We recently connected with Catherine Lee and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Catherine, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

My sister and I started Semaine Health because we both suffer from endometriosis and PCOS (poly cystic ovary syndrome). While these are common conditions for women, it can take over a decade to get diagnosed and treated for them. It took me 15 years of debilitating periods, countless rounds of birth control, dozens of sick days off of work and major surgery to get diagnosed with endometriosis. Period pain, whether caused by endometriosis or another condition, is incredibly common and usually treated ineffectively with birth control and painkillers. My sister and I wanted to create a solution that could be taken long term and didn’t involve pharmaceuticals.

Fortunately my brother-in-law is a scientist and at the time was working in a biomedical lab at the University of Washington. In his spare time he did thousands of hours of research into period pain, which ultimately resulted in our first supplement, PMS & Period Support. Four years later, I still can’t believe we have a product that eliminates my pelvic pain during my period. I’ve never had a pain-free period until I started taking our supplements. Unlike other products on the market, our supplement doesn’t contain ingredients that directly impact your hormones. It’s an all natural anti-inflammatory and can be taken if you’re on hormonal birth control.

The positive feedback we received on our PMS & Period Support supplement was so overwhelming that we felt empowered to develop more supplements that would address other women’s health issues like urinary tract infections, imbalanced hormones, menopause symptoms and digestive upset.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My background is in municipal economic development. I never imaged I would be a co-founder of a consumer product goods company. My journey with Semaine really came about from a need. There are so many women that suffer with issues – like period pain and menopausal hot flashes – that have been normalized to the point that there are very few solutions on the market. As I struggled to find options beyond birth control and pain meds for my condition, I realized two things: 1) I wasn’t alone, so many other women were struggling and 2) I could be part of the solution.

When my cofounders and I started Semaine Health, we knew we wanted to create a product that would help women and be a place where they felt heard. We have multiple ways that customers can get in touch with us, whether it’s to ask a question about our supplements or to give feedback on our packaging. We also make sure we’re as transparent as possible. All our ingredients are listed on our website and even though it’s not required, we invest in third party clinical trials of our supplements to validate their efficacy.

When I read emails from customers tell me how our supplements have changed their lives, it makes all the stress and work of a startup completely worth it. Yesterday a woman reached out saying she had tried every menopause product under the sun and it wasn’t until she started taking our Menopause Essentials that she stopped having hot flashes and felt like herself again. I feel so lucky to be able to help so many women on a daily basis.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I have so many examples of pivoting in the past 3 years of running a startup! One of the biggest pivots we made was within our first year. Our plan was to start out by selling on our site and eventually branching into small retail before even thinking about national retail.

Then after only three months of selling our first product, a buyer from Target reached out. We spent the following 6 months negotiating, redesigning packaging, figuring out pricing and scrambling to finalize our fundraising pitch so we would have enough money to make the product that Target was ordered. And this was all during the first year of COVID.

Working with Target gave us the confidence to work with other national brands, which helped us diversify our revenue sources within our first few years. Of course this meant we had a crash course in all things retail the first few years while also keeping our ecommerce side of the business afloat. Figuring out how to market and produce product for both retail and ecommerce with a three person team was an extreme example of building the plane while trying to fly it. The whole process was birth through fire and we’re still learning from our mistakes today, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

We have a amazing customers – whether they buy directly from us, on Amazon or in retail stores. We try to make them feel heard and understood. Anyone can email us at [email protected], DM us on our Instagram (@semainehealth) and/or live chat with us during business hours on our website. I’m in charge of customer outreach and engagement, so I’m usually the one at the other end of those channels. We’ve debated for over a year about outsourcing our customer service, but we really want our customers to know they’re talking to someone who’s authentically empathetic and not just following a script. People can be really skeptical about supplements and intimidated, so we want to give our customers as much personalized help as possible when they’re using our product.

The majority of our ecommerce customers have a product subscription with us, which means so much. We know our products work because the amount of customers that sign up for an automatic shipment every month. This summer we wanted to thank our subscribers and launched Subscriber Summer Days. All subscribers received a Semaine sticker sheet that included a habit tracker and self-care reminders. Subscribers who have been with us for six months or more also received a Semaine scrunchie and those who’ve had a subscription for more than a year, received a Semaine baseball cap. We hosted giveaways that were only open to subscribers and plan on sending out Starbucks digital gift cards to our subscribers weekly in the autumn. The Subscriber Summer Days have been such a hit that we’re already planning for next year and thinking of a special holiday theme sticker sheet for the end of the year.

We take customer feedback very seriously, which is why we offer multiple ways to reach us. When we launched our first iteration of the PMS & Period Support, a number customers said the pill was too big. It wasn’t something I ever thought about because I’ve never had an issue with swallowing pills, but it was clearly an issue for a lot of people. We created a campaign to educate our customers on how to open up our capsules and mix them into smoothies so they wouldn’t have to swallow the ingredients as pills. And once we were low on our initial inventory, we figured out how to keep the same formulation but use a smaller capsule size.

Similarly, when we launched our Pre+ Probiotic this year, we intended it to be a supplement that anyone could take as needed. Most women get constipated about a week before their period, so we created a 20 pill pack to accommodate for that time frame. Immediately we got feedback that customers wanted a bigger pack so they could take it everyday of the month. It took some hustling, but we were able to launch a full size bottle of the Pre+ Probiotic four months later.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.semainehealth.com/
• Instagram: SemaineHealth
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sem
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/semaine-health/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/semainehealth
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@semaine_health

Image Credits
Semaine Health