Meet Alexandra Fennell | CoFounder and Co-CEO, Attn: Grace

We had the good fortune of connecting with Alexandra Fennell and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Alexandra, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
The concept behind Attn: Grace was born from a deeply personal place. Mia — my CoFounder and wife — had witnessed her mother navigating a host of changing needs as she was getting older, including managing bladder leaks. She was relegated to using products that contained harsh chemicals and synthetic fragrances and dyes that irritated her skin. This made an already thankless condition even harder to manage and kept her from doing things that she loved – spending time with friends and family, staying active and traveling.

At the very same time, as mothers of four young children we were having genuinely delightful experiences with brands thoughtfully catering to our needs with cleaner, greener baby care products being conveniently shipped to our door. It was such a stark contrast and we knew Mia’s mother — and all women — deserved better solutions.

When you think about it, as young women, we were muses, with brands aiming to delight us. As young mothers, we were respected gatekeepers. Brands took our values seriously, catered to our need for convenience, and committed to products that were both body-and-earth-friendly. But then what? As we entered our 40’s and 50’s, we realized that we are increasingly nobody’s “brand darling”.

We started talking about it with our friends, our mothers, and our mother’s friends. We studied the category, and went to industry conferences where personal care aisles for older women were referred to as “the aisle of death.” It felt dehumanizing and cold and so far from what younger women were experiencing in other analogous categories . Women don’t see themselves in the “aisle of death”, and we don’t blame them. So we set out to pave a better way. With Attn: Grace, we’re designing thoughtful, modern solutions for age-old problems.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
We are so proud of where we are today, and how far we’ve come, but let me tell you, it has not been easy. Imagine walking into a roomful of investors — primarily men — and trying to convince them that they should care about improving the lives of women with bladder leaks. Then imagine that same scenario, on repeat, for dozens of meetings to follow. If I resist my usual tendency to glorify things in hindsight, this was our life for two. excruciating. years.

We talked liners, pads, and briefs, and got blank stares. We told deeply moving stories of the shame and stigma that so often accompany this common but rarely discussed condition. We modeled a gazillion different scenarios and shared countless financial projections. We networked with slews of different experts in the space — including two pretty prominent ones, both of whom told us that it wasn’t possible to build a brand like ours in the urinary incontinence (UI) space. (The imposter syndrome was as palpable in those times as it’s ever been throughout the course of my career.) And while I’ve never gone back to count, I would conservatively say we created 100+ versions of our pitch deck as we meticulously tried to synthesize feedback from different investors, experts and advisors (much of which was, you guessed it, contradictory). And, we got so close to that yes (or at least it felt like we did) a number of times but just couldn’t land a lead for the round we needed to raise to move forward.

I remember at one point, my brother-in-law, who happens to be a super talented VC in London and also one of our first angel investors, said to us– “You know, you don’t have to do this.” As in: you can still turn back now. And to be clear, it was sound advice. We’d been without meaningful incomes for some time and were living off of savings and the resulting stress on our marriage was intense. I was also pregnant with our twins at the time — just to keep things interesting. But I vividly remember thinking, as much out of pure resolve and conviction as from sheer terror that this had all been for naught: no way are we giving up now.

Right around the same time, Mia and I both started to shift how we were thinking about the business. By this point, we had spoken with hundreds of women, ranging in age from their 30’s to their 90’s. We had heard so many stories from so many women, some of them profoundly sad, and all of them uniquely inspirational. The more we learned, the more we realized how little is understood about our changing needs as our bodies evolve, or how to thoughtfully address them. Not just around UI, but around our bodies overall as we age. We started affectionately calling them “the inconvenient truths of aging.”

This realization prompted some real soul searching for us around what we wanted our larger mission to be, as founders and as a brand. We expanded our thinking beyond our product solutions and began talking about destigmatizing aging for women, and the fact that women deserve to be seen and celebrated as we age. As we often say, our needs may have changed, but our standards have not. If anything, they’re higher now than they were when we were younger. We made that vision and those beliefs our North Star, and parlayed a single story about one (magnificent) woman struggling to dispose of her incontinence briefs, into a belief and a promise to all women. We ALL deserve better.

We started pitching Attn: Grace as the much, much larger opportunity that it represented — not just to design more thoughtful, more effective product solutions, but to meaningfully impact how we, as women, perceive and experience the process of aging, and how we treat our bodies and minds along the way. In short, we needed to expand the definition of “wellness” to include the needs (and joys) of life as we age. So, over the course of two years of concepting and pitching, evolving and learning, Attn: Grace became a movement and a marketplace, and more than “just another DTC CPG play.” And that’s when the sparks started to fly. We found our lead investor a few weeks later and closed our first venture backed round shortly after. And then, two weeks after launch, we suddenly found ourselves fielding unsolicited inquiries from investors interested in backing us and closed a follow-on pre-seed round that we hadn’t even set out to raise! You read that right, it took us 2 years to raise that first pre-seed round of funding, and then a mere 2 weeks to raise the second.

The biggest lessons learned? Push the boundaries of your mission and vision, early and often. And don’t be afraid to dream big.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
We live and work in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just across the Charles River from Boston. Here are a few of our most treasured spots!

Things to do / places to visit:
– MFA (Museum of Fine Arts) and ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art)
– Harvard’s Natural History Museum
– New England Aquarium
– Seaport District
– South End

Eating/Drinking
– Puritan & Co. (Cambridge)
– Shy Bird (Cambridge)
– Dear Annie (Cambridge)
– The Butcher Shop (South End)

If you can get out of town for a bit and are here in the warmer months…
– Take the Fast Ferry to the outer Cape (Provincetown) or the Vineyard

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Without question, this shout-out goes to Charles Hudson at Precursor Ventures in San Francisco. Charles is one of our earliest investors and has been such a critical part of our story. Unlike so many others when we were first pitching Attn: Grace, Charles immediately saw a large, under-appreciated market opportunity. He also believed strongly that we were the founders to tackle it. That confidence, coupled with his sound, strategic advice and measured approach to supporting us as founders, has carried us through some pretty challenging times. We’re deeply grateful to have him on this journey with us.

Website: attngrace.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/attngrace/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/attn-grace

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/attngrace/

Other: Email: hello@attngrace.com TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@attngrace