Bodily’s mission is to shed light on stigmatized areas of women’s health by educating women and their supporters on postpartum and birth recovery with information they need, and providing products they want that are grounded in research. Growth, therefore, is line with its mission to educate and provide resources for as many new parents as possible.

I had several mandates during my time at Bodily. The first was to help grow presence on third parties like Amazon through paid media and advertising. The other was help with supply chain management and procurement in advance of Bodily’s first major wholesale deal with Babylist. I owned the procurement of paper goods and dealt with negotiating with suppliers and helped with site experience to make sure people could access information and products as easily as possible. I also helped on ad hoc projects, such as editing blog posts, product descriptions, and positioning, and project managing development of creative assets and marketing materials.

I was able to apply several skillsets from my MBA. Marketing and understanding bidding and marketplaces for CPC-based bidding helped in my Amazon marketing efforts. It also helped as I was putting together scripts for podcast marketing (e.g., how to best position the brand in a few soundbites) and efficiency metrics to determine which podcasts were the most financially sound for us. I was able to use tools I had learned in Business Analytics to put these analyses together. Additionally, my operations coursework helped me understand inventory needs and how much we should have on hand. My Behavioral Economics course proved be to applicable across the board: in choice architecture, system one and system two processing on the website and on marketing materials, and conquest bidding strategy (i.e., bidding against competitors with higher price points and lower price poins) on Amazon. Digital Literacy from Decision Makers also was helpful as I was able to apply principles of UX and digital marketing mechanics to my projects. Strategy core work came into play across the board — understanding and articulating Bodily’s success and competitive advantage is important as it scales up and thinks about how we could leverage network effects to gain marketshare.

Working remotely was definitely a challenge.Vvirtual communication was more difficult, but my team made it well worth it. Working on a small team across several time zones while coordinating aspects of a global supply chain was a challenging undertaking as I was getting up to speed. Moreover, working with some of our suppliers remotely slowed down timelines and urged me to be more forceful in getting deals done, especially if they didn’t feel the same time pressure to prioritize our projects. The pandemic led to other challenges in shipping times and costs under tight deadlines, both domestically and internationally. That said, it helped me strengthen my communication skills — both internally and externally — to ensure I could meet our tight deadlines.

My goals were to be able to drive quantifiable impact in an organization, to get outside of my comfort zone, apply skills I had learned at CBS thus far, and learn skills and tactics I had yet to learn during my first year of business school and in my previous marketing and advertising roles. Strategic Development touched a lot of parts of the Bodily business, and I learned to be ok with ambiguity, to be even more of a self-starter in a remote setting, but also to ask for help and clarity and be sure to communicate what I did and didn’t understand. I also had never worked on supply chain projects before, and I had to learn while doing and be comfortable with being uncomfortable in isolation. The experience reinforced the two-way flow of information that happens within the MBA experience: I was able to apply my coursework to my experience at the company, and I have been able to apply my Bodily experience to coursework that just picked up at the beginning of A term this semester.

As a social enterprise, Bodily is committed to help surface underrepresented perspectives and information about birth and postpartum, but that doesn’t preclude its necessity to return value for its investors; importantly, social good and profitability/returns don’t have to be mutually exclusive — in fact, they can be mutually beneficial. Finally, I learned the value of understanding your market — Bodily always considers the perspectives of those who have just given birth and their supporters as it thinks through its strategic initiatives and decision-making. This understanding of their customer and belief in their value proposition yields a brand and product offering that speaks authentically to its target.