Letting Customer Behavior Guide Distribution Strategies | Lauren Barker | Uresta

Lauren Barker is the CEO and Co-founder of Uresta, the first self-managed, FDA-cleared bladder support device for stress urinary incontinence. With nearly a decade in finance before joining Uresta, Lauren brought the analytical skills to identify a massive market gap and the vision to build a solution that prioritizes women's quality of life over symptom management. 

She personally reads every customer review, using those insights to shape product development and build Uresta's highly engaged community. Under her leadership, Uresta has become an eight-figure business serving over 30,000 women. 

What is Uresta? Uresta is revolutionizing bladder control with the first self-managed bladder support designed specifically for modern women, with no prescription or doctor visits required. Unlike traditional solutions, Uresta addresses leaks at their source, providing immediate all-day protection during physical activities like exercise, laughing, sneezing, and coughing.

With 97% effectiveness and 90% continued use after 12 months, Uresta restores confidence, spontaneity, and dignity to millions of women.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• [00:00] Intro
• [00:35] Addressing a gap in women's health
• [02:19] Leaving a career to chase an idea
• [06:28] Callouts
• [06:38] Finding success as an operator
• [08:40] Sponsor: Klaviyo
• [10:47] Validating a market before scaling up
• [14:50] Sponsor: Intelligems
• [17:05] Building early trust through creators
• [19:45] Sponsor: Electric Eye
• [20:54] Setting realistic budgets for paid ads
• [22:04] Using social proof for different markets
• [24:52] Marketing a product people deny

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
• Bladder support for women https://uresta.com/  
• Follow Lauren Barker https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-barker/  
• Follow Uresta https://www.instagram.com/myuresta/?g=5  
• Get your free demo https://www.klaviyo.com/honest
• Book a demo today at https://www.intelligems.io/
• Schedule an intro call with one of our experts https://electriceye.io/connect 

If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

Transcript

Lauren Barker

One of the things that's scary about Meta is you have to spend to learn. But then once you get there, it's somewhat pretty flexible in terms of ramping up and ramping down. But yeah, probably at least 5k to 10k. And I remember that being a very scary number. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, that's what I set expectations with younger entrepreneurs these days. “If you don't really have 5k or 10k a month for a single channel, do not even try to spin that across TikTok, Google, no. All into one. 

Lauren Barker

All into one. Yeah, for sure.

Chase Clymer

Honest Ecommerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow and scale an online business today. 

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming to the show Lauren Barker. She is the CEO and co-founder of Uresta, the support bra for your bladder, where she's transforming a taboo, underserved category into a rapidly growing pillar of women's health innovation. Lauren, welcome to the show. 

Lauren Barker

Thank you. Happy to be here. 

Chase Clymer

I'm excited. For those that don't know, what is Uresta? What's the flagship product that you are bringing to market over there? 

Lauren Barker

So Uresta is a solution for bladder leakage. Leaks that are caused by coughing or sneezing or jumping. If you've ever seen a woman cross her legs when she's about to sneeze, she has bladder leaks. And basically what's happening in the body is the muscles that are supporting your bladder have become weaker and damaged. It could be because of pregnancy related or you just started getting older, hormones as well. 

And we say we are a sports bra for your bladder because we actually help support the bladder to prevent those leaks from happening. This is our product here. And it essentially is a vaginally inserted product that will just support your bladder from within the vagina. I know that sounds very confusing. 

But it will prevent the leaks from happening, but you don't have to take it out to pee. So this is like, like I said, a sports bra.Or say if you sprained your ankle, you might wear an ankle brace. Think of it the same way. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Yeah. And I remember from when we chatted a while back, little inside baseball for all the listeners. We do a pre-interview for all these things. You mentioned that this is a very common problem that isn't talked about much. 

Lauren Barker

Yeah. So it is very prevalent. It impacts about 1 in 3 women after the age of 30. And then as many as 1 in 2 by 10 in menopause. Obviously, no one wants to pee their pants. It's embarrassing. But I think it also, and I've talked to thousands of women this point.It's something that makes them feel old. It makes them feel gross. 

They might worry in a social setting or a work setting. I hear this all the time, “Oh, I smell like urine. Can my colleague smell that I just leaked? So it's a huge confidence issue. But it's incredibly common. And I think because it's so embarrassing, women don't necessarily talk about it. So I think they often feel very isolated. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Now, where did the idea [come from]? Is it the chicken or the egg? Was it the problem or the solution? Where did the concept... Maybe there's a product here, a business here. Where did that start? 

Lauren Barker

So it is a bit of an interesting story. I started my career in investment banking and private equity. So I was on the investing side or buying businesses. And I just kind of by fluke, met the inventor of Uresta. So he was actually a urogynecologist. So he was actually doing bladder surgery to prevent leaks. And there's a lot of limitations when it comes to surgery. And I mean, obviously it's invasive, it's not always successful. 

And I think he was also just finding that a lot of women were trying to find a non-invasive solution. And so he came up with the idea. And as you can imagine, a medical product is very expensive to go through the initial clinical studies, regulatory approvals, and then just not really having the right experience or background. He was a full-time physician to properly market the product. 

He had invented it, gotten it through those initial regulatory hurdles, and then was just roadblocked. And didn't really know where to go next and had personally invested a fair bit of money. I got connected with him, like I said, I was working in private equity. There's not a lot of females in private equity. 

And someone sort of put us in touch and had said, would you just take a look at this business and see if maybe you could provide any advice? It wasn't the right fit for say my firm necessarily to invest in. But it just really sparked an interest in me. I feel like at the time it was probably like 2018, 2019.

I feel like we'd seen so much disruption in the menstrual space, for example, like menstrual cups. But then if you looked at the incontinence space, you were really just seeing, I think it was [limitation]. We did a survey and some research. About 80 % of women were using pads to manage their leaks. And it just felt really archaic. 

And also starting to understand that women were so dissatisfied with that solution. And then you also realize that this is such a common issue, like one in three women. That's a lot of women and the pad industry is huge. It just felt right for disruption. And I basically, it was one of those things. It was kind of like a bug in my ear. I thought about it for about two years. I was helping Dr. Farrell on the side of my desk, just purely out of passion. 

And then finally, one day I was like, it's now or never. And I don't want to wake up in 10 years and be like, “Wow, I really wish I quit my job.” And I didn't want to regret not partnering with him. And so yeah, I jumped in like 2 feet in. 

Chase Clymer

Hey everybody, just a quick reminder, please like this video and subscribe if you haven't. We're releasing interviews like this every week. So don't miss out. Now back to the interview. 

Absolutely. And that was one of the things that I really thought was exciting about your story and something I don't know if we've covered on the podcast before was you aren't the inventor of the product. But you were there from the very [beginning]. Not the very start, but pretty close to the beginning. And this is just another path which you can take in Ecommerce. 

I think one of my goals with this podcast, I guess, would be to show there's a bunch of ways to build a career, a life, and to do what you want in this space. You pointed out here that there are certain people that have great ideas, and then they don't know what to do next. And so if you are a person that is good at helping with some of these skills that we'll probably get to talk about here in a minute. Like marketing, branding, wholesale, distribution channels.

If you're just an Amazon expert, you just have to go find someone with a smart [idea]. With a cool product, right? There's a bunch of ways to do it. So that's my little soapbox moment for everyone. It's like, you don't have to have the next best idea, but you got to find someone that does. 

Lauren Barker

Yeah, totally. I think like Dr. Farrell, he's our chief medical officer. I love him. He's a great guy. But he really struggled on how to build a business and how to properly market it and have a successful go-to-market strategy. And he's smart. He obviously developed a very unique product. He required that medical knowledge. But yeah, I think it was lucky when we met, it was like the right time, right place. 

But I think to your earlier comment, entrepreneurship can take so many different angles. I think we see a lot and so I grew up or started my career in finance. And so it's somewhat common to buy a business instead of starting a business. And so I always like to say, we were a hybrid between a true startup from the ground versus buying an established business. So yeah. 

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I could also just imagine that it was possibly hard for the good doctor to speak to women in the way that they want to be spoken to as a male. 

Lauren Barker 

Yeah. I mean, he's doing surgery for this. He was talking to women. It's very... Marketing is so different. And our product is very interesting in the sense that it's a product that women really need, but don't necessarily want. And there's just so much shame. And to be honest, probably a lot of denial. So it's very different from a lot of other products out there that are being marketed. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. And marketing, surprise, surprise, has nothing to do with the medical benefits. It has to do with how it helps the selfish little things that drive human nature. So I'm sure that's something that's been fun to explore. So just to get back to the journey. You're like, “Screw it.” You jump in, like you said, both feet first. You don't want to miss this opportunity. What's going on in the business? And what were some of the first things that you started to give your full attention to? 

Lauren Barker 

So when I first joined full time, we were generating almost no sales. We had a couple things. We had been through Health Canada approval to sell over the counter so we could sell directly to consumers in Canada. In the US, we were prescription only. So in order to get Uresta, you would need to go to your doctor and get a prescription. So the first thing out of the gate is we started doing a ton of customer research and competitor research. 

And what we realized is that a lot of women weren't actually talking to their doctor about it. So less than 50 % would actually bring it up with their doctor. I think because it's a quality of life issue, it's not necessarily, “Oh my god, something's wrong with me. Maybe I have cancer." I think a lot of women would be, “Oh yeah, I pee when I sneeze but so does my mom. So I know it's okay.”

So yeah, we were finding a lot of women weren't going to their health care provider. We were also finding a lot of them were buying pads or reusable leak proof underwear. So we're like, okay, the majority of women are already buying their products the direct to consumer route. And so we really felt like we needed to be DTC. We needed to cut out and that was something I thought initially. 

The thought that we go more like the medical sales route, like educating physicians who would then tell their patients and then it would be sort of a prescription model. But I really felt strongly that we needed to take down that barrier of the prescription in the US. And as you can imagine, like going through an FDA process even though we had been FDA cleared, but just to remove that prescription requirement was incredibly expensive. 

We didn't have the capital to do it and it would take a lot of time. So my first kind of gut reaction was, “All right, well, we have the ability to sell directly to women in Canada. Let's test it here.” If you haven't figured it out, we are Canadian based. So we started in Canada. Under this like direct-to-consumer strategy. And we saw traction almost immediately. And that little bit of traction allowed us to raise the capital we needed to start the FDA process. 

So we knew we were going to have to raise capital. But yeah, we basically did that kind of building a case study in Canada. And then as we went through the FDA process, which was almost three years. We continued to grow in Canada and just like to learn as much as we can. Built our market strategy here so that when we are ready to launch in the US, we were better equipped, obviously. 

But then also could again, use Canada as a case study to then raise money to really go out of the gates in the US quite as aggressively as we can. Or with as much success as we could. 

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Absolutely. And this is my favorite…

Lauren Barker

Yeah.

Chase Clymer

Topic. Not really. All right. What was that aggressive go-to-market strategy in the States? What worked in Canada that you were trying to replicate here in the States once you got that barrier of that prescription out once you could just start selling online?

Lauren Barker

Yeah. So a couple things. One thing to note is we did also launch during the beginning of COVID in Canada. So I think you're somewhat limited. For example, we started on Meta. I feel like there were a lot of conversations around women's health happening on Meta. So there were a lot of allied healthcare professionals.

One, a big one was pelvic floor physiotherapists, for example, who were not working, who were honestly bored. They were at home. They were starting to post content online. So we started partnering with them to be like, “Hey, we want to send you a product. Can you do a review? Can you talk about it?” 

So we started to build trust that way and spread the word that way online. And then we started with Meta ads too, I think also because we were super eager to just get traction and show the product works. 

We knew trust was going to be huge. We knew we needed to get reviews. We knew we needed to get testimonials. So we knew we had to get sales. So we were like, “Okay, let's just get sales.” Not at any cost, but started with Meta. And then once we started to get the ball rolling on Meta, we were able to then just start. We started interviewing customers who bought it, doing surveys, really understanding what was in an ad that drew them to purchase.

And just really just started to learn as much as we could so that we could just improve our messaging. And we honestly grew pretty much mostly through Meta initially in Canada. And I know it's a challenging platform for a lot of people. But I think because it is a pretty large market size, we saw a lot of success. At the same time, once things started to open up, we had a big cohort of runners. 

So we started doing... If you're running a marathon, there's often an expo before the marathon. So we would go to a marathon, we'd have a booth. So we started to do in-person events. And then when we launched in the US, it was a lot of the same stuff. We have started to tap TV, which has also been a huge one for us as well. I think there's cool platforms like Tatari. 

There's ways to test TV in a very measurable way at a much smaller scale than I think you would think. It shocked me. But yeah. 

Chase Clymer

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Just because I want to set expectations for brands when it comes to paid ad spends and stuff. You don't have to give us the exact down to the penny. But do you remember when you were ramping things up, what you were spending a day or a month? Or when was it a scary number that now looking back, you're like, “Wow, I can't believe we were even spending that little?” 

Lauren Barker 

Oh, that's a good question. I remember early days being like, “Okay, do we have $5,000 this month to put into Meta?” That felt like a really scary number. I think one of the things that's scary about Meta is you have to spend, to learn. But then once you get there, it's somewhat pretty flexible in terms of ramping up and ramping down. But yeah, probably at least 5k to 10k. And I remember that being a very scary number. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, that's what I set as expectations with younger entrepreneurs these days. I was like, if you don't really have 5k or 10k a month for a single channel. Do not even try to spin that across TikTok, Google. All into one. 

Lauren Barker 

All in one. Yeah. For sure. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Yeah. Then something I just wanted to point out about you guys going after the Canadian market while trying to figure out what you could do in the US is once you had that email list and you had that pixel in Canada. Some people like to call it seasoned or whatever.

Lauren Barker 

Sure. Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

When the US opened up, you could just make a lookalike audience with all that weird data that Peta has on everybody. These are the exact customers. So I'm assuming being able to branch out into that market was infinitely easier than going from zero to one on Meta in the first place. 

Lauren Barker 

Yeah, I think it was for sure. There were a few different things we leveraged. One, we had our existing customer base. So we had a pretty good idea of the types of women who were purchasing Uresta. We had different cohorts. So we had our Canadian personas. We did a fair bit of research prior to launching in the US. So we did surveys and customer interviews as well with women who suffered from bladder leakage. And we found them to match up quite well with what we were seeing in Canada.

It is interesting. I did hear from a lot of other Canadian brands who first launched in Canada and then launched in the US that would tell me the US market is very different. Your personas will be very different. An ad that works in Canada won't necessarily translate in the US. I will say that has not been the case for us. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, maybe in Montreal.

Lauren Barker

Yes, maybe. But I think maybe a little bit right now, there's definitely probably stuff in Canada that's Canadian-specific or Canadian-made product, for example. So that's something that is important to Canadians right now. But generally speaking from a persona and a messaging standpoint, I think we found it to be pretty similar. And then something that was initially recommended to us was actually to split out our ad accounts. 

So we'd have a US account and a Canadian account on Meta. But we have really strong engagement on our ads. So we'll have women who will be like, “I use this product. I love it.” Or people will ask questions about it. And then it'll get a lot of engagement, which obviously also helps with ad performance. And so we were able to leverage some of those high engagement ads by relaunching them when we started in the US. 

So and I kind of agree with my earlier point, trust is really important. Building social proof was critical for us. So yeah, being able to just leverage all that social proof from Canada has been really important in our US launch. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience? 

Lauren Barker 

I think it's because I always think about a couple different things. I think with Uresta, I touched on this, but it's a product that I think women don't necessarily want to accept that they have to purchase. I speak with a lot of our customers. It's like one of our [SOP]. If you're not in regular contact with your customers, you should be because you learn so much. 

Currently, right now, I am reaching out to women who have expressed interest in filming a video testimonial. So when I reach out to them, we usually start the call off on getting to know them and their purchase journey and all that. But I've heard this from so many women now, “Oh, I knew about your rest, but I was on the fence for like eight months because I didn't want to accept that I needed this product.” 

And so I was like, “Okay, this is really interesting.” It wasn't the price that was holding them back. It was truly denial and them feeling like they were old and accepting that they had the issue. So I don't know. It's been really interesting because I think there's so many products out there where you want to buy that product. But you don't necessarily need it. And we're like the total opposite. 

And I think just really leaning into trust and education and finding ways to destigmatize bladder leakage has just been really important in our marketing journey. Because I think I've had so many people along the way being like, “Oh, this should be like a slam dunk.” And I'm like, it's not necessarily a slam dunk.

Chase Clymer

Yeah, but writing the ads. You interview your customer and then talk about that transformational moment. That is just hook, line and sinker. Easy ad copy right there. 

Lauren Barker

Right. Yeah, for sure. Exactly. Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. Now if I'm listening to this, and it potentially resonates with me, maybe I'm not there ready to accept it, but I want to get on your retargeting pixel. So what website should I visit to check things out and learn more? 

Lauren Barker

Yeah, it would be uresta.com. So uresta.com.

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. We'll link to that. We'll link to your Instagram as well in the show notes. Lauren, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing that amazing story. 

Lauren Barker

Awesome. Well, thank you for having us.