WoW Woman in Wellness I Cecilia Tse, Co-founder and Chief Financial and Operating Officer at hey freya

Cecilia is a Chartered Accountant with over 15 years’ at a Big 4 firm, advising private and public companies on finance and M&A strategy. Through her most recent corporate role as Well-being Strategy Leader, she additionally brings in deep experience in organizational change, wellness initiatives and delivering wellness workshops to audience sizes up to a few hundred people. She leverages her longstanding commitment to wellness through her 200-hr yoga teaching training, mindfulness teaching certification, and Integrative Nutrition Coach certification, and is a National Council for Mental Wellbeing Mental Health First Aider.

Growing up in Australia to immigrant parents and later living and working abroad as a minority, she rarely saw herself represented in media, executive leadership positions and product branding. Cecilia devotes her energy to causes dedicated to the empowerment and advocacy of women and Pan-Asian minority groups, people recovering from burnout, and women facing infertility challenges and transitioning into motherhood. 

hey freya is Cecilia’s dream-realized to dedicate her technical expertise, energy, and passion to helping ensure that she and her daughter, and others like them, live in a world where both perception and reality around health are accessible, empathetic, and inclusive to all.

In her free time, you can find Cecilia hiking with her miniature golden retriever, Rupert, enjoying movement through yoga and bootcamp classes, playing piano and keeping her Duolingo streak (French) going!

Tell us a bit about your background and your projects so far.

hey freya is founded by three women with the mission to improve accessibility to naturopathic care and provide our bodies with everything vital for optimal health. It’s the only end-to-end solution helping relieve women's top health concerns through at-home lab testing and personalized wellness products formulated by women physicians, specifically for women’s needs.

We recognized an alarming lack of transparency in the supplement industry, with products full of fillers, toxins and synthetic ingredients, reluctant to take off-the-shelf supplements because we couldn’t trust them ourselves. On top of that, health tests were confusing and the results they provided felt unclear.

After years of research and practice in women's health, hey freya has curated the best health tests and created the best supplements on earth. We combine evidence-based innovation with traditional naturopathic medicine to design formulas that synergize with your body. 

How did you get into this industry? Has it been an easy industry to get into or have you had many challenges?

Founding hey freya felt like a natural next step for the three of us in a lot of ways. Helkin Berg has spent her career leading and building tech companies – and naturally like many women – experienced intense burnout. She also spent several years blending naturopathic and traditional Western medicine to treat health issues and injuries as a former Division 1 athlete. This influence came from growing up between the US and Germany, where natural remedies and supplementation were offered alongside – and often before turning to – pharmaceutical solutions by doctors. Helkin always found it frustrating that in the US naturopathic remedies were harder to find and usually out of network. She also knew how to build and scale a startup from the ground up. All of that, coupled with our combined passion and personal ties to filling a massive gap in women’s health, drove us to build hey freya.

Our co-founder, Thara Vayali, who also serves as our Chief Medical Officer, spent her career trying to tackle many of the issues we’ve built our company around. Thara spent over a decade as a naturopathic doctor focused on women’s health, with deep practical knowledge in health testing, supplement formulation and herbalism. She was looking to expand access to better, more effective care, which is a key driving force of hey freya.

I spent over a decade working in finance when I experienced my own bout of burnout which drove me to a career change as the Well-Being Strategy Leader for PwC. As someone who’s done IVF multiple times, I also experienced my own share of feeling unresolved about my health after seeking help from medical practitioners. I was eager to empower people who couldn’t speak up for themselves and were silently dealing with a lot of the issues I had faced myself, so I pursued further education in various wellness modalities and dug further into the wellness industry. When I met Helkin and Thara, many of those ideas were realized in what is now hey freya.

We all connect with our customer base on a deep level because we have felt the dismissal and isolation that they feel. It’s what often drives them to evidence-backed products like ours, because they haven’t been given a choice, or adequate information about their health journey. The biggest challenge is delivering an experience that shows them that, so we can build real trust. We’re still a small and growing brand so we deal with many of the similar challenges that any startup does at this stage, but we continue to lean on our expertise, passion, and network. 

How long did it take you to be where you are now? What was the biggest obstacle? What are the challenges of being in the industry you are in? 

We started hey freya in February 2022. We were able to get high-quality products to market quickly given our depth of expertise but it wasn’t without challenges, particularly as women founders. On top of that, we’re underrepresented middle-aged mothers. 

Our experience and work, as well as how quickly we’ve been able to build hey freya, speaks for itself, but unfortunately given our identity we still struggled with being taken seriously. We heard directly from investors that they weren’t used to seeing ‘three middle-aged moms’ pitching them, and we feel like that makes our mission even stronger. We aren’t the typical Silicon Valley founder, but our experience, professionally and personally, has given us a competitive edge – and seeing who’s receptive to that helps us identify the right partners. People who align with our values are able to see how that’s a strength, and we hope to help overcome and break down the societal obstacles for the women who come after us.  

What are your biggest achievements to date?

Building hey freya has been very intentional. We’ve worked hard to do that by developing high-quality, doctor-formulated products that make it easy to address the main issue facing women at every stage of their lives: stress and burnout. Our biggest achievement by far has been earning the trust of our customers and hearing from them that our products are making a difference by enabling them to thrive again in their everyday lives, instead of barely making it through. 

The other part of building intentionally for us is very much about the people involved in our brand, as partners and stakeholders. We’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive company in every way, which also means from an investor perspective. We’re proud to say that while we committed to only taking checks from investors who align with our values, and set a benchmark of 51% of funding coming from diverse check writers, we’ve surpassed that goal with nearly 90% of our check writers falling into this category. 

What are the projects you are currently working on?

This month, we launched two new products to expand options for women who are looking to address symptoms of anxiety and hydration support. Both products are now available for order via heyfreya.co. 

Is the #WomenInTech movement important to you and if yes, why? 

As an immigrant to the States, tech always felt exclusive, like it wasn’t meant for people like me. I was an accountant, I didn’t see myself as creative despite years of devotion to music and design in my personal life, and I never saw myself breaking into tech. But at the same time that didn’t feel right to me, it seemed like it was supposed to be an industry where unique perspectives and diversity should thrive.  

When I met hey freya co-founders Helkin and Thara, I realized I wasn’t alone in that feeling. Helkin spent her entire career in tech, and as a woman shared that she would be in rooms with the rest of her team (who were men) and investors wouldn’t even look her in the eye. She put her career on the line to advocate for a maternity leave policy for another woman at a past company because one didn’t exist. Helkin inspired me when I met her because despite having experienced all the negative aspects of the industry, she still said I want to be a part of this but I want to do it with women and for women, I want to knock the door open and hold it open for other women to follow. 

Thara, who spent the majority of her career in the healthcare industry, broke into tech because she wanted to reach more people with her work. She ran into challenges such as gender and racial bias in medical data collection and wanted to leverage technology as a tool to try to expand the lens, and also scale the solutions. That’s a big part of our mission at hey freya – to change these larger industries. We are grateful for all the people and especially women who came before us and paved the way. We hope to make a difference by changing these systems so that they don’t continue to exclude underrepresented groups like women and people of color. 

What will be the key trends in your industry in the next five years and where do you see them heading?

Today, women are seeking out more holistic health options because they’re not getting solutions from their primary care doctors. In fact, over half of women don’t feel heard by their doctors and 90% of them are looking for health solutions online instead as a result. We’re likely to see women and women of color continue to turn to alternative, holistic, and naturopathic health and wellness products and services, normalizing this and making it a key way they find effective solutions. Products like ours also target the symptoms women most commonly have and turn to doctors for, but don’t get answers because they’re not ‘disease-state.’ These symptoms include trouble with sleep and needing more energy, as well as changes in mood, memory, and menstrual cycle. 

We’re also likely to see women try to consolidate the way they look for healthcare – they want a one-stop shop solution. As a result, many of the companies that are innovating to address these needs will likely expand service offerings to become a more comprehensive solution. 

The wellness industry has made immense progress in recent years, with more diverse and inclusive brands and companies, serving a more diverse population, popping up as the women’s wellness industry has drawn attention and dollars from investors. The femtech sector has had over 112 exits since 1990 worth $27.6 billion. We’re excited to see this industry take off and believe it will continue to gain momentum. For too long, wellness solutions have been inaccessible and priced out of many communities – especially the communities that need them most. Taking care of ourselves shouldn’t need to be a luxury or a privilege, it should be a universal right. 

What is the most important piece of advice you could give to anyone who wants to start a career in this industry?

It may sound cliché but I would encourage people to stay true to themselves and their mission. It can be easy to flock to where the money or hype is, but when you do something authentic to you, with real purpose and action behind it, people will see that. The right partners for you will be attracted to your company because they’ll see your commitment, and long-term, sustainable growth potential, instead of a fad of the moment. And you’ll be more inspired to put the work in because you’re working to solve a real problem.

Who are three inspirational women in your respective industry that you admire?

There are many, but these four women inspire us because they walk the walk. They uplift women and are trailblazers, making an impact themselves and holding the door open for more women to come after them. We believe there’s room for us all to thrive and collaborate, and we’d love to march alongside these women because we’re stronger together. 

Find out more about hey freya on their website.

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This interview was conducted by Marija Butkovic, Digital Marketing and PR strategist, founder, and CEO of Women of Wearables. She regularly writes and speaks on topics of wearable tech, fashion tech, IoT, entrepreneurship, and diversity. Follow Marija on Twitter @MarijaButkovic and read her stories for Forbes here.

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