[Coworker] Femna, a coworking story
Coworking space are a concentrate of talents. They gather, under one roof bright minds who are seeking an inspiring place to do their work. Inspiration does not come from the interior design only but also from the members around whom they gravitate. Sometimes, magic happens and great products arise on the market. There is, in Berlin, a new product just like that. It is called Femna and what most of the people don’t know is that it all started out and thanks to a coworking space. COWORKIES met Maxie, one of the two co-founders, to chat about her new venture that she runs from Impact Hub.
Coworkies (C): Let’s start! Who are you and what do you do?
Maxie (M): I am Maxie, I am an Entrepreneur. I successfully founded a business for Female Hygiene called Ruby Cup and I am now doing my second venture called Femna.
C: We’d love to hear more about your journey with Femna! How did it get started?
M: It started with Ruby Cup, when I acknowledge the big need for natural products to help women go through the different hormonal stages of their lives. At the start, Femna was just a very vague idea in my head. I organized brainstorming sessions, I talked to several people about it, I also got feedback from my friends and family. Thanks to that process, it got clearer every day for me that the product I wanted to focus on would be based on Herbs and not Homeopathy, which is also an alternative medicine.
I started to work on Femna in a coworking space called Impact Hub. During my stay here I met a lot of people including Emily, who later became my co-founder. At the time, she was also working on her own venture and she was more into making natural body care products. We spoke a little and I asked her if she wanted to supply Femna as I needed somebody with her expertise and know-how on cosmetics and body care products. She wrote me some suggestions which I really liked, I felt we were sharing the same vision.
Starting a business can be a lonely road if you do it just by yourself so I was looking for a business partner, since we got along so well, I asked her if she would be interested to join me. She immediately agreed and this is how we met and started our journey together.
C: Did the coworking space staff facilitated your connection or did you just randomly started to chat to each other?
M: The people behind Impact Hub are definitely the one who facilitated our connection. At the time we were both “Host”, helping out at Impact Hub, and the team knew what each of us was working on. They introduced us to each other and said we should talk.
Coworking spaces like Impact Hub are great at connecting people, if it was not for the space, I would probably not have known what she was working on.
The community and the all ecosystem here facilitated my connection to Emily.
C: Once you met, why did you choose to stay in Impact Hub while bootstrapping?
M: We wanted to combine a desk at Impact Hub and a “production / in-house lab” where we could print, sent, pack and do the all fulfillment. Three days a week, we meet here at Impact Hub. It’s essential to us as we are getting good input from the community and we are surrounded by other people instead of being just the two of us all the time. That was definitely refreshing and helped us out with more valuable contacts.
C: I also know you did your launch party here, inside of Impact Hub. Why did you choose to do it here?
M: I have to say Impact Hub supported us immensely. We were able to launch our new online shop and present our products thanks to their help. For the launch party, the team invited their personal network and gave us a hand to spread the word around Berlin. We were also able to use their social channels to get more people. The decision to make it here came quite naturally as we needed a space to make the event and this is here where it started. We are very connected to it and we thought it would be nice to bring everyone where it all began.
Impact Hub allowed us to completely transform the space and make it our own for the night. We could brings flowers, our own food and drinks, which would not have been possible some place else. Making our event inside a coworking space gave us a lot more credibility and lifted up the event.
C: Last question to you Maxie, what’s next? What are your main challenges at the moment?
M: The next step for Femna is to raise the first seed round. As you know we are a consumer product company and we have to invest in product development, get more stock as we are often sold out. We produce on a demand basis at the moment.
We also want to invest in marketing to gain visibility and awareness on the market. We also want to start paying ourselves, as at the moment we are both working aside on different jobs to sustain Femna.
We are seeking angel investors and are doing a crowd investing campaign. For that as well a coworking space is very helpful, it gives you access to a lot of people who can help you spread the word about your campaign as well as potential investors.
Thank you Maxie!
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