Ep 021: Non-Toxic Period Products with Rif Care

Today on The Heart-led Brand Podcast, we’re chatting with Val Emmanuel of Rif Care!

Rif (which stands for Regenerative International Female) is a wellness company that makes non toxic, organic period care products using hemp fiber. It was founded by childhood best friends Val Emanuel and Rebecca Caputo in 2022 and they’ve quickly taken off as a trusted new voice in the period care industry. They are all about providing safe and non hormone disrupting cycle care solutions for women and lowering their carbon footprint one period at a time.

Episode Highlights:

Selling on Squarespace:

“We started on Squarespace and if you have CPG, I think you have to have such a strong following to start on a website that's not Shopify. I would say, start on Shopify, over any other website that promises you anything.

I'm like, look, if you're selling services through Squarespace, if you are a creator who just needs a website, go to Wix. If you have products with all the offerings that Shopify has, there's no reason you should be on anything else in my experience and opinion.

The first time I really realized that was when we did our first big influencer campaign. So Sophia Esperanza, she's got millions of followers on Instagram and then she's got a few hundred thousand followers on YouTube and we paid her to be in a video. Video literally popped off and ended up making thousands of dollars of sales. Her affiliate link wasn't working, so we couldn't track what was coming from her. So I ended up just paying her that way via commissions. If we would have had Shopify, it would have worked out so much more seamlessly.

But that experience of having a hundred dollars in sales a day, to all of a sudden a day doing $2,000, we were like we need to switch immediately because there were so many abandoned cars also from them.”

The Importance of Resources for Founders:

“Two of the most amazing resources that we've had was a CPG brand Naturally Network. It's a nonprofit and they help a lot of startup companies to connect with retailers to have all types of resources that are specific for CPG companies that are trying to get in retail and just grow in the natural products space. It's like $75 a year. At first I didn't want to pay it. Um, paying that $75 a year has probably bought us $50,000 a year in opportunities.

And I would tell people that you need to find a network that's specific for your genre. There's also a Female Founder network. The Female Founder Collective is amazing. You pay a very nominal fee, and I went to a dinner and someone introduced me to an investor.

They gave us $100,000. So these networks you really have to invest in and you have to invest in yourself. It's very, very helpful in your first five years, you need to network.

If you're trying to reach people B2B, you have to post on LinkedIn. Don't do that thing where you just start sliding into people's DMS. Like we have this amazing service. No, no, no. Use LinkedIn, like Instagram for your business. And really post on there because people will find you. And I think that's also a great thing about the searchability and the algorithm of LinkedIn, is that people reshare a lot and they're each other's cheerleaders. And if you want inspiration, go look at midday squares on LinkedIn. Midday squares has an amazing LinkedIn presence. So I'm now starting to do vlogs of me and my co founder. We just started vlogging a few months ago. I was like, these do really well and people really like us together. So I also wish I would have started doing that.” SHORTEN more?

On getting Ashley Graham as a mentor/investor:

“I recently was on a TV series called side hustlers on Roku. It's with celebrity hosts, Ashley Graham and Emma greed. And the opportunity came randomly.

Me and my co founder were actually at tech stars in Atlanta. And then we got phone calls and emails from a casting director and they were interested in having us be on the show. We ended up getting Ashley Graham as Our mentor, and then she ended up investing a hundred thousand dollars. We went to her agency like two months before the show. So it's so funny how things manifest in your life because she was in our top 10 female celebrities we would want.

And I thought we couldn't have her because she invested in another period care company. But it just turns out that that company ended up getting acquired. So she was kind of in the clear to do something similar. And luckily with pattern matching, if someone does something and it's successful, they will most likely want to do it again.”

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