Ep 023: Reimagining Women’s Wellness with hey freya

Today on The Heart-led Brand Podcast, we’re chatting with Dr. Thara Vayali of hey freya!

Dr. Vayali is a licensed naturopathic physician in Vancouver and has over 10 years of clinical experience in women’s health. In 2022, she joined her two co-founders to launch hey freya – a women’s wellness brand that provides women with a path from burnout to renewal, through state-of-the-art biomarker testing with proprietary evidence-based supplement recommendations, and culturally competent health coaching.

In the episode, we talk about:

why hey freya chooses to focus on women’s wellness and the greater impact that it has on the world
How they work together as 3 co-founders and some tips for creating a successful co-founder relationship
challenges they faced when seeking funding as a company that is focused on women and founded by women
their hope for the future of women’s wellness

Episode Highlights:

How the Founders came together + their different backgrounds:

“When the three of us met, all of us were laser focused on women's health and how to use our skillset for that.

Elkin, who is our CEO and is a co founder, has 20 years building beautiful technology in SAS and software as a service. And Cecilia has 20 years in mergers and acquisitions and a trategy leader for wellness within one of the big four accounting firms. We were really kind of coming from such different skill sets and such different lives.

We did not know each other prior. And one of the things that we knew is that a large percentage of co founder Relationships end up failing and that's what takes the business down. So we used a structure called “50 questions to ask your Co-founder” that was written by a woman. We met once a week and sat down and went through about five, six questions. It went from very light conversation of, what do you do for fun or, what was the challenging thing in your last position? Right down to what's your financial runway? What do you think of successful exit looks like? What do you do when things get really skinny? We know that we want to have a shared purpose that we have to be able to pivot if we need to, because we understand that the foundation of a relationship is what it's going to make or break this business.

So that was the beginning. And then we got really focused on our business model to be like, what, what are the levers that we can work on? What's going to be quick, what's going to be long term and focusing there. And then because three of us have such different skillsets, we could move very efficiently. So anything in the clinical or medical side, we didn't have to go outsource or go schedule a meeting with an external medical advisor. I’m leading the business with a clinical lens. I can make decisions relatively quickly on what's going to work. What's not going to work. We don't need to go outside to consult. So we moved quickly on the on that lens on the financial lens. Cecilia was able to take that on the tech lens. So we moved rapidly in the first year because we could. We could each have a checklist that didn't need a lot of oversight from an advisor because we came with those skill sets.”

Why Women’s Wellness:

“There's going to be the obvious connection to the, the clinical world I was in. So the people who are coming to see me were women. So my experience grew and grew in that space. But also the reason that I lean into that as a clinician is some of the deep beliefs around how women through most of our medical history have been dismissed and gaslit and ignored. The risk to those women's lives is huge when that happens, the risk to their health, the risk to their ability to get up and do and perform and do the things that they like to do is squashed just by not being taken seriously.

What I believe is that women and folks who do the act of care, they're the backbone of society. And if we can support that group of people, we can change what this world looks like. If those people can be supported to rise, not only will care improve across the nation, across the world, but also those people are full of ideas and power. Those people can make changes that we probably couldn't even imagine.

I'm one of those women. So yes, I can imagine some of those changes but on a grand scale, those women are now able to to thrive and not just constantly be managing the pain or whatever other physical things that they're just having to push under the rug and continue their days with. I'm not saying that as a company, that we're here to solve every single medical concern, but the idea behind the support of women and the support of those who care being the priority of how we operate is going to lift up everything in the world.

So that's where women's wellness becomes the focus.”

Facing Pushback from Investors as a Women-focused Business:
I will say also that the biggest challenge or the biggest piece that we've had to navigate is just simply the belief in what I said about women needing support. So the number of times we've had to make decisions and conversations around if someone's going to fund us or if we're having conversations in the fundraising world – the majority of our time in the conversation is spent just simply trying to share and almost convince the listener that women's health is actually important. When we're in those spaces, we're like, okay, not a good fit. If over 50 percent of the conversation is just like, yeah, but do they really need this? Is this so unique? Why not for men too? And I agree, men also need support, but the fact that the discussion would center around that, that was an interesting challenge for us to face.

Whereas when we get into a room where that is accepted, and still lots of conversation challenge, maybe even back and forth around that. But it is known that yes, this group of women has been dismissed and marginalized and or this group has been dismissed and marginalized and absolutely requires care. That's different. Those rooms were nice. But those were less frequent and it speaks a lot to who's standing at the tables in the VC rooms and in the funding rooms. It speaks a lot to how many women are leading those teams, because it often, not always, but often was that the rooms where we felt like they get it, were the people who've experienced it in their lives.