WoW Woman in FemTech | Rachel Braun Scherl, entrepreneur, book author, keynote speaker and women's health expert
Interview by MarijaButkovic
A business builder, marketing strategist, a champion for women’s health, and Vagipreneur®, Rachel Braun Scherl has passionately focused on driving the conversation on the business of women’s sexual and reproductive health. While President and co-founder of Semprae Laboratories, Rachel and her team built a company that developed and marketed sexual health and wellness products for women - creating a new category. Semprae attracted significant media attention and industry interest and was sold to Innovus Pharmaceuticals in 2013. Rachel’s career-long findings and learnings are at the heart of her best-selling book: Orgasmic Leadership: Profiting from the Coming Surge in Women’s Health and Wellness. In addition, Rachel is a sought-after keynote speaker, podcast co-host of Business of the V, board member, and strategic advisor.
As Managing Partner and Co-Founder of SPARK Solutions for Growth, a strategic and marketing consultancy, Rachel has built an international client list that includes Johnson & Johnson, Allergan, Pfizer, Bayer, and Church & Dwight, as well as venture-backed femtech and sextech start-ups. SPARK is a provider of choice for business leaders in women’s health who want to catalyze their growth, navigate around a roadblock, find the right messaging, sufficient funding, and access to channels for growth. SPARK develops customized processes and solutions, incorporating the organization’s 25 years of experience successfully building brands and businesses around the globe.
Rachel, tell us a bit about your background and your projects so far. How did you get into this industry? Has it been an easy industry to get into or have you had many challenges?
I would describe myself as an “accidental” Vagipreneur®. My business partner, Mary Jaensch, and I had built a very successful business in strategy consulting focused on revenue growth – catering to Fortune 500 companies in pharmaceuticals, consumer products, health, and beauty. Our work focused on identifying new insights, opportunities, targets, products, line extensions, and geographies. We dealt with businesses that affect women from the tops of their heads to the tips of their toes. One day, a venture capitalist friend (who had never before shared a business plan with us), passed along an opportunity to work with a company in women’s sexual health, with a topical, safe product that improved sexual desire and arousal for women of all ages.
When we met with the company, instead of looking for strategists and business builders, they were looking for significant financial investment. We had run and consulted for many businesses. However, we had never raised money. We left the meeting fascinated by the technology and product, but wary about the complex capital structure – 165 individual shareholders at that time. Despite that, we couldn’t get the company out of our minds. When the asset became available, the opportunity to jump into space seemed like the perfect storm.
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?
I cut my teeth in marketing at Johnson & Johnson and met people who have been instrumental in my growth as a person and professional, working on brands you probably have in your home right now, including Tylenol. I earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and went right to Johnson & Johnson, built my expertise working for other consulting firms, and eventually started my own. Over 20 years, I have worked on hundreds of projects for products and services affecting women, from the tops of their heads to the tips of their toes and every body part in between. You name it, and I’ve marketed a product for a woman’s particular life stage or health need: haircare, skincare, menstruation, fertility, birth control, incontinence, menopause, and more. When the opportunity to create our female sexual health company presented itself with my longtime and adored business partner, Mary Wallace Jaensch, we jumped right in. We had built and run a successful consulting firm, finding creative ways to market and promote products in the health and wellness space and those skills were critical as we entered the world of sexual desire, arousal, and satisfaction.
After four months of complete immersion in the category and product while simultaneously running our consulting practice, we were taking the company somewhere.
We certainly didn’t anticipate that media outlets would lockdown as tight as a nuclear reactor in meltdown the moment they were faced with the subject of female sexual satisfaction. After all, why would I ever have suspected such a thing? ED ads were on the air night and day and had been for a decade at that point, or on major networks, during major sporting events like the Super Bowl. Why on earth would Lifetime not want us running our ads on their station at 8:30 p.m. when I am quite confident no young children were watching? And how could we possibly have imagined that we would be offering to spend significant money on ads (yes, pay them actual money— large sums of money for a new company) on other media channels and that they would say, “No thanks,” time and time again?
As a part of a strategy to roll out the product to a broader market, Mary and I worked with professionals to create tasteful, factual, accurate, and effective ads for Zestra. There was nothing prurient or objectionable about them; we didn’t simulate sexual activity, as did other companies advertising products completely unrelated to sex (sneakers and toilet bowl cleaners, among others). We didn’t even use the names of female body parts (again, not that there's anything wrong with that). From our perspective, the ads were fairly innocuous and certainly respectful. One ad, for instance, simply said, “Try Zestra Essential Arousal Oils for Free.” We aggressively contacted more than 100 media outlets to make what we thought would be straightforward media buys on networks— always a long shot—along with cable TV, radio, and websites. We had absolutely no reason to believe that buying advertising space would be anything other than routine.
And then ninety-five percent of the media outlets we contacted refused to take our money. Not even WebMD—a medical site— would ultimately agree to take our ads. Even though Zestra was a safe, clinically-proven product, it quickly became crystal clear that we would not, under any circumstances, be able to persuade the majority of advertisers to accept Zestra ads in the places, channels, and outlets where we knew our target customers would be watching, listening, or reading.
For nine months, we banged our heads against Standards and Practices at nearly every outlet we tried to advertise with and met with only the most limited success. Most of the answers we got were resounding “Nos.” ABC, NBC, CBS—“No.” WebMD—“No.” Facebook—“Yes,” for three short weeks, and then “No” (more on that later). TMZ —“No.” ESPN, TNT, and all of their properties said “No” at the beginning. The placements we were offered were inevitable during graveyard hours— overnights, in the wee hours of the morning. A few people may have been watching at that hour, but very few members of the target audience we had carefully defined and were trying to reach were. And the few media channels we had been offered access to were not sufficient. They were not going to work for our business—in a new category, from a new company, starting a new conversation. The incredibly complex tangle of outdated barriers and challenges that stand in the way of the successful commercialization of women’s health products and services drives my work today. A great deal of my learning is included in my #1 international best-selling book, Orgasmic Leadership: Profiting from the Coming Surge in Women’s Sexual Health and Wellness.
What are your biggest achievements to date?
Thankfully, the seemingly endless chorus of people saying “No” wasn’t the end of my story as a Vagipreneur®; it was just the beginning. And it was a story that was tailor-made to appeal to precisely some of the same major media outlets that wouldn’t take our ads. Their news and entertainment divisions were completely independent of their advertising divisions, after all. On a Tuesday in September, the New York Times ran a story about the difficulty we had encountered with ad placement. The very next morning, Zestra was discussed on The View and Good Morning America (thank you, Whoopi). The following week, Mary and I were interviewed on ABC News.
I’m also proud of Quotes from Quarantine, a Zoom interview series I created in April of 2020. The goal was to stay connected to and engaged with the femtech community in a time of uncertainty and turmoil for all of us. I started thinking I’d do about a dozen of them, and I’ve completed over 120 interviews so far!
I am now many years into what has become a passion project and a business for me, which continues to grow, expand and motivate me: to build female health businesses (broadly defined as reproductive health, sexual health and wellness); to share the lessons I’ve learned along the way as well as the mistakes I have made; to learn from others who are bravely building companies in this space; and to encourage other Vagipreneurs® to enter the void. There’s a wide-open playground in the female sexual health and wellness marketplace, and it’s growing and maturing every day. The excitement is there, the customers are there, and for sure, the money is there.
What are the projects you are currently working on?
I am thrilled to be working on a new podcast, The Business of the V, with Dr. Alyssa Dweck. The show is the first of its kind that focuses on the intersection of everyday patient concerns and the unmet needs in the clinical realm, and the many businesses, big and small, being created to meet these needs.
I am always in awe of the creative group that encompasses the space of women’s health and sexual wellness, so Alyssa and I decided to celebrate this innovative, driven and entrepreneurial cohort by giving them the platform to share both the clinical and the business aspects of their endeavors. We’ve just recorded our first few episodes and I can’t wait to share it with the world!
I spend a great deal of my time building partnerships between venture-backed start-ups and corporate partners. Given that I have worked in and with large companies as well as run and worked with small companies, I find that the collaboration between the two will continue to drive growth.
Is the #WomenInTech movement important to you and if yes, why?
Supporting Women in Tech and gender equality in STEM is a no-brainer. I wholeheartedly support the mission of leveling the playing field when it comes to tech and innovation and giving women the space to create our future. Women control roughly $20 trillion in annual customer spending (accounting for 74% of total consumer spending), so why shouldn’t we take an equal part in making the products we will consume?
Health tech is not only an important business; it is a big business. The femtech market – companies focused on a wide range of sexual and reproductive problems – can reach $50B by 2025. The facts and figures tell the story: 43% of women have sexual concerns and difficulties at some point in their lives, over 30% of women experience symptoms of incontinence, 45% of pregnancies are mistimed or unplanned, one-third of women report never having had an orgasm, of the 30 states that require sex education in public schools, 10 require the information to be medically or factually accurate, 9 require any discussion of consent, and only 2 states – California and Louisiana – forbid the promotion of religion in sex education. 27 states require lessons that stress abstinence, and 18 states require instruction that teaches students to engage in sexual activity only within marriage.
#WomeninTech Leaders who see these industry gaps are capitalizing on fundamental business principles, new technology, social transformation models, education and disruption in distribution to build their organizations. They are creating better solutions for big problems, and yet face huge challenges of bias and stigma when it comes to supporting women-focused businesses. Companies have historically failed to adequately create and market products that meet the specific needs and pain points of women across the female health life cycle. We need to de-stigmatize the concerns expressed by the tech and investment communities, such as growth limitations due to ad bans on Facebook/Instagram, regulatory uncertainty and the potential or perceived career repercussions of supporting and including a sextech company in their portfolios.
What will be the key trends in your industry in the next five years and where do you see it heading?
Collaborative and mutually beneficial business partnerships between business owners and celebrities based on shared and reinforcing missions. Importantly celebrities are identifying brands that reinforce their own brands while brands are looking for opportunities greater and differentiated reach. Examples: Dakota Johnson and Maude, Cara Delevigne and Lora DiCarlo.
Celebrities exercising their financial muscle in support of brands and businesses that reflect their values, e.g. Serena Williams/Karlie Kloss/Lena Dunham and Allison Williams investment in LOLA
Increased rate of partnership between innovative women’s health companies and large corporations. We will see more deals like P&G’s acquisition of This is L., Bayer’s licensing agreement with Daré Bioscience Licensing Agreement for U.S. Commercial Rights to Ovaprene ®, an Investigational Hormone-Free, Monthly Contraceptive, Bayer’s acquisition of KaNDy Therapeutics and its treatment for menopause-related hot flashes
Ongoing advocacy to overturn or undue needless restrictions that make access to care more problematic, e.g. elimination of the pink tax (upcharge on products traditionally intended for women which have only cosmetic differences from comparable products traditionally intended for men), continued efforts to pass legislation (similar to the one passed in NYC in 2019) requiring companies to provide a "plain and conspicuous" list of ingredients on all menstrual product packages or boxes.
Consolidation/merging of companies in areas where multiple entrants exist – subscription, DTC menstrual health product businesses, providers of fertility services
The continued growth of businesses focused on treating conditions that affect women exclusively, predominantly, and differentially
What is the most important piece of advice you could give to anyone who wants to start a career in this industry?
You have to be 100 percent in it, you have to play hard, and even more importantly, you have to play fair. You have to go to work every day, work as hard and as smart as you can until you can’t work anymore—and then get up the next day and do the same thing.
Who are three inspirational women in your respective industry you admire?
The number of amazing women in this space is abundant!
1. Polly Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of Unbound, and co-founder of Women of Sex Tech
2 Elizabeth Bailey and Stasia Obremskey, Managing Directors, Rhia Ventures
3. Elizabeth Gazda, CEO Embr Labs
AND SO MANY MORE.
Website: https://www.sparksolutionsforgrowth.com/orgasmic-leadership-3/
Social media handles:
Instagram: @rbscherl
Twitter: @rbscherl
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rachelbraunscherl
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.