Female Empowerment Meets Brand Strategy

What are the most important ingredients of your brand?

Firstly, it‘s the mix of communication and an absolutely high-quality product in every dimension! For all this, we have defined 4 core values according to which we design our brand with a certain obsession: Trust, Emotion, Aspiration, Quality.

Which brand contact points and channels have proven particularly effective for you? Do you also use analogue channels?

First and foremost, Instagram with all its facets – on the one hand in the feed, but we also take the community with us almost daily in our everyday life as founders in Insta Stories, we go live again and again and also have a very close dialogue in the direct messages! We also want to spread our mission via live events (such as at the University of Münster, at OMR etc.). PR is of course very important for us.

In your case, the mission stands above the product. Is this a shift of young companies to no longer define their corporate goal in terms of profit maximation only?

We believe that every company should address social issues, because we have enough problems in the world that cannot be ignored. Our self-image and also the way we make decisions consist of a triple bottom line: We are a business enterprise, we strive for female empowerment and more equality and live various new-work approaches (flexible working hours, reconciliation of family and work, orientation towards all people in the value chain, which must be taken into account in all their facets).

How important is community building for the success of your products?

Very central! Especially at the beginning, when we were able to use crowdfunding to pre-finance the first delivery. Since we are still bootstrapped until today, the community and the outreach is essential for us to get ideas, to be inspired and to further our mission. The dialogue with our customers and followers is irreplaceable for us.

With the topic of period underwear, you are openly with a former taboo zone. I‘m sure many people want to have their say in that. Don‘t you also have to deal with a lot of shitstorms?

Not much in our own channels, but when we appear in certain classic media, especially on TV, they have to deal with it. For us it‘s rather the the opposite: we receive a lot of encouragement and gratitude.

At ooia, how important is branding to achieve your business goals?

Absolutely essential. We don‘t go by price, but communicate the value of our products through our brand and thus reach people on a completely different level.

What were the challenges in rebranding ooshi to ooia due to a trademark conflict?

On the one hand, purely communicative, many people knew us as ooshi on DHDL, among other things; On the other hand, there were purely technical aspects, search volume had to be managed correctly, etc.. In addition, there was of course a lot of organisational work - but in retrospect we are very grateful and feel that the name ooia is a much stronger brand that will bring us more success in the long run.

What advice would you give to other start-ups?

Definitely look for a co-founder! The highs are higher, but the lows are less deep. You don‘t necessarily have to build on complementary skills, you can buy them in. It is much more important to have common values and ideas about how you want to run the company.