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"If you don't yet know Miki Agrawal by name, you surely know her work. The self-described \"SHE-E-O\" behind wildly successful industry-disrupting startups like period-proof underwear company THINX and portable bidet company Tushy has never been afraid to question the status quo.\r\n\r\nAgrawal wants more people—and more women, in particular—to start challenging the systems that might not actually work in our favor. That's the subject of her latest book, , a call to reexamine 13 major areas of our lives to determine whether they're really serving us.\r\n\r\nParade.com sat down with Agrawal to talk about how she found success, what it takes to disrupt industries on a deep level and how she avoids burnout.\r\n\r\nDisrupt-Her asks women to think about how they can approach 13 areas of their life in a disruptive way. What has disruption meant to you in terms of your business experience?\r\n\r\nI’ve spent the last 15 years of my entrepreneurial career looking at categories that haven’t had any disruption in a really long time, maybe because they’re taboo. When you can’t talk about something, it’s really hard to innovate in them because no one’s talking about it, right? I received so much pushback from society, just saying that the conversations I want to be having are uncouth. And it turns out society was really wrong.\r\n\r\nPeople are interested in trying new things, people do want to see if there are other options out there that are better for our health, hygiene, planet, for our pocketbooks—for all of that. I think people are really interested in seeing if there are better options. Having built my businesses to very successful numbers, it just proves that people are ready to have the conversations. It's made me think, What are the other things that need to be disrupted in our society? What are the other things we need to be talking about? And it turns out that we’re not talking about a lot of things.\r\n\r\nDid you set out to disrupt industries, or did you just have great ideas that happened to be disruptive?\r\n\r\nIt always starts with necessities. Necessity is the mother of invention. When it came to my needs, I couldn’t find any good option for myself in the categories of pizza, periods, pee and poop—all these categories that we think about often! It sparked an opportunity.\r\n\r\nHow do you start to open people up to having conversations about things that are considered taboo?\r\n\r\nI have a thesis around how to shift culture and have the conversations that people aren’t talking about. The first prong is it has to be a best-in-class, one-of-one innovation. It has to be something that people would actually want to have, want to wear or want to use in their homes. It also starts with asking yourself, \"Would I actually use this product?\"\r\n\r\nAnd then the second prong is considered, artful design across every touchpoint of your brand, which means that we need to really think about everything that we’re putting out, whether it’s our website, our packaging, the product itself, the little tag on our product, our Facebook ads, our subway campaigns. We all have to consider the aesthetic and the artfulness of it.\r\n\r\nAnd then the last one is accessible, relatable language across every touchpoint of your brand. Whenever people introduce a new innovative product or a new culture-shifting idea, they’re often too academic or too clinical or too technical or too prescriptive with their language and it just makes people be like, “Huh? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The way we think about and talk about all our products is just like we’re texting our best friend. If you think about the way you text your friends about something, it’s very different from the way you write ad copy. That’s the most authentic, that’s the most real. We've found that the more human we are, the more people will say, “Oh, I can relate to that. I feel like you’re talking to me.”\r\n\r\nWhat kind of advice do you have for other entrepreneurial women? \r\n\r\nJust keep putting one foot in front of the other. There’s no silver bullet that’s going to solve everything. You just have to keep chipping away at the thing you want to create. Just be as creative and weird and out there as possible, because the more weird you are, the more you’ll stand out. The more interesting, creative things you can put out, the better. I’m always telling everyone to do the weirdest thing they can do, that’s not just one of many but that’s one of one.\r\n\r\nWhat’s the weirdest thing you’ve done to promote your own businesses?\r\n\r\nThe first time I was launching my first restaurant, I had no experience, I had no contacts, I had no money, I had no ability to pay any PR person, so I just did it all with myself and my friends. We basically put together this weird nondescript box—I went to this corner store and bought 25 or 50 brown paper boxes that cost 25 cents each, and then I had my friend’s dad send me 50 IV bags that you find in a hospital. My first restaurant was originally called Slice, it’s now called Wild, and its original tagline was \"the perfect food.\"\r\n\r\nAnd so we put the little IV bag in the boxes and we put a little note that said, “The perfect food will be arriving shortly. Until then, don’t eat anything.” And then on the IV bag, we had a little sticker that we wrote on top, “Should the lack of substance prove to be debilitating, please insert tube into vein.” And then below that, there was this invitation to our grand opening of my tiny little pizza shop. Everybody came, we had a line out the door—that proved to me that doing weird things is really, really important.\r\n\r\nOne thing I know is that when you allow someone to participate in something, they feel like they’re part of the thing, which means that they now need to complete the thing that they’re a part of—which means they show up and see what happens.\r\n\r\nOur newest thing that we’re doing for TUSHY is a Funeral for a Tree in New York City on April 25. Over 15 billion trees are decimated every year, 100 million of which are used for disposable paper products (like paper bags and toilet paper). We’re going to pay our respects to these magical living beings that keep all of us alive and celebrate a tree’s life cut down too soon.\r\n\r\nThere’s a lot of talk about burnout these days. How do you keep from getting burned out when you have so much going on?\r\n\r\nI just don’t find work to be work, necessarily. I find it to be like these fun projects that are living and breathing, and there’s nothing to burn out from.\r\n\r\nI work in spurts, and I work hard in those spurts, and then I also have an amazing team around me for all my projects where I feel like I can really just hand them the reins and give myself the space to be creative and to really think about the greater plan for the business and for the campaigns and the creatives and the inventions that we’re working on. That’s where I really thrive and want to be, and I’ve sort of created that space for my teams. I get to really focus on what I do best, so I don’t think I’m at all in a place of burnout because I’ve created the environment where everyone’s thriving in their respective department."
<https://parade.com/867680/beckyhughes/thinx-tushy-founder-miki-agrawal-isnt-afraid-to-disrupt-the-status-quo-heres-her-business-philosophy/>