Womansplain

Classical oboist turned Wharton MBA and healthcare VC Lisa Rhoads couldn't find a white shirt that fit, cost less than $1,000, and survived a spilled glass of wine, so she and her daughter Bryn, a Parsons-trained stylist, rebuilt it from scratch as The Anteros. They redesigned the collar, cut, and button spacing for women and sourced from a sister-run Italian mill and ultra-fine Australian Merino....

Sainabou "Sai" Lowe started SAIbysai by painting a pair of thrifted pants in her college dorm and selling copies to classmates for $20. Now her hand-painted wearable art has been on a SoHo billboard through a Gushers x Hypebeast collab, and she still runs the whole brand herself. Sai tells us how she went from Pace to LIM College and graduated into COVID. She talks about the Hypebeast call she tho...

Cleo Davis-Urman is the co-founder and CEO of Barrière, the transdermal vitamin patch brand now in more than 4,300 retail doors including Target, Walmart, and Anthropologie. She got there from luxury fashion, employee number five at Moda Operandi and later fashion director at Saks Fifth Avenue, by way of 100,000 medical-grade masks she sold during COVID and a blood panel that showed she was danger...

Mithu Malik is a trained pharmacist who co-owns Musaafer, the Michelin-starred Indian restaurant in Houston, now with a second location in Tribeca and a speakeasy, SAAQI, downstairs. She and her husband Shammi built the business from an ice cream import route in Lagos, where he slept on top of the shipping container at the port so the power cut wouldn't melt the stock. She talks about the pint of...

Amy Chan got laid off and cheated on in the same stretch, then built the first science-based breakup bootcamp from what she learned crawling out of it. Twenty years a dating columnist and a former CMO of SPIN, she's run Renew Breakup Bootcamp retreats for ten years, landed press from The New York Times and Good Morning America, and gets 80% of her one-on-one clients into relationships within a yea...

Robyn Berkley spent seven years as fashion director at Kelly Cutrone's People's Revolution before her health forced her out: 16 shows in a New York season, midnight most nights, and a body that stopped cooperating. She quit, flew to Bali for yoga teacher training, and came home with a name and no plan. Live the Process is now one of the first luxury activewear brands, made in its own California fa...

Ochi Latjuba Vongerichten co-owns Wayan and Ma•dé, and Wayan is the only Indonesian restaurant on the Michelin Guide in America. She got there by leaving Jakarta at 18 for the Culinary Institute of America, interning for Daniel Boulud, and working every job at Per Se from food runner to manager, with a mother who catered 3,000-person weddings telling her to finish what she started. In this episode...

Barbora Samieian went from nonprofit fundraiser to co-founder of Sundays, the award-winning furniture brand she launched with her husband, his sister, and a 20-year friend, three months before the pandemic. She also co-founded Vancouver salad chain Field & Social and Sundays' sister brand Hetta, all while raising four kids. We cover the chef who quit mid-shift days after she took over her firs...

Laura Rubin spent 15+ years running a marketing boutique after leaving a top job at USA Networks, then shut it all down to bet on AllSwell Creative and a belief that journaling had a PR problem. Today she's a Simon & Schuster author (The Big Unlock), a New York Times feature subject, and has led hundreds of science-backed workshops at Adobe, Goop, Google, and the CAA (Creative Artists Agency)....

Odellia Etaat left three years in corporate financial planning to launch Mize Dining, the luxury private dining brand that made her the chef New York's most discerning hosts call first, from Manhattan to the Hamptons. It started with her sister's birthday brunch: the group skipped hiring a private chef because "Odellia cooks," and she woke the next morning to a hundred screenshots of her food by 8...

Madeleine Cohen built her career inside the hottest consumer brands of the DTC era (Estée Lauder, Casper, Bala), then got laid off from her dream job and found her next company in her own closet: 30 pairs of jeans, none that fit her 5'1" frame. Today Nelle Atelier is a premium petite denim brand for women 5'4" and under, made in LA from Italian denim, past $1M in revenue and sold on Nordstrom.com...

🎁 A gift from us + Sonsie: use code WOMANSPLAIN15 at sonsieskin.com for 15% off. Valid on individual SKUs, one per customer, through 7/31/26. Kailey Bradt was 16 years old, running around her high school telling anyone who'd listen that she was going to start a sustainable beauty brand. So she studied chemical engineering to earn the right to do it. Her first company, Susteau, took a waterless fo...

🎁 A gift from us + Scarlett Chase: Use code WOMANSPLAIN10 at checkout on scarlettchase.com for 10% off, valid through the end of August. Sandra Powers Murphy spent decades at the top of institutional finance: an early career at State Street, her own broker dealer, a book (The Road to AUM), and six kids at home. Then one rainy day in New York, ten blocks from Penn Station with no cab in sight, she...

Season 6 is here, and we're opening with someone who walked away from 21 years of white-glove finance to help everyone else get in the game. Stephanie Guild, CFA, spent two decades at JPMorgan, most recently as a Managing Director at the Private Bank, building portfolios for the kind of clients who can always find help. Then she left to become Chief Investment Officer of Robinhood, the mobile-firs...

Season 5 is officially a wrap, and we're closing it out the only way that felt right: by going back to the moments that stuck with us. This compilation pulls together the founders who defined the season. The ones building real, durable businesses in categories most people overlook, dismiss, or assume could never be made desirable. Listening back, a throughline emerged that we did not plan for: ove...

Libie Motchan grew up in New York City, studied math and psychology at a tiny Minnesota liberal arts college with no business major, and spent her early career in consumer marketing, first at an agency, then at IBM running digital media and brand health. What she learned there was that she could not survive bureaucracy and red tape. What she also developed, hunched at a desk in unsupportive shoes,...

Dr. Chrystle Cu went from running a fully booked Bay Area dental practice (patients waiting four to six months for an appointment) to co-founding COCOLAB, the oral care brand that's making flossing something people actually want to do. Her co-founder and little sister Cat Cu pivoted from a failed San Francisco art marketplace (one painting sold, and her dad bought it) to becoming the creative forc...

Saher Hussaini is the founder and acupuncturist of Set Your Intention Acupuncture (SYI Acupuncture), a New York-based wellness studio reshaping the modern acupuncture experience through intentional healing, considered design, and personalized care. A licensed acupuncturist and herbalist, Saher blends the ancient wisdoms of Traditional Chinese Medicine with an integrative approach to treatment, sup...

Lulu Ge came to this country at four and a half not speaking a word of English, internalized the immigrant instinct to shed everything different about her, and spent her 20s in fashion corporate strategy running a $300M budget at Saks. Hormonal acne, hair falling out, periods so unpredictable she bled through her white French lace wedding dress during cocktail hour at her Tuscan wedding. Park Aven...

Samantha Diamond was diagnosed with PCOS in her mid-20s by her then-boyfriend, a Toronto OBGYN resident who happened to be living with her. Most women wait years for that diagnosis. 70% never get it at all. That asymmetry, the unfair advantage of having a doctor at home, became the founding insight for Bird&Be: what if everyone could walk into a fertility appointment already armed with the inf...

Alissa Miky moved to LA at 21 with two suitcases, no English fluency, no U.S. degree, no family or friends, and built a seaweed empire anyway. Her first U.S. company, Misaki Tokyo, turned luxury seaweed candy into a 1.4M-follower TikTok phenomenon with Kim Kardashian collabs and Oscars and Emmys pre-event placements. Now she's the founder and CEO of OoMee, the first marine plant beverage brand in...

Charlotte Cruze went from producing Willard Scott's 100-year-old birthday segment at NBC, to running branded content for luxury men's publishers, to an NYU Master's in Food Studies, all before co-founding Alice Mushrooms, the functional mushroom chocolate brand now sold in Target, Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Erewhon. Named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2025, Alice has made funct...

Hailey Yaffa spent years doing what looked right on paper: investment banking, finance at a luxury fashion house, the whole thing. But underneath the polished resume was a woman quietly battling disordered eating and wondering if this was really it. So she quit. And then she built DateWorthy, a frozen dessert brand made from dates and real ingredients that's rewriting what "treating yourself" actu...

Mallory Jones Oniki studied finance, graduated into a pandemic, and started posting cookie videos on an app she barely understood. Five years and over 6,000 test cookies later, she's ⁠ @thepalatablelife ⁠ ; a recipe developer and content creator with over a million followers on TikTok, and now a debut cookbook author. Cookie Club is 80 recipes, nine custom paintings, and two years of baking from h...

Erin Barrett was a systems engineering major who pivoted into consulting for the free Starbucks, landed at McKinsey during the 2020 food tech boom, and then got so sick from COVID that it completely rewired her relationship with food and health. By the time she got to Stanford GSB, she was serving experimental cocktails out of mason jars through her dorm room window, and Goldilocks was born. In th...