Building a Women’s Health Company: A Conversation with Stix Founder, Jamie Norwood
Company: Stix
Company Description: Stix is a women’s health brand that launched to create better products and experiences for women and the health products they dread buying. Their initial products include pregnancy and ovulation tests in addition to a robust content and education platform.
Founder Background: Jamie Norwood and Cynthia Plotch are both former Venture for America Fellows. They met during their time on the founding team of Hungry Harvest in Baltimore, MD. Jamie leads customer experience, operations, product and supply chain and Cynthia leads marketing, data, and sales.
Moment of Inspiration: Jamie and Cynthia both were united by cringeworthy experiences buying pregnancy tests at drug stores in the summer of 2018. In their conversations, they continually came back to the idea that the brands that make pregnancy tests don’t represent them. Jamie cites that half the people buying pregnancy tests are not trying to get pregnant, leaving a major gap in representation by the common brands on the market.
Customer Demographic and Customer Discoveries: Jamie and Cynthia have collected invaluable information in their initial months of launching Stix. In Jamie’s words, “We are constantly doing customer interviews. It is important that we spend a lot of time hearing what they have to say.” A big finding so far? They have a lot of orders coming out of Texas, Tennessee and Ohio. They are indexing higher in the South and the Midwest and in rural and suburban areas. Jamie attributes that to both lack of easy access to drugstores in addition to a need for discretion. Jamie’s thought is that a lot of the women’s health brands that have recently launched are targeted towards the modern, urban-dwelling, coastal women. Stix will target a broader segment of women and follow them along the various stages of a woman’s personal journey, including sexual activity, fertility, pregnancy, post-partum and menopause.
Personal philosophy that informs the brand: Feminism through access and education.
Why Stix provides a better experience than purchasing pregnancy and ovulation tests at a drugstore or on Amazon: Jamie notes that it all comes back to education and brand representation. The same issues that you see in the drugstore where women don’t have a brand they are loyal to or that represents their interest in purchasing a pregnancy test as someone not currently trying to conceive is amplified in the online setting. Jamie poignantly states, “There’s a wide range of pregnancy tests at the drugstore and the instructions on the tests are written for lawyers. All the products feel dated to a women making a purchase that is looking to evaluate her cycle or confirm she is not pregnant. The experience is transactional only and there’s no opportunity for education.”
Big future plans? Stix plans to launch additional products that fit their ethos of following women along various aspects of a woman’s health journey.
