Name: Cora’s Molly Hayward: Out to improve the world since age 10
Uploaded: 2020-03-13
Duration: 4 min 9 s
Description: Fortune introduces the newest season of Trailblazers.

When you make business a force for good it's incredibly powerful and it's incredibly engaging for a lot of people. [ MUSIC ] My name is Molly Hayward and I'm the co- founder and chief brand officer of Cora. Cora is a modern women's wellness company so we started out in period care we wanted to create Better for you products that were also better for the world. So making products that are healthy and organic and made with natural materials while also helping to provide products to girls in need all over the world so that they can attend school during their periods when a woman buys Cora through our, DTC subscription. It's a one for one giving model. So for every month supply of product that you receive, we provide a month's supply of pads plus reproductive health education to a girl in need in India and when you purchase our products at Target we give 10 % of our net profits to Zhan Africa in Kenya Which helps to provide pads and health education to girls there. I love the saying, look at what you were doing when you were ten years old, and you'll know what you should do for the rest of your life. And when I was ten years old, Running around my fourth grade classroom getting kids to sign petitions to help save the baby chicks that we were raising in our class. Or I was asking everybody to donate, you know, twenty five cents of their lunch money to UNICEF. So, I always had this real really strong sense of sort of responsibility to help wherever I could. Several years ago, I was traveling in Kenya and I met a girl who told me that she would stay home from school during her period because she couldn't afford menstrual pads. And really that was the inspiration for Korra. As a woman who has never not had the products that she needed to manage her period, it was almost impossible for me to imagine going through my day. Going to school going to work without those products? Really my first thought was, my gosh, how can I help this one girl stay in school during her period. And then my next thought was there are probably millions of girls like this girl all over the world. And there are probably millions of women like me who would have this same reaction. If they could help this girl in this small way, and help to make sure that she could get the education that we all know is so vital to her ability to break out of the cycle of poverty and pursue her dreams and ambitions. That they would. That was incredibly powerful moment for me, I mean, truly life changing. And I felt like even though I knew that pursuing the idea was going to require a lot of resource that at that time I didn't have, and I knew I'd have to go out and find it. It was like I couldn't not do it. There are many points in this sort of journey of starting Cora where I really got to the end of the rope at every round. There are the naysayers. They're the people who think that you've built the model wrong or you should be doing it this way. We believed in what we had built. And then in the next round, people were saying, It's so brilliant that you did it this way. Even though fundraising is Can be challenging. Every no was sort of just the motivation to keep going and it felt like if it's a no then that wasn't the right person but there were enough yeses and people who believed in us. We've now raised over $ 35 million to date. Every time I go back to Kenya, every time I go back to India, that inspiration is just renewed. That feeling happens again. And it's very visceral and it's very real and seeing just the, strength and tenacity of these girls is it is just incredibly moving and really makes you know any of the hard work that we do. Number one seemed small in comparison, and number two feel completely worth it. [ MUSIC ]

Fortune introduces the newest season of Trailblazers.

Cora’s Molly Hayward: Out to improve the world since age 10

The female-focused wellness company does a lot of good.