Breaking Down Barriers for Women, One Healthy Product at a Time
An Interview with Cora Founder Molly Hayward
Interview by Susanna Camp
A pioneer in the women’s health product industry, Molly Hayward co-created Cora, a new line of sleek and safe tampons, with a mission to advance educational and economic opportunities for women around the world. Molly’s career advocating for women’s rights and socio-economic empowerment began during a trip to Africa, where she witnessed the negative impact of economic disadvantage and ingrained societal stigma on women in developing countries. Girls in these cultures would often be pressured to stay home from school while they were menstruating, and women, unable to afford menstrual products, would resort to using makeshift solutions — old rags, newspaper, animal dung and tree bark, even pieces of old mattress — that were dangerous to their health.
As she started researching the feminine products market and took stock of her own experience socialized in western culture, Molly learned that women in the US also lack awareness about the safety of materials used in conventional tampons and that even here there is limited access to healthy menstrual products. Meanwhile, the traditional pink and flowery packaging of feminine products seems targeted to twelve-year-old girls, and conflicts with a grown woman’s experience of her body and lifestyle choices.
“Menstruation is natural, not to mention essential for all human life, and yet it’s portrayed and perceived in our society and around the world as an embarrassing and unessential nuisance at best, and a punishable curse at worst in some places,” says Molly. “We aim to change that. No girl or woman anywhere should be disempowered, denigrated, or made ill for something as universal to women as breathing.”
Women can now find Cora’s 100% organic cotton tampons, with stylish packaging and accessories, in hundreds of Target stores and online. This is no small matter: women menstruate for seven cumulative years of their lives, highlighting the importance of safety in prioritizing their health by choosing products that are suitable for their bodies, while also advancing freedom and opportunity for women worldwide. Through Cora’s woman-to-woman, one-for-one sales and distribution model, the company matches the sales of products in the US with a reciprocal delivery of critical products to girls and women in developing countries.
A serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded the UK-based ethical fashion brand Rebecca Street, Molly Hayward is living proof that women designing critical products for women is the wave of the future.
We caught up with Molly this week to ask some key questions about her life as an entrepreneur, her thoughts on networking, and how she strives to support and inspire other women.
How does your network support you, particularly in your work at Cora?
My network has many layers, ranging from close friends and confidantes to those on the business side, and it’s critical to my success (and anyone’s success) to consider that all the layers together form a professional network of people.
I have a tight personal network that supports me on a personal level, and flows through to the professional side. And then I have people I’ve met who are very supportive on the professional side but not anyone we would ever directly work with. Still, they are important to our success at Cora, because they are people I can bounce business ideas off of, or call if I have a question about something, and they can give me their objective advice from their own experience.
And then there’s this layer of people who I think I would potentially work with, or Cora could work with, on a direct business level. And those people are important because they open up new possibilities for the business.
How do all these layers of the network support me? It’s kind of like having a network for all layers of your life. Nobody is just on a career path, we’re all on a path of personal development and growth as well.
What advice would you have as a social entrepreneur to women at the GUILD?
Being a social entrepreneur is about solving a problem that can lead to a wider impact. Not just solving an everyday problem for an individual, but actually looking at how to make a more foundational change in the way that individuals live in a society. My advice as a social entrepreneur is for people to look at the things that tug at their heartstrings and their souls, and to think about how these things make them feel.
There are plenty of day-to-day challenges and actions that we can take to make our lives better and easier, but in reality the things that will change the world take into account how we can impact people to address greater basic and foundational needs.
Having passion for what you do is so critical to being able to weather the ups and downs of starting a business. If you don’t truly care about what you’re doing and it doesn’t speak to your fundamental values as a human being, then it’s going to be hard to do, and won’t be nearly as gratifying as if you know that you made a foundational difference in our society or in the global society.
Why did you decide to partner with the GUILD?
What I see in the GUILD is a crossover of these different layers of the network. Instead of being a strictly professional networking organization and business network (which is all about moving your business or your career forward in a limited way that we’ve seen in professional networking sites before), the GUILD takes a more personal approach and recognizes that the best business relationships are just the best relationships, period.
There’s a sense of being able to connect with someone on a personal level, in order to move career or business goals forward. And not the other way around.
And that’s why the GUILD is going to be so successful. Because ultimately, most of us are not super-psyched to expand our “strictly professional” networks. We want meaningful relationships. And if those meaningful relationships happen to coincide or dovetail with a business objective, then there is value to be found from both sides of the relationship. It’s personal relationships that have longevity and become the best business relationships.
Who are some of your current role models?
I am inspired by my own team. That may sound insular, but I feel really lucky to have found the people around me, and to work with these people. They are all experts in what they do, in things that I am not an expert at. In addition to being really grateful to them, I also look up to them and to their experience. It has been useful to me in expanding my own understanding. And maybe I’m not ever going to be an expert at online user acquisition, but my teammate Puja is really inspiring me to learn more about it and to understand it in a deeper way, even if that’s never my primary role.
On a larger scale I’ve been inspired lately by women who are vocal about the wave of activism around women’s rights in this country. There are some amazing women across generations who are emerging with really strong and vocal voices. I’ve been inspired by the musician MILCK, and the way that she turned her song, a piece of artwork, into an unofficial anthem of the new women’s movement. There are not only women in this movement who are politicians and business leaders but there are also women in the arts who are championing these issues and being really provocative about it.
It inspires me to look outside of my label as an entrepreneur or business owner and to think about how I want to show up for that movement and how I want to be heard.
What would you tell your 25-year-old self? What do you want your 50-year-old self to remember?
Keep going. Keep moving forward. For me, that was a point where Cora was in its nascence and there was considerable uncertainty and a lot of challenge, and a really long-feeling road ahead of me. But I was able to endure it because I had such a personal conviction for the work and the mission. There were certainly times I felt a lot of despair, but I truly never felt like giving up, like it wasn’t a good idea and wouldn’t work and I should move on. Infact, that never crossed my mind. But it could be very lonely and frustrating, and progress in those early days was slow. Especially when you’re doing things on your own, and you don’t have a team, and you don’t have funding or a huge network to rely on.
But if you truly believe in this thing that you’re doing, just keep doing it. Do whatever you have to do. Make sacrifices and keep getting out there.
As far as my 50-year-old self, I think I would say the same things. I hope that at that age I will still have the same energy and conviction for what I do, or for women’s rights, or for women’s health and quality of life. But on the chance that I don’t, I would want to remind myself that you just have to keep going, moving forward, and looking for the things that really excite you and sticking to those.
The Takeaway
Inspired by Molly’s story and want to know how you can help? Get a free month’s worth of Cora’s stylish, 100% organic products when you join the GUILD. In addition to tampons, Cora subscriptions come with a complimentary Cora Signature Kit, which includes Cora’s vanity box, vegan leather clutch, and individually packaged tampons to stow or share. Each monthly subscription delivered in the US provides menstrual education and sanitary pads to a girl in need in a developing country.
