Founded in 2014, Thinx, Inc. makes absorbent underwear that can be worn during menstruation. But the feminine care market had seen virtually no innovation in half a century because of the taboo against discussing the topic of menstruation. As a result, the startup was competing against large incumbents like Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson.
Assistant Professor Rembrand Koning examines these strategic marketing challenges and discusses the importance of removing taboos and biases in order to bring innovation to the feminine are market in his case, “Thinx, Inc.—Breaking Barriers in Feminine Care.”
BRIAN KENNY: Few would argue that the words taboo and menstruation go hand in hand and often with disastrous consequences for women. Prior to the 1960s, feminine hygiene products weren’t advertised due to concern for public decency. And it would take until 1986 for the word, period, to be said out loud by actress Courtney Cox in a TV ad for Tampax. Today, such ads are common as makers of feminine hygiene products try to grab their share of this $35 billion market. P&G alone invested 100 million in ads last year. And yet, despite progress made, the taboo persists. Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor Rem Koning, to discuss his case, entitled, “Thinx, Inc. Breaking Barriers in Feminine Care.”
BRIAN KENNY: I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Presents network. Rem Koning studies how managers and entrepreneurs discover new ways to create value. This is his first time joining us on Cold Call. We hope that you enjoy it so you come back again, Rem. Thanks for being here.
REMBRAND KONING: Thanks for having me, Brian.
BRIAN KENNY: Thinx is a really interesting study in innovation by a female entrepreneur. Can you start by telling us what your cold call is when you walk into the classroom?
REMBRAND KONING: So the cold call for this one’s fun. You walk into the classroom, look around, you’ve got 90 students there. And I generally like to lock eyes with a man in the class. Because this can be a little awkward to talk about. People are a little nervous. No matter your gender orientation, it can be something that’s difficult. And I’ll look at them and I’ll say, “Historically, why has there been so little innovation in the feminine hygiene market?” In general, the response I get, is a little bit of white comes over the face, you see the sweat bead come down the forehead. And a stutter. And they say, “Well, there’s tampons and there’s pads.” And I pause and say, “Hey, everyone, this subject can be hard to talk about,” and get a laugh out of the room, step back and say, “I myself, don’t have a lot of experience with it personally, but I’ve learned a lot from the case we are going to learn from the discussion.” And then we opened it up from there and explore exactly how taboos have really shaped the economics of this industry. I think we think of taboos and social norms, as something that sociologists study or something that’s important for social movements. But it shapes a lot of economic action. And I think there’s no better case than the feminine hygiene market. Where it’s really shaped things like switching costs, right? If nobody wants to talk about it, it’s very hard to learn about what the other options are. As you mentioned, there were no television ads until the 1970s. How are you going to get consumers to switch and do innovations and tell them about the innovations? And then a bunch of other factors start playing a role too. So you look at who runs companies like Procter & Gamble, it tends to be men. And so, are they just more likely to overlook the problem, maybe dismiss it? Perhaps. You think about entrepreneurs entering, we know female entrepreneurs were likely to see these problems, they have the experience, notice them, maybe less likely to overlook them. They have a hard time raising capital because essentially all venture capitalists are men up to the last decade. And so there’s all these forces that compound, revolving around this idea of the social norms and the uncomfortableness that lead to a market where people are really sticky in their purchase patterns. You don’t get a lot of innovation coming in. And you don’t get much competition. And for companies like Kimberly-Clark or Procter & Gamble, it’s an amazing place to be. I mean, their margins are like 50% on these products. It’s a really big market. Something like a quarter of the world’s population is your customer. It’s a great place to be. And so that’s where we start the conversation for the Thinx case.
BRIAN KENNY: That’s awesome. That’s a great way to start it. So how did you hear about Thinx? How did you decide to write this case? How does it relate to the things you think about as a scholar?
REMBRAND KONING: This one came from me looking around and being interested in how diversity impacts strategy. When we think strategy, we normally don’t think diversity. We’re like, “Oh, that’s something for organizational behavior or people studying HR.” And my contention, that’s not the case. A lack of diversity isn’t just a problem for who works at your firm, it’s a problem for the strategies you develop. And in particular, for the products that end up in markets. So if we don’t have women, if we don’t have African-Americans inventing. They’re often the people who are most likely to see opportunities to invent for people like themselves. And so I was looking for a case along this. And one of the coauthors on the case, Elie, had a friend who had gone to HBS, Maria Molland, who took over as the CEO of Thinx. And so we got connected to them and it just seemed like this amazing roller coaster of a story. We could probably do three or four classes just unpacking this case. And so that’s where it really came from was, how can we take this idea of diversity, and explore it in the context of strategic decision making in terms of marketing, places where sometimes it gets overlooked.
BRIAN KENNY: And we’re going to talk more about Maria Molland, she’s the protagonist in the case. So some great insights into her leadership and what she’s been doing since she went to Thinx. And I should say for our listeners, by the way, Thinx is spelled T-H-I-N-X, even though it sounds like thinks, with a K-S. So let’s talk a little bit… We’ve already teased a little bit about the size of the industry. 35 billion globally. You mentioned a third of the world is your potential customer base. Who are the big players in this space? And what does the market landscape look like?
REMBRAND KONING: The market landscape is highly concentrated. So these are classic consumer goods. You’ve got your big players, your Proctors & Gambles, your Johnsons & Johnsons, your Kimberly-Clarks. And then a lot of really tiny firms. So it’s super highly concentrated. And the way these firms compete is brilliant. It’s not competing by trying to lower prices or out innovate the other person. It’s a little bit about marketing. And in a lot of cases, it’s a little bit about just getting your product on the shelf at a Target or at a Walmart or at a CVS. And people are going to come in, they’re going to buy it. Historically, it’s something people have felt awkward about buying, so they want to just pick the one on the shelf, put it in their bag, get out of the store as quickly as possible. There’s some great history around this one. When pads were first invented, you’d go into the store in the 19th century, you wouldn’t even say the name of the product. You’d walk in if you were a woman, you’d put your money in the slot, they would hand it under in a secret bag. And you’d walk out as if the transaction never happened. So that’s the history that you’re facing. And what these companies, right? Brilliantly from a business perspective, I’m not so sure from a societal perspective, right? Is that they were able to take the fact that when nobody wants to talk about something it’s very hard to compete, it’s very hard to steal customer share. And so they’ve been in this very happy equilibrium for a number of decades, up to around 2010, right? Printing money, not really have to worry about it. Doing minor process improvements, but nothing fundamentally disruptive.
BRIAN KENNY: So I was going to ask if there’s brand loyalty, but it doesn’t sound like it’s brand loyalty, as much as it’s just too much trouble to change brands. I mean, you start with something and I would have guessed it’s generational too. Moms recommend something to their daughters and so on. Is that safe to say?
REMBRAND KONING: That’s what, from talking to Thinx who comes in and starts innovating, that was the research that they did. Is that mom passes it down to daughter. There’s a conversation that happens. And then the conversation never happens again. And so you stick with that brand you know. And to be clear, there are real risks of potentially trying new products. As soon as you get something that you trust and you know works, there’s a lot of reticence to switch to a new products.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. And the case does a good job of describing some of the dire consequences of this taboo, right? Because it’s one thing to have it be kept on the down low in the transaction in the store, but there are some real serious implications in some cultures about the taboos surrounding menstruation. Can you talk a little bit about that?
REMBRAND KONING: Oh, yeah. I mean, so if you look in India, for example, you see as soon as women start menstruating, what you find is that, they’re 12, 13 years old, they’re much more likely to stop going to school. They miss days of school, they’ll just drop out of school. You see similar patterns in parts of West Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. And you end up with the taboo fundamentally shaping people’s opportunity even to go outside the home or get an education. So those are the most extreme cases that we see around the world. So this isn’t just an issue of, “I feel a little bit embarrassed,” but in a lot of cases, changes people’s opportunity in life. And so, that’s something that I think is lurking in the background here, when we think about these norms and taboos shaping the market.
BRIAN KENNY: We’re going to get to Thinx in a minute, but before we do that, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the lack of innovation for decades, centuries, I don’t know how long. It hasn’t changed a whole lot going back for many, many years. Why is that?
REMBRAND KONING: Yes. So, you see an explosion of innovation in the early 20th century. A combination of women’s rights, changes in material science and technology, so you get more absorbent pads invented in the early late 19th century, really the early 20th century. The tampon comes on the scene out of innovations where nurses were treating wounds during both world wars. They see this super absorbent material, they put two and two together, the tampon gets invented. The big invention is the plastic applicator. After that, and then there’s nothing. And I think that goes back to what we were talking about in terms of that cold call. Which is that you couldn’t advertise. So if you invented something really cool and new, how do you tell people about it? People are uncomfortable talking about it. So word of mouth isn’t going to solve your problem. Further, these firms are making really good money. This is classic innovator’s dilemma. If I’ve got a product that’s got 50% margins and people are buying on a monthly basis. And I know that thing is going to sell and get turns in the pharmacies where they’re being sold. I have very little incentive to try to disrupt myself. I’m happy sitting on this stream of income that I know is going to be coming into the future. And so you essentially get no innovation for a long time. And then essentially when Thinx gets going in the 2000s, you start seeing an explosion of different products to address these sorts of issues. And suddenly the market becomes a lot more vibrant.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. So what was the problem that Thinx was trying to solve? What makes them different? And how did they establish themselves in a market that is pretty much dominated by these huge players?
REMBRAND KONING: So when you go back to the original founding story of Thinx it was, why are there so few options, a concern about the environment as well. So there’s a lot of plastic that comes off tampons. They have to be thrown away. They can be uncomfortable, you have to replace them, you can’t wear them for a long time. So the founder comes up with this idea for a period underwear. You can think of it as absorbent material, locked into this underwear, you put it on. You can wear it for a long period of time. It’s absorbent. It’s comfortable. You can sleep in it. You can move around in it. You can exercise in it. And so has this great idea, Thinx it’s going to revolutionize women’s empowerment, has trouble raising capital. So where’s she go? Well to this new website called Kickstarter at the time. So I believe it’s 2013. They go on Kickstarter raises $65,000, uses that to get a prototype of the product, get some funding from the manufacturer in Sri Lanka. And it’s off to the races in terms of really intense grassroots interest, particularly in New York City, where they started. And so, they drive that interest by doing something that’s super clever. And I think a really nice strategy, a really nice marketing tactic as well. When you’re confronting these taboo or uncomfortable industries, is you turn it around and you break that taboo. You break those social norms deliberately to drive interest and show people, in some sense, how absurd they are. So they do this amazing campaign, I actually remember seeing this in the subways in New York City, and the MTA in New York City, the subway agency pulls the ads… And the controversy from the MTA pulling these ads, got them enough free to exposure in newspapers and discussion online that I think they’re probably 10X, if not 100X the eyeballs they saw for the amount of money they spent. And so that was a great grace to get to that grassroots movement and show people that we’re at the forefront of innovating, of changing the norms in this space. So that there’ll be more innovation. So there’ll be more entry. They do a similar thing. And this one blew my mind. They go to Selfridges in London, and Selfridges wouldn’t let them use the word period in their display in the store. Boom! Gets covered by The London Press. Lots of great interest. Drives that growth.
BRIAN KENNY: Let’s talk about Maria Molland then. She comes in after Thinx has already been around for a few years. She’s stepping into us to a difficult situation because the founder and CEO has left the company under shadowy circumstances.
REMBRAND KONING: There’s a sexual harassment allegation, things get complicated, the culture’s coming off the wheels at the company, the founder leaves and Maria gets to come in. Graduate from Harvard Business School, worked at eBay, worked at Yahoo, has experience in consumer tech. And is really interested in working in women’s health. And is a little nervous about coming into this company, it’s around 30 some odd people at the time, and trying to right the ship. But decides to take on the challenge and come in as CEO. And there’s a lot going on. They’ve got really strong loyal customers, but a lot of the rest of the company is a mess. There’s some amazing talent there, but there’s no process. And so she has to come in and work out, how are we going to build a company that can’t just be a couple million dollars a year in revenue, but could potentially be half a billion dollars a year in revenue. She wants to grow to the next great consumer product here. And that’s the challenge she faces when she enters and takes over things.
BRIAN KENNY: So how do you even begin? It sounds daunting to even figure out where to start in a situation like that, where does she place her bets?
REMBRAND KONING: So I think she does one thing just to start, that’s 100% right and it’s any turnaround situation, is like take a deep breath, right? Calm yourself down. And look around at what’s working and what’s not. And what she found is that they had an amazing product, that people… There was a lot of demand for. They had amazingly loyal customers. But internally, they weren’t ready to scale. They had built a company around a purpose, and it was really very focused on changing the world and changing gender norms and thinking about a very liberal view of women’s rights. And though she was very much for it and wanted to support these employees, she also knew that if this product was going to make a difference in the world, they couldn’t just focus on the message and the purpose internally, they needed to make sure they put routines so that they can actually scale that innovation. Because otherwise the company would end there and you wouldn’t see the Thinx product being used in places like Omaha or Canada or Japan. Would only be used in Greenwich Village in Brooklyn. That’s not an outcome that really changes the world and makes women across the world better off. So she decides that she’s going to really focus on the business needs of the company, along with the larger social purpose of the company. Puts in metrics to incentivize those business needs, makes sure that they’re putting in a better cultural routines. Things like maternity leave. You wouldn’t think of this, but the company had no maternity leave policy. Which is remarkable, right? Serving women, but it gets lost in the mission because they were so focused on one particular problem. And didn’t think about it a little bit more holistically. And really sets up, from a strategic point of view, sets the groundwork so that they can think about how they’re going to scale this innovation that they have, scale this product they have. And so it retreats from growth for a year or two, sets up the team, hires some really great talent, and after a year or two was then ready again, to think about how do we actually turn this into… Maintain and even grow our position as the market leader.
BRIAN KENNY: The case also describes, if I’m not mistaken, that as she looked across the social purposes that were driving a lot of the company’s activities, she had to pull back from some of those. They weren’t all consistent with what Thinx needed to focus on. And she lost some people as a result of that. I mean, we’re dealing with a millennial generation who cares very much about the purpose-driven aspects of the organizations that they work for. And here people might’ve signed up for something and then got soured on the fact that a new leader comes in and is turning away from those things.
REMBRAND KONING: And I think this is one of the things where going back to this idea that we need diversity in our companies and the markets where we’re serving. They were having trouble in terms of their employee base of thinking about how they could extend to the rest of the market. And so they had these two personas that I think is a really helpful way to think about this. Elena is their persona of the young 20 something, works in Brooklyn, probably doesn’t have kids and is really excited about trying things like Thinx and other companies. And they do great job of tapping that market. But what they find when they do an analysis is that where their larger market is, is probably what they call Diane. Has two kids, has a high powered job, is thinking about how she might one day pass down her traditions and the product recommendations she has to her daughters. Is also thinking about what would be good for herself and make her life easier. And the issue was the company didn’t have a lot of people could speak to that segment. And further, what they found is they were getting a lot of demand actually from places like Texas, or Florida, or Louisiana that are more right-leaning. And they were excited about those products, even if they didn’t hold necessarily the same political views as the company. And this created a lot of tension. How do we adjust our message, to keep empowering women at the core, but make sure we aren’t alienating people who might hold different sorts of views? And so this is where you get a lot of turnover in the company and they have to do a good job of diversifying who works for their firm and speaking to that broader audience. I think what Maria did here was just really brilliant in terms of saying, “We can’t solve every message and every problem.” When we talk about a strategy, it’s as much about what you don’t do is what you do. And in her case, she decides this company is going to be about empowering women to deal with their periods. To get the products and the help they need. Sometimes having to focus in terms of what your corporate purpose is, so that you can actually achieve it.
BRIAN KENNY: So what is the strategy that they pursue as they move down this path? They’ve got their personas, they’ve made a push into retail, and there’s been some bumps along the way in that, how does the strategy begin to unfold?
REMBRAND KONING: Great question. So they’ve got this Elena character. She shops online. They’ve been selling direct to consumer like a Warby Parker or Casper. Everything’s going straight to the consumer. They’re exploring a little bit popups, physical locations. But what they realize is, where the vast majority of the sales are, where the Dianes are still shopping, are places like Target and Walmart. And so the core question: what channel do you sell through? And how do you sell through these different channels? Do you go on Amazon? Do you go on Target? Are you going to sell a lower price point? It’s worth mentioning here that Thinx are more expensive, they’re reusable. So over time they can actually be cheaper, but it’s just a much more costly, upfront purchase. And so the decision is, for her, do we try to go omni-channel or do we stay focused just on the direct-to-consumer channel?
BRIAN KENNY: The cost issue becomes relevant, and a decision has to be made about whether or not they’re going to create a lower-cost version of the product. And if so, what does that do to the brand? Does that somehow chip away at the value of the original products? Talk a little bit about that.
REMBRAND KONING: Yeah. And so, one of the things you see is that the original entry strategy to this firm was breaking the taboo down, right? Doing these provocative ads, telling people that this is comfortable to talk about, telling people that they can go find these alternatives to tampons and pads, if they’re unhappy with what they have. The problem is, as soon as you start educating the customer, you’re building a freeway that other competitors, other cars can drive on. You’ve done all this education telling people it’s okay to talk about. But remember there was no innovation. And these companies were making so much money, Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark were making so much money, because nobody wanted to talk about it and nobody was switching, right? So that reduced competition. Suddenly, Thinx is coming in and to get their customers they’re breaking the taboo. And this is a classic entrepreneurial strategy problem. You’ve kicked open the door. But now you’ve got to work out a way to close the door behind you. And so this is where the cost really comes in. Do they stay very high price and premium and demand from a greater brand, or do they think that eventually people are going to be like, “Oh, there’s competitors that look similar. I’m just going to go with the cheaper option.” They’re concerned as well, because if they want to compete, not just in the DTC channel, and they want to compete in retail, they need a lot of turns and they need a lot of customers to get people like Target or Walmart or CVS interested. Otherwise they’re not going to want to carry these products. And so there’s a real tension, that they’ve done this fantastic job of building out an entry strategy. And now Maria is at this point where she has to think about do we double down on entry strategy, but maybe that caps our growth, or do we shift our strategy to be broader based, maybe lower costs to try to find those cost efficiencies, the competitive advantage from scale, that in the long term would allow us to be the market leader in this space?
BRIAN KENNY: So I’m just curious about, does any CEO ever say, “We’re going to stick with the status quo and cap our growth?” I mean, it seems like the answer is always, “Yeah, we got to grow more.” Is that the wrong answer sometimes?
REMBRAND KONING: It can be. I think it’s a really interesting thing that comes down to the economics of the market, and it comes down to the ambition of the CEO. And I think one of the things that I often push back on here, is I think when we hear a Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos say, “I’m going to the moon,” literally to the moon, which I think what they’re both trying to do, everyone it’s, “Hey, maybe they shouldn’t be that wealthy,” but it’s applause for the ambition, right? And as soon as we moved to female CEOs. I see over and over again, we get these questions of, should they be quite so ambitious? Maybe they should stick with the regular strategy, right? And so, one of the things I pushed back here is, I think she’s right, that we want to really go for scale here. Maybe there’s an argument to stay really niche. But if we look at the history of consumer packaged goods. You need scale. These are things where there are scale economies in production. You need lots of turns in stores. I’ll give you an example. That’s similar science, like Thinx is at, is Spanx, right? They started niche very high luxury and then moved out to a much broader set of categories. I’m gunning for the big win here. I think the question though is how you do it? Right? Maybe there’s a way to expand just on DTC. Maybe retail is the right option. How do you think about this in terms of timing too, is really important. Because you don’t want to… If you’re making these great margins, how long can you milk that before competition is going to come in and start driving down prices in this market?
BRIAN KENNY: One thing we haven’t talked about either is they did have an incontinence line of products as well, which with an aging population, globally, you would think that that would be an equally lucrative market to expand in. But it doesn’t sound like that was an area that they saw as much promise in.
REMBRAND KONING: So the technology is absorbent material. So cleverly, they work out that they could use this for incontinence as well. And exactly like you said, huge growing market, equally taboo to talk about. And they get really good traction initially with it. What they realized is just a little bit more complex to enter that market, particularly in terms of getting eyeballs to buy the product. So if we go back to Elena, who they were selling to initially, they got her through Instagram, they got her through Facebook, they were able to do the ads there. The older population is less likely to be super active on these social media platforms. And so you’re talking television ads, people are still uncomfortable with that. And it was harder for them to educate. Because one of the things they do is, when you go through Instagram or when you go through Facebook, it takes them to the Thinx homepage and the page isn’t just about selling. It really is about educating. So they have a bunch of tools to explain different sorts of products and what might work for you, to explain how to wash and handle the garment, all this stuff that might be a little bit uncomfortable and there’s no one to ask in the store, right? They can educate online. And so without that online channel, they had a hard time gaining a little bit of initial success to scale up beyond that.
BRIAN KENNY: So the original funding was a Kickstarter campaign and that worked when they were young and scrappy and trying to get started. Maria is entering at a different phase, but still, can’t go it alone. So they do need funding. And this is where Kimberly-Clark comes into the picture. Can you talk a little bit about the dynamic of how she was able to make that happen, and how important it was to their strategy?
REMBRAND KONING: Maria decides they need capital to expand. If they want to be this big company, they’re going to need money for more advertising, to expand production, to hire a workforce who can really help the company grow. And goes on the road to raise money and ends up really hitting it off with the corporate venture capital arm with Kimberly-Clark. So they’re a big incumbent in the space. They see these disruptors coming and they make an investment. Crucially, she makes sure she retains a lot of control over the product that she can compete independently. So they don’t shut off that competition channel. But that money is huge. And beyond the money, the partnership is important because it potentially gives access to a whole global distribution network over the long term as they start thinking about scaling up.
BRIAN KENNY: And I guess the benefit for Kimberly-Clark in this is that now they’ve got a foothold into this market as well, and you can be sure that their competitors are all moving down in this direction. I mean, the innovation that Thinx brought to the table is something that I would imagine the incumbents are trying to figure out how do we…
REMBRAND KONING: It’s something that incumbents have a hard time doing, I was listening to my colleague, Emily Truelove talk with you, Brian, about P&G, trying to do their own internal innovation teams and how difficult that change was. And one way to sidestep the difficulty of trying to change your organization to be more innovative, is to acknowledge that you’re really good at being an incumbent. You can do the big media campaigns. You can optimize distribution, you can optimize manufacturing and say, “Let’s outsource,” right? “Let’s have other companies do that innovation and set up a corporate VC arm.” And that’s what Kimberly-Clark does here, is they take the opposite model of instead of trying to come up with innovations in house, they’re going to make investments in all these new sorts of consumer goods so that they can benefit from these new innovators entering the market.
BRIAN KENNY: So can you describe a little bit about what the marketing campaign is and as they enter this mass retail market, how do they again, create a little bit controversy to draw attention to their product?
REMBRAND KONING: Maria has got the new team assembled. I think they’re roughly 1000 people and this is right before the pandemic hits. And they’re considering do we stick to DTC? Do we move into selling through retail? I mean, how are we going to build awareness so that if we do go into the retail channel, that we can really get people interested. So they come up with this provocative ad campaign called MENstruation, M-E-N, all cap locks. And the idea is, what if we lived in a world where men had periods? And I encourage people to go Google these ads, I think they’re clever and provocative and really get you to think of what if men had to go through this, how might power dynamics in the world be different? How might we treat menstruation very differently as a society? Fantastic ad, think they’re building on all the controversies that come and they’re waiting to see, will this ad be effective as the case closes.
BRIAN KENNY: I hope there’s a B case, because I’d love to hear how those ads play out.
REMBRAND KONING: There is a B case. Which is fantastic. I can say, the ads don’t go as effectively as you would hope, which is really interesting. There’s a silver lining in the pandemic though, that I think is worth mentioning. Is that, they have a lot of troubles as many retailers and companies did, but with everybody being at home, they were more comfortable trying products like Thinx.
BRIAN KENNY: Interesting.
REMBRAND KONING: If you’re not out and about and worried about a leak, you’re so bored at home, let’s try some new products. They got a surge of interest from that, which is, I think, a really fascinating one to think about how being at home actually allows you to do things that you wouldn’t be comfortable to do in public and changes behavior, is fascinating to think about, for a host of different sorts of companies.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. That’s super interesting.
REMBRAND KONING: As we move into this more digital mediated world.
BRIAN KENNY: Rem, this has been a great conversation. I’ll send you off with one last question, which is, if you would like people, our listeners, to remember one thing about this case, what would it be?
REMBRAND KONING: I think the one thing they should take away from this case, is that diversity or lack of diversity isn’t just a problem for your HR folks. Isn’t just a problem internally in your company. It’s a problem for innovation. It’s a problem for strategy. It’s a problem for who benefits from what businesses build, right? Not only do we see labor market bias, but that spills over into product market bias. We see too few innovations aimed at women, at African-Americans, of underrepresented communities of all sorts. And so, as you’re thinking about building a strategy moving forward, I think one really exciting place to find opportunity is to see where there’s been these biases, where there has been a taboo, where these norms have maybe prevented people from coming up with innovations and innovating for those communities. Because not only can, I think, you build a really successful company, you can do a lot of good in the world at the same time.
BRIAN KENNY: Rem Koning, thanks for joining us to talk about Thinx. What a great case. Thanks for writing it.
REMBRAND KONING: Thanks for having me, Brian.
BRIAN KENNY: We are excited to be celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the case method at Harvard Business School. It’s a yearlong celebration, kicking off this month alongside our new academic year. If you want more on the history of the case method, visit our website: www.hbs.edu/casemethod100. Cold Call is a great way to get a taste of the case method, after all each episode features a business case and its faculty author. You might also like our other podcasts: After Hours, Climate Rising, Skydeck, and Managing the Future of Work. Find them on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Thanks again for joining us. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School, brought to you by the HBR Presents network.