Why the CEO of popular Olly vitamins wants to stop menopausal symptoms with one little pill
Hanneke Willenborg was at a visit with her general practitioner a couple years ago when the topic of menopause symptoms came up. She reported that she’d been having mood swings, and the doctor, to Willenborg’s astonishment, immediately wrote her a prescription for antidepressants.
“She was well-intended, but I was like, there has to be a better way,” Willenborg, the 53-year-old CEO of Olly, the San Francisco-based vitamins and supplement company owned by Unilever, tells Fortune. “I knew I didn’t want to have antidepressants. And I was surprised at how quickly she prescribed them to me, without any extra questions.”
The situation is not uncommon: One study out of the UK found that nearly 40% of women were prescribed antidepressants by general practitioners for menopause symptoms, despite four out of five of those women believing the treatment felt “inappropriate.” And while there is some evidence that antidepressants (as well as hormone replacement therapy) can be effective for both menopause-related depression and hot flashes, it’s a road that not all women want to go down.
Willenborg, a Netherlands native drawn to natural health solutions who was largely taught to “tough it out” by her culture, kept the experience at the doctor’s office in the back of her mind as she began to work towards making her mark on Olly. And this week, the CEO brought many of her ideas to fruition: She announced the launch of a new product, Mellow Menopause, which claims to alleviate 11 symptoms including mood swings, fatigue, and hot flashes (though the product, just like all supplements, has not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration). She also introduced a menopause policy, under the advisement of OB/GYN and influencer Dr. Kiarra King, for Olly employees—ushering in perks like flexible hours to make up for lost sleep, desk fans for the overheated, and even extended reproductive-care benefits like egg freezing and hormone therapy through Carrot Fertility.
“It is slightly self-serving,” Willenborg, still perimenopausal, admits with a grin about both the pills and the policy.
But it’s also a vital part of what she sees as needing to practice what she preaches at the B Corp.
“We cannot say we’re going to serve people with menopause solutions without asking, ‘What am I doing myself in our company in order to serve women better?’” At Olly, 70% of employees are women, and while most are a bit younger than Willenborg, “what we know is that all of them, at a certain point in time, will start to go through these phases as well,” she says.
Being a perimenopausal role model
Part of being an older role model, for Willenborg—previously in leadership positions at Seventh Generation and Ben & Jerry’s—means being an open book. Because part of why her mood swings were so distressing, she says now, is that she hadn’t expected them. In fact, according to one study, 72% of women are not fully informed about menopausal symptoms.
“And I was definitely part of that 72,” she says. “Yes, I had heard about hot sweats, and the basics, but I wasn’t expecting that estrogen cliff that hit so hard.”
It’s why she’s made a pact to not be silent—even if, as she admitted at a New York City Mellow Menopause product launch event last week, “there’s always still this little voice in my head, sort of like, ‘do your job, run your business, and don’t talk about these things.’”
These days, Willenborg is “a happier person,” she says, attributing some of that to the new Olly product, for which she was “one of the guinea pigs” who found that the supplement “was working.”
It doesn’t mean she doesn’t struggle—she is a mom to three kids ages 13, 15, and 16, after all, a job she describes as “hard work,” especially when it comes to balancing “breathing down their neck and letting them be.”
But living a healthy and empowered life—waking at 6am to do a 7-minute workout before a breakfast of fruit, yogurt, and granola, and then pedaling her Dutch electric bike along the 23-mile route to the Olly office—helps.
As does showing up to work as her true self, just as Willenborg encourages all of her employees to do.
“I had feedback early in my career of, ‘you’re too emotional, you’re too passionate,’ and it took me a couple of years to understand that, you know what? That’s not a weakness. That’s my superpower,” she says, despite the traditional corporate world not always seeing it that way.
But with experience came wisdom, and a desire to embrace those qualities. “I was like … let me be as passionate and emotional and caring as I can be,” she says, “and use that as my power as a CEO, instead of thinking of it as a weakness that I needed to overcome.”
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