Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Rebecca Caputo. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Rebecca, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry? Any stories or anecdotes that illustrate why this matters?

Corporate America fails to provide women with adequate access to reproductive health care. I’m not referring to maternity leave or lack thereof; or the fact that chronic pain experienced from periods can keep us from heading to the office; or how some employer provided health insurance plans don’t even cover birth control.

With their larger than life profits, you’d think the least that they could do would be to provide their employees with menstrual care products that aren’t made with synthetic materials or harsh chemicals. I would love to see these big businesses with their wellness and environmental initiatives begin to provide organic period products to their employees. It’s a small action that can make a big difference.

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

I took a lot of twisty back roads and wrong turns before I landed into the entrepreneurship ecosystem. I was the girl that got kicked out of Venice High School, so I definitely never thought that I would end up leading a femtech startup. I eventually got my head on straight and got a biology degree from UCSD. I was working as a cytogeneticist technician when my best friend and co-founder Val, sent me the original kickstarter video last year. I immediately fell in love with the mission behind Rif Care and started turning my passion into hours of hard work to get it off the ground. I quit my job when we launched in June 2022 and it has been the best adventure ever.

What I love is that Rif makes period products out of hemp fiber, making products better for our bodies and the planet. We make pads, tampons and period underwear but plan on growing this brand to provide natural solutions for our entire cycle. We really want to support our reproductive cycles from menstruation to motherhood. So we’re much more than just another organic period company. There’s this huge gap in the wellness industry to provide holistic care solutions for women and dependence on birth control to fix everything. There’s so much more we can do and I think part of the reason we started Rif was to be part of the solution. I think I might have girlbossed too hard, but I took that whole ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ very seriously – I guess.

I’m super proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish in under a year. I’m obviously very proud that we won some awards like getting Amazon’s Choice Award and winning Audience Choice at the Natural Products Expo West this year was amazing. But honestly the greatest feeling in the world is hearing the feedback we get from our customers. “It’s the most comfortable pad ever” or “I felt safer using your product” I won’t ever forget hearing things like that. I’m so grateful knowing that we are making that time of the month a little bit better for them and that together we’re able to make a positive impact on the environment too.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When we started Rif Care, we had no experience in shipping or logistics. Even now, I wouldn’t say we’re experts at all. Our product arrived at the Port of Long Beach and we thought that we’d be able to go there and just pick up our products and load it up into a Uhaul to bring to our 3PL facility. We learned extremely quickly that it would be illegal for us to do that. We were freaking out because we had about a week to figure it out or we’d be charged thousands of dollars. Did I mention that there is a trucking shortage in this country? We somehow got our hands on a list of about 300 trucking companies and we hustled. We must’ve called about 100 people before finally finding someone who could help us and not just laugh at us trying to explain why we needed a truck. I’m pretty sure I called in sick at work to make these phone calls but we got the products there and eventually learned that you can hire people to do this for you.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

I think my favorite thing that has ever happened to us was when we were awarded an Amazon’s Choice Award for our product. We hired an outside Amazon team to handle that channel and told them to keep our ad-spend on the site as low as possible. We’ve been bootstrapped this whole time and can’t compete with other companies spending $10k on the platform. I think we spend about $200 a month on it maximum. They thought we were crazy. We started just changing all of our affiliate links and QR codes to go directly to Amazon for a little while. We added an option on our website to buy on Amazon too. We did this for like three or so months and our sales on the site started to increase a lot which helped our ranking on the site. In January, after about 5 months of being on Amazon, I got an email from our team with a screenshot of our product with “Amazon’s Choice” on it and I was shocked. It was a great moment. Now our Amazon sales are really steady and it keeps growing so I’m happy with where we are.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.rifcare.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/rifcare
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccamcaputo/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@rifcare4616
• Other: https://forms.westock.io/brand/1287?source=website&medium=website

Image Credits
Katy Pritchett Randy Tizon