How Two Moms Turned Their Pregnancy Frustrations Into Power—and Progress for Women’s Health

Natasha Pearlman
·11 min read

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Never underestimate the power of pissed off moms. Because, well, they might just get together and start a business that revolutionizes women’s health. Which is exactly what happened when Perelel founders Alex Taylor and Victoria Thain Gioia met in 2019. Both postpartum, both struggling with health challenges, both extremely frustrated by the lack of information, support, and good vitamins, they were set up—as they both describe it—on a blind date by a mutual friend, who said to Taylor: “You both are picking my brain about the same things, you need to meet.”

The date was, appropriately for two Los Angeles dwellers, at hip grocery store Erewhon. “We were both actually breastfeeding at the time,” says Taylor. “So we’re like, ‘You got 30 minutes? Great.’” And from there, their women’s health and vitamin brand Perelel was born.

Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple—many more months of planning and fundraising and pitching and assembling a team and development followed. But that first day cemented their foundations: They both wanted to create high-quality vitamins for women, they shared a goal to revolutionize the pre- and postpartum experience, and they wanted to ensure women’s health wasn’t just taken seriously but funded properly.

It was ambitious, especially for two women without a medical background—at the time Taylor ran fashion media site Who What Wear, and Thain Gioia worked in finance. But they were undeterred.

Thain Gioia says, “We were like, ‘We need to pull together experts to actually create these products.’ We didn’t want to be the next Instagram brand. We needed someone else to really be making the products and looking at every single dosage, every single ingredient. Looking at women of today, what are today’s women’s diets? Where are those gaps? And so we brought on our medical cofounder, Dr. Banafsheh Bayat, who is a practicing ob-gyn, and then two of the country’s top reproductive endocrinologists.”

Today, four years on from launch, Perelel is not only one of the fastest growing women’s supplements brands, but they are now leading the way in funding for women’s health. In February 2024, they announced a $10 million donation to two different research institutes to fund women’s health. But it shouldn’t just be on businesses like theirs to carry the funding burden, they argue. So in September of 2024 they launched a national campaign and petition, backed by singer and actor Mandy Moore, calling on the biggest health organizations in the country to “close the research gap”—highlighting that the National Institutes of Health allocates just 10.8% of its annual funding to the study of women’s health.

“I mean, as of 2015, there were five times more scientific studies on erectile dysfunction than PMS,” says Taylor. “And ED affects less than 15% of men, while PMS affects 90%-plus of women. The math is not mathing.”

Here, the two founders talk about the importance of their campaign, what makes them proudest, and the most ridiculous pushback they encountered from some male investors.

Glamour: What advice would you give to other women who are trying to start a business?

Alex Taylor: You have to have clarity in your vision and stay steadfast. Also, we just really wanted to do something good for the world, especially amidst the pandemic and navigating our fertility and pregnancy journeys. And candidly, because that comes from an authentic place for us, it’s so hard every day. We cry a lot. But at the end of the day, we are doing something that's kind of bigger than ourselves and that keeps us going. And I think that’s really important, especially if you’re going to start a company now.

What’s your proudest achievement with the company?

Victoria Thain Gioia: I think some of the things that move us the most are the emails from our customers that say, “Thank you. You were the only person that knew I was going through this. But you guys supported me.” Or when people send us a picture of their baby and invite us to their baby shower. Those things make us feel the most proud.

Taylor: There’s a reason why the crying emoji is probably our most used when we message each other. It’s more than anything we could have dreamed and hoped.

Talk to me a little bit about the current campaign as well and the petition.

Taylor: So we just launched our campaign called the Perelel Universe. As we started to peel the proverbial onion that is women’s health and maternal health, we learned that women have been forgotten in medical research. Starting in the late 1970s, many women of childbearing potential were banned from clinical trials for the better part of 20-plus years. Fast-forward to 2021, and still, funding research patterns favor men. In 2024, a McKinsey report found that less than 10.8% of NIH research grants go to women’s health research. Women make up half the population, we create the future. We literally birth the people of tomorrow, and there’s so much about our bodies that we don’t know.

In our Perelel universe, the idea is that what if women’s health was taken seriously? What if fertility support was accessible? What if the fourth trimester wasn’t an afterthought? What if hormonal wasn’t a bad word? What if research reflected our bodies? So we’re calling on Congress to essentially to direct the NIH to deploy more equitable funding for women’s health research. Within the first 24 hours of releasing our campaign video in partnership with Mandy Moore, we saw over a million views.

Thain Gioia: Our petition got 9,000 signatures in less than a week.

As female founders of a company focused on women’s health, was there ever a moment in which you struggled to bring men on board?

Taylor: So we do love men.

Thain Gioia: We do. We have some male investors. But we started fundraising in April of 2020, and it was probably the worst fundraising environment you could ever approach. It was a lot of older men and we got asked a lot of times, “Well, how big is this market really?” We’re like, “Women. The market is women. It’s 50%.” And they’d be like, “I mean, how long have you been pregnant for?” But it’s also, it’s not just like poof, you’re pregnant and then poof, you’re not pregnant.

Taylor: Also it wasn’t even just about pregnancy. It’s years of the journey. We want to support women throughout their whole life cycle, and they just didn’t care.

Thain Gioia: It was crazy. There’s 4 million live births a year. There’s 40 million millennial moms. Even if we just had to be only moms, it’s a 4 million market size. And they’d be like, “Well, I just don’t know if the opportunity is big enough.” Or they’d say, “Let me ask my wife what she thinks.”

Taylor: That was the worst response we got.

Do you have a favorite product you now sell?

Taylor: One of the products that I think is most near and dear to us isn’t a bestseller by any means, but it came out of a phone call from Tori one day as she…. Yeah, if you want to share the story.

Thain Gioia: We launched a recovery support pack, and at the time I was going through a pregnancy loss. I had to go to CVS to get pads and get a heating pad and all of that stuff. And I was just like, “This is just is so shitty. We need to do something for this person.” I was totally alone, I hadn’t really shared my pregnancy with anyone. I had no control over this moment. And we were like, “That moment needs to be seen. We need to give her something different.” I didn’t want to take my prenatal, I didn’t want to see a baby on a bottle. And we just knew we wanted to create something that was very specific to see the moment and also to see her. In the early days, when we were a little cash-strapped and couldn’t launch a product, we created a program and so anyone that notified us that they were going through a pregnancy loss, we sent them a candle and a handwritten note that we were writing.

Taylor: And it’s something we still do to this day.

You both have families and run this fast growing business. What time to both of you wake up?

Both: 5:45.

What does a typical morning look like?

Thain Gioia: I work out at 6 because if I don’t work out at 6, I don’t work out. Working out is my sanity and the only time I feel like is me time. Though my kids are usually up and join me for the back half. Then I get them fed, changed, and hair brushed. My older two go to school at 8, then I circle back to sort the two youngest, and then head to work.

Taylor: I wake up at 5:45. I meditate for maybe 10 minutes, and then I work out at 6 and then I somehow get myself half pulled together and then wake my kids up at 7, and I do mom duty. I give them breakfast, I clean up breakfast. I help get lunches packed, and then we somehow by some miracle make it out the door together. Usually, I’ve forgotten something for school, so that’s always fun. It’s really not an elegant process, to be honest.

How do you take your coffee, both of you?

Taylor: I mix mine with two scoops of collagen protein, and I’ve been adding raw milk. Occasionally, I add in some creatine.

Thain Gioia: I do collagen, creatine, two sweeteners, and almond milk.

What were your childhood dream jobs?

Taylor: I thought I would be an editor in chief of a magazine, and I was very fortunate in that I got to do that, and then I realized, Wow, there was something more for me.

Thain Gioia: I wanted to be a doctor, which kind of plays out.

What were your first actual jobs?

Taylor: I worked at a clothing store that sold Juicy Couture tracksuits, and I would literally take all the money I made and just buy Juicy tracksuits, so not totally proud of that, but it’s my truth. It was an era.

Thain Gioia: I also worked at a clothing store, but then I also helped with the finance. I was the bookkeeper.

What’s the best piece of money or career advice you've ever gotten?

Taylor: Always live below your means is a good one. I’ve always liked that. But career advice? Just do the next right thing. It’s never guided me wrong.

Thain Gioia: There’s no perfect time, and you can wait forever for the perfect time to do x, y, z. It was definitely not the perfect time to start this business in 2020. There’s no perfect time to have a baby, and so it’s just moving forward with what you have at that time.

Taylor: I have to share this quote that really struck me the other day. It said, “The only thing worse than starting something and failing is not starting something.”

What's the last great book you've read?

Taylor: Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn. I think what’s really important is in learning about the women’s health research gap, you also have to understand the historical context as to why we are where we are. It’s a really incredible and empowering book, and I loved it so much. Everyone must read it.

Thain Gioia: I found Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr incredible.

What’s your biggest vice, both of you?

Taylor: Chocolate, easy.

Thain Gioia: Dirty martinis.

What's the best parenting advice you’d give a new mom?

Taylor: Mine would be that everything is for now, so every time you’re in the middle of a stage that feels wildly impossible and it’s going to go on forever, they’re never going to sleep, whatever it might be, just add the words for now to the end because it’s a reminder that as soon as you get a grip on whatever is happening, it’s going to shift and change. And I think that’s the beauty of parenthood, so every stage is just for now, and we’ll keep growing and changing, and you will too.

Thain Gioia: Mine is to practice “good enough” parenting. Your kids are happy and fed and healthy and that’s good enough. You don’t have to be this picture-perfect Instagram—just do what’s good enough for you.

Originally Appeared on Glamour

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