Thyme Sullivan
Photo: Thyme Sullivan
Period. Tampon. Menstruation.
These aren’t whisper words anymore (we can even say these words around boys). Yet, Thyme Sullivan had to spell it out to an industry that shouldn’t need an explanation. We sat with Thyme, CEO and co-founder of TOP: The Organic Project, to discuss the challenges of being an industry leader, entrepreneur, mom, partner, wife, advocate, and salesperson while also being a woman. In 2021.
The conversation begins here:
Nestlé, Pepsi, Coke. Dunkin, corporate. I’m sure you were dominated by men in these companies.
Absolutely. Because there was no entrepreneurship when we were graduating college, you were supposed to go get a job. Looking back, my grandmother dropped out of college because she got pregnant. That’s what you did. She had a bunch of babies, because she was Catholic. That’s what you did. And it wasn’t the best path for her. Then my mom went to college, but then didn’t finish college immediately because she got pregnant. When she went to work outside the home she was met with adversity because you were supposed to stay home with your kids.
We thought in our generation that we were so blessed because we get to go to college and have corporate jobs, and we get to put our careers first and it would be amazing. But, in the industry I was in, it was very male-dominated and the few women who were there were so convinced that they were competing for just a few board seats, that they weren’t kind to each other; they wouldn’t help each other out. They only looked out for themselves. Guys never did that. I had some really great bosses and I had some really tough ones.
“I remember having a boss that when I had a banner year and my male counterparts got better raises and bonuses and I asked why, he said, “You don’t need it, your husband is a Director.” ”
And I said, “That has nothing to do with it!” I was the only woman on an executive team and you know I miss the first day of school, the last day of school, both my kids’ birthdays, Halloween. It was unnecessary. I could have a meeting Tuesday or Wednesday and I would leave Tuesday morning on the earliest flight to get there in time, and then peel out of there after the meeting to get home. Whereas every other guy on my team would leave usually Sunday, sometimes Monday, and they would golf and get a steak dinner and they wouldn’t leave after the meeting. They would leave on Friday. They would be gone for a full week for a two-day meeting, every single time.
As a woman, if you weren’t networking with your boss and everybody and spending that whole week going out for a steak and beers, which is the last thing you wanted to do with an infant at home, you couldn’t get ahead. It was just tough, it was really, really tough. I remember having my baby and I was up at 5 in the morning to run on the treadmill so that my suit still fit. Then I have to get my kids ready and off to daycare, both of them at the time, and then it was over an hour commute and by the time I get to my desk it was 9:30 and people are giving me the side-eye like you’re a big slacker, and I’ve been up since 5 in the morning! And I thought this is not sustainable! There’s nothing about the working culture that was built around women. And I think the only silver lining coming out of this last year is that people are realizing we don’t have to be in the office all the time. I still have people asking, “Hey, do you want to have coffee?” and I’m all “No! Pick up the phone!” The only thing that drives me nuts now is no one can just pick up the phone and call someone, everything has to be set. If you call somebody and they answer they act like they just got electrocuted [laughing] and I just want to have a conversation. And every time I schedule a call it turns into a Zoom and then I have to comb my hair.
Really what happened is when my job was eliminated, I couldn’t relocate, and again, this is a very old-school thought in business that they thought you weren’t committed to the company if you weren’t willing to relocate around the country. But my husband works here and we are from around here, and my kids go to school here. I had a good severance package and it gave me time to reflect and really think about what I wanted. I was about to start with Kimberly Clark and I know I could’ve gotten the same type of job with much better pay, because I was grossly underpaid, and I remember I had mentors and I said “I’ll do eventually the same thing I did with Nestle and I did with Pepsi and I did with Coke.” Someone who knew me very well said, “You can do it, you will do great, and in six months you are going to be bored.” It’s true. I think that happens if you always had that entrepreneurial spirit and that creative spirit.
There’s no encouraging risk-taking in corporate America. They want you to stay in line and follow the rules. You couldn’t take a risk because it wasn’t rewarding; it just wasn’t worth it. My cofounder and I both had long careers and it was the hardest thing to untrain that muscle and take risks, to make decisions a lot more quickly and to just own it and be ourselves.
Who was in your head while you were pushing forward with this business plan?
Sarah Blakely. Always. We were the recipients of the Red Backpack. She texts us every Monday. She’s built this community. Here was yesterday’s: “Happy Monday. Don’t be a lady, be a legend.” I heard, ”Be a lady,” a lot. That word has a lot of mixed emotions for me. There’s nothing wrong with being gracious and kind, we should all strive to be those things. But somehow [that word] felt more like “don’t speak up” and “quiet who you really are” so I say go for the legend instead. The reason I like her is because she never said she’s the smartest person in the room, but she figures it out. She carved her own path. When people told her, “You’re gonna have to go to war to be an entrepreneur,” she said, “I don’t want to go to war, I want to build a better culture and do things differently.” She gives back. She is exactly who she is on her personal Instagram as she is in her corporate life. She has a messy life that she lets everyone in. She let everybody see her messy house during COVID. She makes pancakes with her kids on Sunday on Instagram Live. She’s just relatable. So many women look at her and they say, “I can do that too,” because he has four kids and a messy life and she’s a billionaire. So even as a billionaire you can still have a messy life and stuff still gets crazy in your household and that’s totally normal. We had done a podcast and the host said, “he reason why this is gonna be a great podcast is because women are going to find you and Denielle very relatable and maybe they’ll get the courage to do it because you literally just figure it out.” We did. There’s been so many challenges but we’re just both very curious and both creative and both great connectors. I was just on the phone with her and talking about all these great connections because now we realize we need employees and HR and payroll and all of the things that are so far out of our sphere, so we just call other entrepreneurs.
Let’s talk about relatable. I remember when I was young, looking up to my boss and thinking I can’t wait to rise to that level. And then I saw them as just, well, women! I thought I don’t emulate you at all. Your house is a mess. That’s not what I’m dreaming of, because I want St. John’s Suits, right?
Perfectly coiffed. And to make a life versus a living.
“I’m trying to show my daughter that I can have girlfriends and I can go to yoga. I just think that [there] was not enough permission for women to have a life outside of work. They always say “work like you’re not a parent and parent like you don’t work.” That’s insane.”
It’s just not natural. I hate the “How do you do the work-life balance?” Don’t ever use that again. That’s a lie. It’s an integration. Our lives have merged with what we do because we really love it. But that’s a really silly term. And anybody who says it doesn’t really live it. It’s not reality.
When I read your Linkedin profile, your two-word title jumped right out at me: Speaker and Storyteller. Probably the best titles I’ve ever heard.
I have decided that is what my next chapter is going to be.
Nobody listens unless it’s a good story.
Everything begins with a good story. One of the things we got with the grant from Sarah Blakely is a subscription to MasterClass. My first was with David Sedaris. I think everything is about storytelling. I remember this woman said, ‘I just wanna tell you, I greatly admire what you’re doing because I don’t know a lot of women who would put on a tampon suit and put themselves on social media. I know that took a lot of courage but what you’re doing is so important.’ Nobody would listen to us. It wasn’t until we really put ourselves out there in this very fearless way [that] people would listen. It makes it easier to have a conversation. Now it’s nothing. Because it was always just my girlfriends saying, “Tell me about this tampon business you’re going to start.” Now I would go anywhere in this suit. My husband and kids don’t even care anymore. My son is a senior in high school and I was really worried at first. Was this going to be a problem for him with his peers? But he says no, it’s making it so normal. I went to a grad party and I put a check and a card in a gift bag with one of each of our products. The girl said I love your product and your company so much. Everywhere I go, I bring a little gift bag. Our biggest sellers are our first period box and our new mom box. Our first period box is so huge because of our partnership with Girlology and really giving this present of knowledge, so she knows what’s normal and not normal. And in a community where she can ask questions because it’s scary for them.
And the new mom box. We have had so many new moms tell us they get home from the hospital and the pads were so uncomfortable — the ones that came from the hospital — or so big and I was so unhappy. We need something that’s more comfortable and actually works. So our box has an eye mask and a door hanger and a journal.
Why did we not talk about this for so long? Once a month for 40 years this happens to us.
We’re working with this organization of female pediatricians. They’re saying, think about when our kids are in 5th grade and they go to get ‘the talk’ and they split up the girls and the boys. Now the boys go through school and have girlfriends and know nothing about it. They end up being buyers at supermarkets and don’t know what women want. The other thing is we’re learning about single dads. They don’t know what to do. You know, 40% of marriages in the US end up in divorce and these single dads have no idea what to do. So we’re becoming a resource and changing that. There’s so many pieces of it. It was the environment. It was transparent. It was organic. It was about bringing plant-based and better quality. But then it became period poverty. Period poverty in the US is now one in every four girls have missed school because they didn’t have access to period products. Everything you talk about equality and empowerment — it’s not talking to her when she’s 30, it’s talking to her when she’s 12 and maybe missing school. I brought my daughter to one of the first donation events at a charter school and the school nurse sat her down and explained to her that she has a budget that allows her to buy period products for about the first two months of the school year. Then, her budget is depleted. If she doesn’t go to the club store on the weekend to buy products, the girls stop coming to school for a week every month because period products are not covered by food stamps and families have to make hard choices. If you’re at a charter school, somebody advocated to get you there, you care about your grades. So how do you ever have quality education and come out when you’re missing a quarter of your education? It’s insane! Every generation is making it better for the next one. These girls, the Gen Zs, they’re going to change the world. They put up with no crap. All the things that drive me crazy are going to make her successful.
They will. One of the things we can do to help that is to stop whispering the words that our mothers and grandmothers did. Like “period” and “tampon.”
“Right. We need to amplify their voices. There is a 16 year old girl in Nevada who literally wrote the legislation to provide free feminine care in schools. She is 16. She is just incredible. ”
What we found is an even bigger part of our social impact. There’s measurable environmental impact with plastic that we’re making within communities, and then how many women we can empower by providing not just donations, but community pricing. It really does make an impact because it makes products with more dignity that are better performing, that are more comfortable, and that are sustainable. They are completely biodegradable. We can have an even bigger reach by partnering with all these different community organizations. We get calls all the time [from] girls who have done fundraisers for their birthdays. High school girls who want to supply products to their school. That’s been such an incredible byproduct of what we’re doing. Our Director of Corporate Social Responsibility and Partnerships was the Director of Healthy Communities for Providence, RI, so we did a donation to the city of Providence. Providing free feminine care had a measurable increase in attendance for girls. She’s helping us develop this program.
It’s amazing to me that you have a Director of Corporate Responsibility in this stage of your company.
That was one of the first things we did because it’s part of our core values.
[phone rings]
Do you need to take that?
These calls go straight to the 800-83-tampon number.
What kind of calls do you get on that?
Everything. That’s how we got into Wegmans. The buyer at Wegmans saw us on social media and reached out to her distributor and said, “Find these ladies and see if they want to be in our stores.” It came through on a Friday afternoon on this number. So they called this number and I thought, Am I being punked? We had a call from a distributor in Virginia who said a college that he works with has a sustainability committee and they asked him to find organic feminine care. He said, “I googled it and found you and I can’t believe you answered the phone.”
Our pillars are organic, it’s about being transparent, it’s about the ingredients — which funny enough, there is no transparency in this category right now, which is crazy. It’s about the giveback. It’s to make it more accessible by our retail strategy. And now we’re launching with Sprouts and we’re launching with HEB. And we’re finding with our Amazon sales the pockets of the country where we’re really strong. Now there’s all these other parts of the business with direct to consumer and e-commerce. A lot of different places which are making it accessible because there wasn’t a chance to choose better.
Women like you are teaching our daughters to choose better.
It’s always been dictated for us, right? This is just the way it is. I really think there is something to them truly believing that they can change the world and do anything and everything. They’re not waiting until they get out of school to make change. There are girls all over the country that are not taking no for an answer and they’re not staying in line and apologizing.
One of your tag lines is “Empowerment should never be a luxury.” Where does that come from?
I’m always asking people, not David Sedaris questions, but questions like “What is your superpower?” And they look at me like If I can’t turn invisible or I can’t fly then say “I don’t have any.” I say, “Everyone has superpowers. I don’t get bitten by mosquitoes and I always find a perfect parking spot.” If you ask somebody in a young age group, they give you such a raw and wonderful answer. It’s not always “I’m great at lacrosse.” They’ll have a much different answer. It’s a great question because I think that everybody needs to really believe that there’s something special and different [about themselves].
Who were the naysayers? When were you rubbing your eyes with frustration?
It was 100% raising money. It was so awful. That first summer that we were in business, And we thought for sure with our pedigree, you know, I had Coke and Pepsi and Nestle and [Denielle] had Kate Spade and Ann Taylor and Coach and Talbots. we got all suited up and went out and met with probably 50 venture capitalists. We didn’t raise a nickel. Every single one said no. We’ve never had so much rejection in our lives. In 2019, 2.7% of venture capital went to women. Last year it was 2.2%. It’s extremely hard to raise money as a female. It’s probably the best thing that ever happened to us because it made us sit down and reflect on who we were talking to. They just didn’t get it. It was a bunch of young, white guys who went to Ivy League schools and all played lacrosse together. And they literally sat across from us in a very patronizing way and said “there’s already tampons.” What’s your defensibility. It was dismissive. It was horrible we actually jokingly called it “The summer of unlove.” And then we had to really dig deep. We had a friend at UMass reach out about putting an article in their magazine and she asked “do you need help?” and I said “We need money.” Denielle was like “You’re so shameless!” and I said “You know, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. They can say no.” She told us about a fund at UMass where they invest in alumni making social impact. So they ended up being the lead investor on our seed round and the rest was friends and family. So we at least had one lead that could formalize it and help us understand our valuation, and so on. They were all Angel investors. We just did a second round and what is so incredible is that now we have some traction and we could be little picky and one of our advisers introduced us to a woman in Boston who is a big angel investor and she was one of the first ones who said “hey look, this is what’s wrong with your pitch. Here’s what investors are thinking about. Here’s what you need to do differently.” She helped us craft our pitch and put us in front of groups that were mainly women who could connect with what we were doing and how we were doing it.
Probably the worst thing anybody said to us during the first round was “You girls are mom’s, are you sure you’re going to have the time to dedicate to doing this?” And I practically had to hold Denielle down so that she didn’t jump across the table. It wasn’t very long ago.
I can talk forever about fundraising. It’s awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, super awful for women. It’s hard and it’s super exhausting. I mean, you put yourself out there it’s really, really crazy. But I wouldn’t change it for anything. But this brand is part of what we do. But if we someday can invest in other women and make it easier for them like they invested in us, and we can send that elevator back down--that’s when we win. If you can sit on boards--there are very few women qualified to be in boards and if you would ask me when I was at Nestlé managing a billion dollars in revenue, and asked me to be on a board I would have said “hell yeah!” but i wasn’t ready… You’ve got to develop more women that can go in and make real change on boards because it’s never going to happen with the same regime that’s out there right now. There’s never going to be business that are built for working moms and for real diversity. There’s just so much to do and it’s really hard to be doing it. But it’s so worth it.
TOPS WOMANIFESTO:
We believe that every girl and woman
deserves healthy, organic, tampons and pads
that are good for your bodies —and your planet.
We believe you have a right to know what goes in and on your bodies
and a period should never interfere with your ability to be the very best version of yourself.
You can swim, you can sing, you can jump on a trampoline, wear white jeans before, during, and after Labor Day.
And if the mood strikes, run a race in a tampon suit.
You can accomplish anything because you have superpowers to do amazing things.
And together, that’s just what we’ll do.
