When Greta Meyer played lacrosse on Stanford University’s NCAA Division 1 team, there was a custom among players, who wore white uniforms for home games, when they were menstruating.
“I’m running down the field—I don’t want to have this leakage and this distraction,” Meyer told Retail Brew. “With my teammates, it was often a question, ‘Can you check me?’ And that’s common amongst a lot of female athletes.”
So Meyer, who was earning a product engineering design degree, connected with a classmate in her program who also was an elite athlete, Amanda Calabrese, then a member of the Open US National Lifesaving Team, which competes in bathing suits. As part of a class project, the pair set out to build a better tampon, forming Sequel in 2018, the year before they graduated.
The product, with padding in a spiral pattern the brand claims is less leak-prone, received FDA clearance in 2023, and is now being sold directly from the brand.
With Procter & Gamble’s Tampax and Kimberly-Clark’s Kotex dominating the tampon market, Sequel is being strategic with its marketing budget. Befitting its founders’ backgrounds, the startup has pursued sports-related partnerships, including activations with Athleta at the Paris Olympics. Retail Brew sat down with Meyer recently to learn about Sequel’s partnership strategy, and how a partnership can double as a sampling program.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How is Sequel using partnerships?
With Athleta…we were basically giving away product with them at a couple activations…near the Olympics, which was just awesome to be a part of. We’re very aligned with them on what type of woman we want to go after. They’re very much about the “Power of She,” their big campaign.
Some other ones that we’ve been doing include the Women’s Decathlon World Championships. We’re the partner, so we were stocking watch parties, provided products for athletes, and we’re a sponsor of the event.
We also just announced that we are [the official tampon provider] of the USL Super League, which is the new US women’s professional soccer league, so that’s been super exciting.
And we’ve been doing some partnerships with several fitness studios in New York City. They are actually kind of like B2B partners, so they buy product and stock their bathrooms and locker rooms for their clients. That’s kind of a departure from the pro athlete positioning, but it is also appealing to movement of all kinds—that you’re active and you might be in a workout class, but you also need a performance product.
Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
It sounds like all of these partnerships have some aspect of sampling.
Yeah, most of them do. That is something that we really are pushing for because we have a differentiated product experience. Wherever we can show up and get people to try the product organically, that’s better than starting with, “Okay, can we market to this person?” If we can give you one or two tampons to try, or you even find it in the bathroom at that point of need…that can be super impactful.
How does the fact that the biggest players in this space are Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble—these huge multinational companies—play into your own marketing?
We’re definitely the underdog in this space. And we think about this in: How can we think out of the box about partnerships?...How can we get people to sample organically? P&G is not out there stocking the locker rooms of different sports teams or even the fan bathrooms.
What’s the importance of the sports connection? Is it partly kind of a stress test, like if it works for athletes, it’ll definitely perform for your night out on the town?
It is a stress test. Coming from the Stanford design school, we definitely learned you want to design for the most extreme user. The best example of that is the Oxo kitchen appliances were originally designed for people with arthritis, and the idea is that “OK, if it’s made for this really extreme user that has dexterity issues, it’s probably going to be more comfortable for me, even if I don’t have issues.” And so we really keep that in our mind: If it works for Serena Williams, it’ll work for me in my working-from-home environment, or it’ll work for me going to Pilates, or picking up my kids from school, or in a boardroom meeting, or defending [a client] in court. We really are focused on the athlete positioning to start, but the idea is that really, if it works for that athlete, it’ll work for everyone.