Get comfortable being uncomfortable and get very confident in what you believe in. Your vision is what will get you up in the morning.

Clara Fiorella Rivera is the founder and CEO of MyClarella, a wellness brand dedicated to empowering women through maternity and postpartum care. Her personal experience as a mother highlighted the lack of conversation and resources around postpartum recovery, inspiring her to create MyClarella in 2020. Under her leadership, MyClarella's products have reached over 50,000 customers and generated more than €1 million in revenue.

What inspired you to start MyClarella, and how did your personal experiences shape your approach to maternity and women’s healthcare?

My biggest inspiration into starting MyClarella was my own personal experience. I had a baby at 25 years old and there wasn’t a lot of conversation around having babies, postpartum, anything like that. Neither in my own friend circles, but also not in the society overall. There weren’t a lot of big brands doing anything around postpartum and it was such a societal taboo and it still needs work, but it was definitely worse at the time. And so I sat with that experience for, I would say, one or two years and then decided there needs to be some change. It can’t be just me who’s alone in these horrible underwear and who’s alone with all these questions and everything that I want to know. And I was very naive maybe to start a business in e-commerce and in product in the beginning with such little capital. But I had so much energy and so much drive wanting to make a change. And that’s why I started MyClarella.

Building a business in the healthcare industry is challenging. What were some of the key hurdles you faced when developing MyClarella’s wellness products?

The biggest challenge that I personally see in women’s health startups or companies is the underfunding. So there’s just not enough risk capital or even traditional money from banks that goes into it.

So either you can put your own personal money and bootstrap it to a certain point where investors are like, OK, this is a no brainer I will put my money there, or banks, or you really have to struggle. And that’s what I had to do. I had two, three jobs until I was able to make my career, my full-time income, which is normal in starting a company. But I think it took severely longer than in other business sectors, even though we had to grow and we had the demand. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity for me to grow on that momentum.

And at the same time, I think it’s such a niche sector for investors or for society still, even though us women are 50% of the population. We’re just consistently underfunded, we’re under-researched, and there’s so much that goes into having to change that, that I think it will still take, unfortunately, a couple more years or decades in order to be at a point where equality, when it comes to investment, when it comes to health, when it comes to rights, is going to be achieved.

And so building a business in this industry has been extremely challenging. It has been an extremely crazy learning curve, but I’m also extremely happy for the growth that I’ve personally had, that the business had, and to prove them wrong every day is the biggest blessing, to be honest.

What advice would you give to women who are interested in starting a business in the healthcare or wellness industry, where the stakes are high, and the competition can be fierce?

The biggest advice I have in this specific sector is to literally focus on yourself. Like, don’t even look left, don’t look right. Be aware of what is happening, obviously, and use that for your own benefit, but don’t get distracted.

Don't get scared and definitely learn how to deal with getting rejected, whether that's from retailers or investors or banks or people want to do collaborations with you or not wanting to do that.

Get comfortable being uncomfortable and get also very heavily confident in what you believe in, your vision, and you have to be very specific with why you're doing it and who you're doing it for because that is what's going to get you up in the morning. It's not going to be the money in the beginning, and it's probably not going to be all these crazy opportunities that maybe other industries are seeing, but it's going to be your team, and it's going to be the people you surround yourself with. And it's going to be your biggest vision that you have for it. And also, keep in mind that not a lot of people understand what you already see five, ten years down the line, and so also be very comfortable with the fact that you're probably the only one who 100% understand what you're working on and then just prove them wrong.

Looking ahead, what do you believe is the most important area of women’s healthcare that needs innovation, and how do you plan to address it through MyClarella?

I think this is a really hard question to answer due to the fact that there's just so much to do when it comes to women's health. There's so much innovation still needed. We've been overlooked for like most of the time when it comes to statistics, studies, funding, anything like that, research in general. So whether that's postpartum care, whether that's breastfeeding, menopause, endometriosis, hormonal imbalances, PCOS, like I don't even know where to start and where to stop, where innovation is needed.

And honestly, I think that as long as we open our minds and our pockets when it comes to venture capital for women's health, any innovation will benefit another sector in women's health because at the end of the day, we're going through a cycle, not just a monthly basis, but from the moment we're born to the moment we enter menopause and to every challenge that comes after. There's a lot of repetition that is in there where we can just transfer knowledge from one women's health sector to another.

So as long as there's work being done and innovation keeps happening in that space, I'm extremely happy and I wouldn't be able to pinpoint to one specific area because that wouldn't do justice to all the other areas that are also under-researched and underfunded.

Thank you, Clara, for the interview and your insights!