, NYC, keynoted by Robinhood CIO Stephanie Guild. 120 seats, most already spoken for: luma.com/7bxd1137 The Womansplain Collective+ is open: founder matching, member dinners, and priority Summit access. womansplainpod.com/membership Find The Anteros: theanteros.com | IG @the.anteros | brynrhoads.substack.com Find Womansplain: IG @womansplainpod | hello@womansplainpod.com | womansplainpod.com/newsletter

Sainabou "Sai" Lowe started SAIbysai by painting a pair of thrifted pants in her college dorm and selling copies to classmates for $20. Now her hand-painted wearable art has been on a SoHo billboard through a Gushers x Hypebeast collab, and she still runs the whole brand herself. Sai tells us how she went from Pace to LIM College and graduated into COVID. She talks about the Hypebeast call she thought was a scam, vetting 20 manufacturers, and the five-color wool sweater that became her first manufactured piece. She also covers the origin of the Sai face, producing a runway show nearly solo, why pop-ups outsell Instagram, pushing to be heard as a woman of color in streetwear, and her plan to hire her first core team member. The inaugural Womansplain Summit is October 16 at The Malin Chelsea, NYC, keynoted by Robinhood CIO Stephanie Guild. 120 seats, most already spoken for: luma.com/7bxd1137 The Womansplain Collective+ is open: founder matching, member dinners, and priority Summit access. womansplainpod.com/membership Find SAIbysai: saibysai.com | IG @saibysai_ Find Womansplain: IG @womansplainpod | hello@womansplainpod.com | womansplainpod.com/newsletter

Cleo Davis-Urman is the co-founder and CEO of Barrière, the transdermal vitamin patch brand now in more than 4,300 retail doors including Target, Walmart, and Anthropologie. She got there from luxury fashion, employee number five at Moda Operandi and later fashion director at Saks Fifth Avenue, by way of 100,000 medical-grade masks she sold during COVID and a blood panel that showed she was dangerously deficient in iron, B12, and vitamin D after ten years of taking a reputable oral supplement. In this episode she explains why up to 98% of a swallowed supplement can be lost in digestion, why the real problem was adherence rather than formulation (about 85% of Americans start a supplement routine and fewer than 40% stay with it), why she manufactured to German and UK standards rather than take the faster route through an unregulated US supplement market, why she still refuses to make a magnesium patch, how Dear Dairy and Steady Motion push the brand past vitamins, and why she believes waiting for a perfect product is how most people talk themselves out of a company. 🎁 20% off Barrière with code WS20: mybarriere.myshopify.com/discount/WS20 🎟️ The inaugural Womansplain Summit is October 16 at The Malin Chelsea, NYC, keynoted by Robinhood CIO Stephanie Guild. Cleo is on the Women's Health panel, What Medicine Still Gets Wrong, at 10:05 AM. 120 seats, most already spoken for. $275 through September 30, then $300: luma.com/7bxd1137 💌 Womansplain Collective+: founder matching, member dinners, priority Summit access. womansplainpod.com/membership Find Barrière: mybarriere.com | @mybarriere Find Womansplain: @womansplainpod | hello@womansplainpod.com | womansplainpod.com/newsletter

Mithu Malik is a trained pharmacist who co-owns Musaafer, the Michelin-starred Indian restaurant in Houston, now with a second location in Tribeca and a speakeasy, SAAQI, downstairs. She and her husband Shammi built the business from an ice cream import route in Lagos, where he slept on top of the shipping container at the port so the power cut wouldn't melt the stock. She talks about the pint of Blue Bunny that took a bullet during the coup in Ivory Coast, the 400-question franchise exam that taught them the restaurant business, opening The Spice Route as the first Indian fine dining room in Lagos, opening Musaafer one month before COVID shut it down and becoming the first Houston restaurant to announce it publicly, the 100-day journey through India that sourced their spices and one recipe from a cab driver's wife, the three-week staff training that covers ancient civilizations through modern Indian politics, and what she tells anyone starting a company, beginning with mopping your own floor. 🎟️ The inaugural Womansplain Summit is October 16 at The Malin Chelsea, NYC, keynoted by Robinhood CIO Stephanie Guild. 120 seats, most already spoken for: luma.com/7bxd1137 💌 The Womansplain Collective+ is open: founder matching, member dinners, and priority Summit access. womansplainpod.com/membership Find Musaafer: musaaferrestaurants.com | @musaafernyc | @musaaferhouston | @saaqinyc Find Womansplain: @womansplainpod | hello@womansplainpod.com | womansplainpod.com/newsletter

Amy Chan got laid off and cheated on in the same stretch, then built the first science-based breakup bootcamp from what she learned crawling out of it. Twenty years a dating columnist and a former CMO of SPIN, she's run Renew Breakup Bootcamp retreats for ten years, landed press from The New York Times and Good Morning America, and gets 80% of her one-on-one clients into relationships within a year. Her new book is Unsingle. We talk about why hiding your success is a bait and switch, preferences vs. deal breakers, the nine-date experiment, love bombing (Amy dated a con artist for three months), the four pillars of lasting love, sunk cost fallacy in relationships, and doing 100% of your 50%. The inaugural Womansplain Summit is October 16 at The Malin Chelsea, NYC, keynoted by Robinhood CIO Stephanie Guild. 120 seats, most already spoken for: luma.com/7bxd1137 The Womansplain Collective+ is open: founder matching, member dinners, and priority Summit access. womansplainpod.com/membership Find Renew Breakup Bootcamp: renewbreakupbootcamp.com | @renewyourheart | @missamychan Find Womansplain: @womansplainpod | hello@womansplainpod.com | womansplainpod.com/newsletter

Robyn Berkley spent seven years as fashion director at Kelly Cutrone's People's Revolution before her health forced her out: 16 shows in a New York season, midnight most nights, and a body that stopped cooperating. She quit, flew to Bali for yoga teacher training, and came home with a name and no plan. Live the Process is now one of the first luxury activewear brands, made in its own California factory, stocked at Net-a-Porter, Selfridges, Lane Crawford and Le Bon Marché, with collaborations including the David Lynch Foundation, Moon Juice and the Whitney Museum. She has never raised a dollar. We get into the stranger at The Dutch who called her idea the dumbest thing he'd ever heard and then became her co-founder, the two years it took to source a fabric that costs triple, the corset bodysuit that sold out on launch day at Net-a-Porter, why they went all in on DTC after building a global wholesale business, going full time in April 2020 and posting their best month ever, the Whitney x Alvin Ailey shoot on the museum rooftop, and what "our plan is no plan" actually looks like after more than a decade. The inaugural Womansplain Summit is October 16 at The Malin Chelsea, NYC, keynoted by Robinhood CIO Stephanie Guild. 120 seats, most already spoken for: luma.com/7bxd1137 The Womansplain Collective+ is open: founder matching, member dinners, and priority Summit access. womansplainpod.com/membership Find Live the Process: livetheprocess.com | @livetheprocess Find Womansplain: @womansplainpod | hello@womansplainpod.com | womansplainpod.com/newsletter

Ochi Latjuba Vongerichten co-owns Wayan and Ma•dé, and Wayan is the only Indonesian restaurant on the Michelin Guide in America. She got there by leaving Jakarta at 18 for the Culinary Institute of America, interning for Daniel Boulud, and working every job at Per Se from food runner to manager, with a mother who catered 3,000-person weddings telling her to finish what she started. In this episode: the call home where she almost quit, opening Wayan in an old Spring Street bread shop with her husband Cedric Vongerichten and partner Ezra J. William, the corn fritters Indonesians say beat Jakarta's, Padang-style dining at Ma•dé, expanding to Aspen, the Hamptons, and Miami, women-owned liquor brands, the fall 2027 cookbook, and her advice for young founders: goal, ambition, consistency, finish what you started. The inaugural Womansplain Summit is October 16 at The Malin Chelsea, NYC, keynoted by Robinhood CIO Stephanie Guild. 120 seats, most already spoken for: luma.com/7bxd1137 The Womansplain Collective+ is open: founder matching, member dinners, and priority Summit access. womansplainpod.com/membership Find Wayan & Ma•dé: wayan-restaurants.com | ma-de-nyc.com | @wayan_nyc | @ma_de.nyc Find Womansplain: @womansplainpod | hello@womansplainpod.com | womansplainpod.com/newsletter

Barbora Samieian went from nonprofit fundraiser to co-founder of Sundays, the award-winning furniture brand she launched with her husband, his sister, and a 20-year friend, three months before the pandemic. She also co-founded Vancouver salad chain Field & Social and Sundays' sister brand Hetta, all while raising four kids. We cover the chef who quit mid-shift days after she took over her first business, the shuttered restaurant that became the first Sundays showroom, why free delivery and assembly lowered their returns, keeping the collection small when more SKUs mean more revenue, and the immigrant parents who shaped her appetite for risk. The inaugural Womansplain Summit is October 16 at The Malin Chelsea, NYC, keynoted by Robinhood CIO Stephanie Guild. 120 seats, most already spoken for: luma.com/7bxd1137 The Womansplain Collective+ is open: founder matching, member dinners, and priority Summit access. womansplainpod.com/membership Find Sundays: sundays-company.com | @sundaysfurniture Find Hetta: hetta.com | @hettahome Find Womansplain: @womansplainpod | hello@womansplainpod.com | womansplainpod.com/newsletter

Laura Rubin spent 15+ years running a marketing boutique after leaving a top job at USA Networks, then shut it all down to bet on AllSwell Creative and a belief that journaling had a PR problem. Today she's a Simon & Schuster author (The Big Unlock), a New York Times feature subject, and has led hundreds of science-backed workshops at Adobe, Goop, Google, and the CAA (Creative Artists Agency). We cover the day she cried at her desk over a "dream" promotion, why she gave her agency away instead of selling it, the 4x4x4 method for reluctant journalers, the UCLA research on men and journaling, when journaling can do harm, and the creative block that hit her the moment the book deal was real. The inaugural Womansplain Summit is October 16 at The Malin Chelsea, NYC, keynoted by Robinhood CIO Stephanie Guild. 120 seats, most already spoken for: luma.com/7bxd1137 The Womansplain Collective+ is open: founder matching, member dinners, and priority Summit access. womansplainpod.com/membership Find AllSwell: allswellcreative.com | @allswellcreative | @lauralrubin Find Womansplain: @womansplainpod | hello@womansplainpod.com | womansplainpod.com/newsletter

Odellia Etaat left three years in corporate financial planning to launch Mize Dining, the luxury private dining brand that made her the chef New York's most discerning hosts call first, from Manhattan to the Hamptons. It started with her sister's birthday brunch: the group skipped hiring a private chef because "Odellia cooks," and she woke the next morning to a hundred screenshots of her food by 8am. Weeks after quitting, a stranger's phone call handed her a 60-person investor dinner for The Coconut Cult with one week's notice; her aunt and sister were the staff. We cover the month she tested 10-course menus on her family, her quit-or-go-back deadline, the overbooked stretch of four dinners a week on two hours of sleep, building a team of sous chefs and servers, four pounds of caviar, why no client has ever gotten a repeat menu, and her advice for leaving a stable job for the thing you'd stay up all night thinking about. The inaugural Womansplain Summit is October 16 at The Malin Chelsea, NYC, keynoted by Robinhood CIO Stephanie Guild. 120 seats, most already spoken for: luma.com/7bxd1137 The Womansplain Collective+ is open: founder matching, member dinners, and priority Summit access. womansplainpod.com/membership Find Mize Dining: mizedining.com | IG @mizedining | TikTok @mizedining Find Womansplain: IG @womansplainpod | hello@womansplainpod.com | womansplainpod.com/newsletter

Madeleine Cohen built her career inside the hottest consumer brands of the DTC era (Estée Lauder, Casper, Bala), then got laid off from her dream job and found her next company in her own closet: 30 pairs of jeans, none that fit her 5'1" frame. Today Nelle Atelier is a premium petite denim brand for women 5'4" and under, made in LA from Italian denim, past $1M in revenue and sold on Nordstrom.com. 🎁 A gift from us + Nelle Atelier: use code WOMANSPLAIN at nelleatelier.com for 15% off orders of $200+. We get into the 500,000-person Reddit thread that validated the idea, launching in 11 months, the factory that tried to rip her off, why rise and knee placement can't be tailored in, and building a profitable-minded brand on $290K while her old employers raised millions. 🎟️ The inaugural Womansplain Summit is October 16 at The Malin Chelsea, NYC, keynoted by Robinhood CIO Stephanie Guild. 120 seats, most already spoken for: luma.com/7bxd1137 💌 The Womansplain Collective+ is open: founder matching, member dinners, and priority Summit access. womansplainpod.com/membership Find Nelle Atelier: nelleatelier.com | @nelleatelier Find Womansplain: @womansplainpod | hello@womansplainpod.com | womansplainpod.com/newsletter

🎁 A gift from us + Sonsie: use code WOMANSPLAIN15 at sonsieskin.com for 15% off. Valid on individual SKUs, one per customer, through 7/31/26. Kailey Bradt was 16 years old, running around her high school telling anyone who'd listen that she was going to start a sustainable beauty brand. So she studied chemical engineering to earn the right to do it. Her first company, Susteau, took a waterless formula from her bedroom floor to Sephora shelves after she discovered that liquid shampoo is 80% water on average (some conditioners hit 94%), and she decided she was done packaging and shipping water. Now she's CEO of Sonsie, Pamela Anderson's skincare brand, leading what she calls clean beauty 2.0. In this episode, Kailey gets into what it takes to formulate for truly sensitive skin, how the team scented the cleanser with rose from Pamela's own garden without ever putting fragrance on the label, and why the hero Adapt Cream is designed to be the product you come home to. She also talks about why clean beauty 1.0 left everyone exhausted, what transparency actually looks like when you show the lab instead of the ad, being perpetually underestimated as a young female CEO (and over-delivering every time), and the mindset that got her here: never give yourself a plan B. 🎟️ The inaugural Womansplain Summit is October 16 at The Malin Chelsea, NYC, keynoted by Robinhood CIO Stephanie Guild. 120 seats, most already spoken for: luma.com/7bxd1137 💌 The Womansplain Collective+ is open: founder matching, member dinners, and priority Summit access. womansplainpod.com/membership Find Sonsie: 🔗 sonsieskin.com 📲 @sonsieskin 🎵 @sonsie Find Womansplain: 📲 @womansplainpod ✉️ hello@womansplainpod.com 📰 womansplainpod.com/newsletter

🎁 A gift from us + Scarlett Chase: Use code WOMANSPLAIN10 at checkout on scarlettchase.com for 10% off, valid through the end of August. Sandra Powers Murphy spent decades at the top of institutional finance: an early career at State Street, her own broker dealer, a book (The Road to AUM), and six kids at home. Then one rainy day in New York, ten blocks from Penn Station with no cab in sight, she took off her heels and ran barefoot for the train. On board, feet aching, she called her assistant and said the thing every founder eventually says: someone should fix this. So she did. In this episode, Sandra gets into the five years of R&D behind a single black pump, why her patented removable insoles are handcrafted in Spain by the same hands that make custom orthotics, and what it took to convince third generation Italian artisans (in factories shared with Jimmy Choo and Prada) to build performance tech into a luxury shoe. She also tells the story of firing her factory mid production run, the boots so stretchy women cry trying them on, and why the brand is named for her youngest daughter Scarlett, a type 1 diabetes warrior, and her grandmother Chase. If you've ever kept a backup pair of flats in your tote, changed shoes three times in one workday, or wondered why beautiful and comfortable still feel like a choice, this one's for you. 🎟️ The inaugural Womansplain Summit is October 16 at The Malin Chelsea, NYC, keynoted by Robinhood CIO Stephanie Guild. 120 seats, most already spoken for: luma.com/7bxd1137 💌 The Womansplain Collective+ is open: founder matching, member dinners, and priority Summit access. womansplainpod.com/membership Find Scarlett Chase: 🔗 scarlettchase.com 📲 @scarlettchase.co Find Womansplain: 📲 @womansplainpod ✉️ hello@womansplainpod.com 📰 womansplainpod.com/newsletter

🎟️ Stephanie is keynoting the inaugural Womansplain Summit, October 16 at The Malin Chelsea, NYC. 120 seats, most already spoken for: luma.com/7bxd1137 Season 6 is here, and we're opening with someone who walked away from 21 years of white-glove finance to help everyone else get in the game. Stephanie Guild, CFA, spent two decades at JPMorgan, most recently as a Managing Director at the Private Bank, building portfolios for the kind of clients who can always find help. Then she left to become Chief Investment Officer of Robinhood, the mobile-first platform with 27 million customers and over 300 billion dollars in assets. She turned the offer down, woke up the next morning asking what she'd done, and called her would-be boss to take it back. Four and a half years later she's built First Trade Recommendations, the Investors Guild blog, retirement accounts with a match, and Robinhood Strategies, the managed-portfolio product she calls her baby. In this episode, Stephanie gets into why she left the exclusivity of private banking to open investing up to everyone, how she builds client trust through a phone app instead of a corner office, why she refuses to dumb finance down with cute alliterations, and how she decides what to say when she's one of the most quoted voices in the market (see: "stagflation-ish"). She walks through the three phases of the AI buildout and where we actually are, why she won't let AI trade a dollar of client money, her real worry about a generation learning to model with AI as a crutch, and how to think about the balance between equity, cash, and the angel investing everyone suddenly wants in on. Plus the line from her dad she still hears before every hard room: act like you belong, because you do. Whether you're managing your own money for the first time, building something and wondering if you can afford the risk, or just tired of finance being made to feel harder than it is, this one's for you. 💌 The Womansplain Collective+ is open: founder matching, member dinners, priority Summit access. womansplainpod.com/membership Find Robinhood: 🔗 robinhood.com 📚 Investors Guild at learn.robinhood.com 📲 @stephguildNYC Find Womansplain: 📲 @womansplainpod ✉️ hello@womansplainpod.com 📰 womansplainpod.com/newsletter

Season 5 is officially a wrap, and we're closing it out the only way that felt right: by going back to the moments that stuck with us. This compilation pulls together the founders who defined the season. The ones building real, durable businesses in categories most people overlook, dismiss, or assume could never be made desirable. Listening back, a throughline emerged that we did not plan for: over and over, these women started with their own bodies and their own frustrations (a sore back, a gut health reset, a fertility class nobody remembers from grade ten), found the gap nobody else was solving for, and then bet everything on brand and education to make people actually care. You'll hear how the right kind of brand work can make a "weird" product feel legit before anyone has even tried it, why Alice Mushrooms spent more on photography and web design pre-launch than most unfunded brands ever would, and how that paid off in trust. You'll hear founders treat the body as a teacher: Elix on reading your own tongue the way you'd check an Aura ring, the full breakdown of the pillars of Chinese medicine, Fulton on why your back pain might actually start in your feet, and Butter Be Kind on delivering "reproductive health 2.0" to people young enough to remember it. You'll hear the unglamorous truths too: staying ferociously lean, taking one step in front of the next instead of waiting on the perfect business plan, and the moment a $500 brand deal made one creator believe she could do this full time. It's a season about making the overlooked beautiful, the clinical approachable, and the "uncool" something people want to talk about. Whether you're a founder trying to bring credibility to a category people underestimate, or someone who just loves hearing women build things from the ground up, this one is a love letter to everyone who tuned in. Thank you for an unbelievable Season 5. We could not do this without you. 🎧 Catch up on any full episodes you missed wherever you listen. Find Womansplain:📲 @womansplainpod✉️ ⁠hello@womansplainpod.com

Libie Motchan grew up in New York City, studied math and psychology at a tiny Minnesota liberal arts college with no business major, and spent her early career in consumer marketing, first at an agency, then at IBM running digital media and brand health. What she learned there was that she could not survive bureaucracy and red tape. What she also developed, hunched at a desk in unsupportive shoes, was back pain. She treated it the way most people in their 20s do: painkillers, massages, foam rolling, all symptom and no cause. Then a chiropractor rearranged how she saw her own body. Your shoes have no arch support, he told her, and that misalignment travels up from your feet to your knees, hips, and back. The fix he offered was a $500 pair of custom orthotics. At 26, she walked out. The drugstore alternative was squishy gels and foams built for a much older customer, nothing made for her. She took that gap to Wharton. At Welcome Weekend, before she had even committed to the program, she met Daniel Nelson over a shared complaint about achy backs and feet, and "Millennial Insoles," an idea she had written in her notebook three separate times, finally had a co-founder. They are now the co-founders of Fulton, the modern arch support brand making the world's most comfortable, supportive, and sustainable insoles out of cork (yes, the Birkenstock material). Cork molds to your foot as you walk, absorbs shock, is naturally antimicrobial, and is carbon-negative, because harvesting the bark keeps the tree alive. They found their supplier by Googling "cork footbed supplier Portugal," flew to Porto during first-year finals to meet him, tested early pairs on roughly 1,000 Wharton classmates, and were headed to launch at South by Southwest when SXSW became one of the first events canceled by COVID. They launched anyway on March 23, 2021, out of Daniel's studio apartment, and named the company after a street in Manhattan. In this episode, Libie breaks down why your back pain might actually start in your feet (no arch support means unstable ankles, which means overpronation, which means misalignment all the way up the chain). She explains how she and Daniel modernized a category she lovingly calls geriatric, medical, and uncool, landing on a mid-price point between $500 orthotics and squishy drugstore gels, and why they bet everything on direct-to-consumer education instead of retail. She walks through how to actually use the insoles (one pair per shoe, then leave them in, because the cork custom-molds to how you walk in that shoe), and the House Shoe born because customers kept taping insoles into their slippers. She gets honest about staying ferociously lean (five years in, still just her and Daniel full-time), and whether she would have started Fulton without a co-founder telling her she wasn't crazy. Plus her advice for young founders: there is no one right way, so build it the way that feels right to you. Whether you're someone running around the city in beautiful shoes that are quietly wrecking your back, a founder trying to make a "boring" category cool without losing the credibility that makes people trust it, or anyone who has ever stood at the drugstore foot-care wall feeling like none of it was made for you, this one's for you. 🎁 A gift from us + Fulton: Use code WOMANSPLAIN15 for 15% off site wide at walkfulton.com. Find Fulton: 🔗 walkfulton.com 📲 @walkfulton (Instagram and TikTok) Find Womansplain: 📲 @womansplainpod ✉️ hello@womansplainpod.com

Dr. Chrystle Cu went from running a fully booked Bay Area dental practice (patients waiting four to six months for an appointment) to co-founding COCOLAB, the oral care brand that's making flossing something people actually want to do. Her co-founder and little sister Cat Cu pivoted from a failed San Francisco art marketplace (one painting sold, and her dad bought it) to becoming the creative force behind a brand that's turned floss, toothbrushes, and toothpaste into objects people genuinely want on their counters. A decade in, COCOLAB is in Target, CVS, Credo, Anthropologie, and Goop, with 177% growth over the past three years and a spot on the Fortune 500 fast growth list. In this episode, the sisters break down how they bootstrapped for nearly a decade before raising their Series A, why they started as Coco Box before narrowing to floss (the problem was just too big to share a wrapper), and how a cold email to Gwyneth Paltrow's assistant in 2016 became their first real inflection point. Chrystle gets into the science of why most people are brushing wrong (you're skipping your gum line, which is where all the plaque actually lives), why coconut oil ended up in the floss (lauric acid, Ayurvedic tradition, and yes, a little bit of Goop strategy), and how her dream toothbrush became one that a dental hygienist liked enough to tattoo on herself. Cat talks about the unlikely mashup of finance brain and art brain, the brute force of bootstrapped fulfillment (she spent five years personally wrapping packages), and why she still loses sleep every time they launch a new SKU. Whether you're building in a category nobody thinks is sexy, bootstrapping through the height of the VC era and wondering if you made the right call, or just looking for the reason your gums bleed at the dentist, this one's for you. 🎁 A Gift for the Womansplain Community Use code WOMANSPLAIN15 at checkout on cocolab.com for 15% off your entire order. Start with the original CocoFloss (the textured, coconut-oil-infused one that lab-tested four times more effective at plaque removal than the leading brand) or the CocoBrush designed to actually clean your gum line. If you have not flossed since your last dental appointment, this is your sign. Find COCOLAB: 🔗 cocolab.com 📲 @cocolab Find Womansplain: 📲 @womansplainpod ✉️ hello@womansplainpod.com

Saher Hussaini is the founder and acupuncturist of Set Your Intention Acupuncture (SYI Acupuncture), a New York-based wellness studio reshaping the modern acupuncture experience through intentional healing, considered design, and personalized care. A licensed acupuncturist and herbalist, Saher blends the ancient wisdoms of Traditional Chinese Medicine with an integrative approach to treatment, supporting patients through hormonal imbalances, emotional wellness, skin health, stress, and digestive support. SYI is designed as an extension of her healing philosophy. Every detail of the space was created to evoke calm and restoration, with chic interior design and sensory experience that play an integral role in the healing process. As acupuncture and Chinese medicine continue to gain recognition in publications like Vogue and ELLE, Saher has become a trusted provider for those seeking a more refined approach to wellness. Saher came to Chinese medicine the way many of her patients do: out of desperation. At 23, working as an EMT in DC, she developed adult-onset cystic acne so severe it covered her face and chest, then spiraled into a stomach ulcer after six months of escalating antibiotics. A friend referred her to a TCM doctor who cleared the ulcer and healed her skin, and pivoted her entire career. Born to a family of internal medicine and psychiatry physicians, Saher traded her Western medical path for a four-to-five-year masters and doctorate in TCM, eventually opening SYI in Nomad as a solo practice. In this episode, Saher breaks down the five pillars of TCM (acupuncture, herbal therapy, dietary guidance, moxibustion, and movement practices like qigong and tai chi), and why TCM treats the whole body interconnectedly rather than isolating symptoms. She explains the Qi clock, the 24-hour cycle where each organ system functions optimally in three-hour increments, and why being asleep between 11 PM and 3 AM is non-negotiable for liver and gallbladder restoration. She walks through the biomedical theories behind acupuncture (opioid receptor mimicry, central nervous system signaling, fascial networks) and why a needle in your head can resolve tendinitis in your foot. She gets honest about building SYI: the sign-from-the-universe morning a Hulu executive emailed asking her to provide ear seeds for 200 tastemakers at the Reasonable Doubt premiere ("I literally thought it was Nigerian prince spam"), and why she chose "Set Your Intention" rather than her initials, to make the space about the patient, not the practitioner. Plus: the TCM dermatology fellowship she's pursuing in London under Dr. Mazin Al-Hafaji, and the beauty soup (Jujube, Tremella mushroom, Goji berry, pear, with Indian spices) she's developing into her inaugural product. Whether you're a founder building a solo practice without a playbook, a woman who's exhausted every Western option, a wellness operator studying how design transforms a clinical space, or someone who wants to understand why you're waking up groggy and reaching for coffee, this one's for you. 🎁 A gift from us + SYI Acupuncture: Because acupuncture is a medical service, SYI is unable to offer broadly available discounts. The first ten Womansplain listeners to email hello@syiacupuncture.com with the Womansplain newsletter forwarded along and a request for an herb consultation will receive a complimentary herbal consultation ($150 value). Find SYI Acupuncture: 🔗 syiacupuncture.com 📲 @syi.acu 📍 27th & Broadway, Nomad, NYC Find Womansplain: 📲 @womansplainpod ✉️ hello@womansplainpod.com

Lulu Ge came to this country at four and a half not speaking a word of English, internalized the immigrant instinct to shed everything different about her, and spent her 20s in fashion corporate strategy running a $300M budget at Saks. Hormonal acne, hair falling out, periods so unpredictable she bled through her white French lace wedding dress during cocktail hour at her Tuscan wedding. Park Avenue gynecologists offered the same three things on rotation: pill, patch, ring; antidepressants for the mood swings; opioids for the pain. It was her mom who finally said: you need to give Chinese medicine a try. One blend of herbs from a doctor who read her tongue, three months of boiling them down at home, and her next period arrived without warning. No cramps, no signal, just a body that finally felt like her own. She is now the founder and CEO of Elix, the first modern east-meets-west wellness platform integrating 5,000 years of Traditional Chinese Medicine with clinical research. She launched March 8, 2020, the same weekend Cuomo declared a state of emergency, and grew 2,000% in the first 18 months running the company from her childhood bedroom. In this episode, Lulu breaks down why 60% of birth control is prescribed off-label as a band-aid for symptoms it was never invented to treat, and the East/West split she's spent six years bridging. She teaches a real-time tongue read you can do right now: red tip means heart-organ stress and overthinking (most high-powered women have it), scalloped edges mean dampness and bloating, red dots mean blood stagnation and likely period cramps or headaches. Plus the warming-vs-cooling food framework (red inflamed acne = internal heat, eat cucumber and watermelon; whitehead acne with fatigue = internal cold, skip the salads and ice drinks). She walks through the science behind the formulas: Daily Harmony, based on a 1,000-year-old cortisol-regulating formula that's the #1 selling formula in Asia; and the new mental clarity formula featuring reishi, lion's mane, and cordyceps. She also gets honest about telling her immigrant parents she was quitting her dream Saks job ("my mom looked me in the eye and burst into tears"), and the Wharton EMBA professor Ethan Mollick who pulled her aside after Entrepreneurship 101 and said "if you decide to do this full time, I'll fund you" (six months later he followed through). Plus her advice for young founders: know your why before you raise a dollar. Whether you're a woman who came off birth control and watched everything go haywire, a founder weighing whether to leave a corporate job for an idea your parents are scared of, or someone who has never once thought to look at her own tongue in the mirror on a Friday night, this one's for you. 🎁 A gift from us + Elix: Use code WOMANSPLAIN15 at checkout on elixhealing.com for 15% off your first purchase. Find Elix:🔗 elixhealing.com📲 @elixhealing📲 Lulu: @lulug and @luluth​eherbalist on TikTok Find Womansplain:📲 @womansplainpod✉️ ⁠hello@womansplainpod.com⁠

Samantha Diamond was diagnosed with PCOS in her mid-20s by her then-boyfriend, a Toronto OBGYN resident who happened to be living with her. Most women wait years for that diagnosis. 70% never get it at all. That asymmetry, the unfair advantage of having a doctor at home, became the founding insight for Bird&Be: what if everyone could walk into a fertility appointment already armed with the information, the testing, and the lifestyle prep? Now she's the founder and CEO of Bird&Be, a modern fertility brand selling supplements, at-home tests, and male fertility kits to a 1,000-store Ulta Beauty footprint, an eight-figure subscription business growing 100% YoY, and a clinical network of fertility doctors actively prescribing the products to their patients. She built it after a decade running her own beauty PR agency in Canada, a miscarriage between her second and third child, and a long fertility journey of her own. In this episode, Samantha breaks down why birth control masks PCOS for years (and the exact symptoms to watch for when you come off it), the difference between cycle-tracking apps and ovulation strips ("apps are amazing for remembering things, but you need to add the biometrics"), and why she insists women ask their doctors for blood work and an ultrasound, and find a new doctor if they're refused. She walks through the science behind every product: the FSH ovarian reserve test that nearly annihilated her to manufacture (started in COVID, when no lab in the world wanted to make non-COVID rapid tests), the at-home sperm test that sends you a video of your moving sperm in 15 minutes, and the CoQ10 dose in their preconception supplement, the highest on the prenatal market. She also gets honest about the resounding nos in her first fundraise ("I left every meeting wondering, am I a fool?"), the COVID pivot when her original team walked, and the early investor who called her months later and said "I can't stop thinking about you and this idea." Plus: meeting her co-founder through her own husband, why she pays for a communication coach for the founding team ("a co-founder relationship is like a marriage"), and her two-part advice for young founders that has nothing to do with business and everything to do with sleep, heavy weights, and being "dressed to be ready." Whether you're a founder navigating your first round of investor nos, a woman who came off birth control and noticed something is off, a CPG operator studying how to win clinical credibility and beauty-aisle distribution at the same time, or someone who just wants to understand her own cycle for the first time, this one's for you. 🎁 A gift from us + Bird&Be: Use code WOMANSPLAIN15 at checkout on birdandbe.com for 15% off sitewide (one-time orders or your first subscription order). Valid through end of September. Find Bird&Be:🔗 birdandbe.com📲 @birdandbe Find Womansplain:📲 @womansplainpod✉️ hello@womansplainpod.com