Building a women's wellness brand in an uncrowded market

Executive overview

Michelle Jacobs and Sally Mueller co-founded Womaness after noticing that products for women navigating perimenopause and menopause were outdated, chemically questionable, and culturally invisible. They built a supplement, skincare, and sexual wellness brand into a three-channel business (DTC, Amazon, Ulta) in three and a half years.

The core challenge is not product or customer — it's capital and category education. Retailers and investors are slower to see the opportunity than consumers are.

Brands in stigmatised, emerging categories must build demand through organic social before performance spend can scale efficiently.

Finding the market gap

• Both founders had personal menopause experiences that revealed how little information and how few good products existed
• Sally's doctor handed her an Amazon list; the products were poorly packaged, used non-clean ingredients, and felt irrelevant to modern women
• Menopause literacy among women tested at roughly 30% — a failing grade, not an intelligence problem
• The medical community itself is largely untrained on menopause, compounding the consumer knowledge gap
• Destigmatisation is the product: customers email saying "thank God you're here, I didn't know where else to turn"

Building the brand

• Launched with 13 SKUs to signal legitimacy as a problem-solution brand, not a single novelty product
• Hero product: Let's Neck (neck and décolletage serum with cooling roller ball) — performed as expected
• Surprise: vaginal moisturiser became the second bestselling SKU on Amazon despite being a harder topic to raise
• Menopause parties — expert speakers, safe environments, open conversation — turned customers into advocates
• Founder story and customer testimonials are the most underleveraged content assets

Where the business stands

• Three primary channels: own DTC site, Amazon, Ulta Beauty
• All products manufactured in the US; supply chain stabilised post-COVID
• Marketing spend concentrated on Meta and Google for paid performance
• Raising capital is the main frustration — higher interest rates changed the investment environment since 2021
• Retailer and investor education lags consumer readiness; millennials ageing into perimenopause will accelerate the category

The organic social argument

• The algorithm has shifted: organic reach now goes to content that resonates, not just to accounts with large followings
• Overindexing organic content becomes the highest-performing paid creative — the signal is already confirmed by consumer interest
• Most brands stay in a paid CAC/LTV loop and under-invest in brand-building organic content
• The play: take a portion of working media budget, redirect it to creative production, let organic performance validate before amplifying
• Founder-led content and real customer testimonials on video carry the most weight in this category
• TikTok reaches a broader and older audience than most brands assume; organic reach there is still disproportionately high

Starting a business later in life

• Both founders built Womaness in their 50s, with Michelle now 60
• Advantages compound: larger network, higher confidence, deeper pattern recognition from prior careers
• Sally: 24 years at Target building brands; Michelle: Real Simple, Home Shopping Network, brand consulting
• In a world where many people live healthily into their 90s, 60 is not a late start
• The risk of waiting is regret; the category will hit a crescendo and early movers need to be positioned when it does