In this episode of Add To Cart, we are joined by Alice Williams, the Founder and CEO of Ovira.
In this episode of Add To Cart, we are joined by a guest who, at the time of recording has the most TikTok followers of any brand in Australia. No it’s not Nike. It’s not Culture Kings. And no it’s not Add To Cart. It is Ovira. Alice Williams is the founder of Ovira, a period pain relief device. I’ve known Alice a while now and always love chatting to her. Whenever you have an inkling of what she’s going to say or do – she flips it on you and presents something in a whole new world. And that’s what she’s doing at Ovira – making the conversation around periods, vaginas and women’s health… normal. In this chat we cover how Alice stumbled across the device that ended up becoming Ovira but we also cover how they got to 6m TikTok followers, their creative strategy when it comes to Facebook ads and her tips for getting favourable PR. I will warn you up front that there is some swearing in this episode – by me included – so if you are offended by sweary words, or heaven forbid, lots of talk about vaginas, you might want to switch it over. For the rest of you, you’ll love it.
“Does it make our customer laugh? Does it make them pissed off? Does it make them rally together and say ‘fuck them’?”
Alice Williams
Educating women about their bodies
“How dare we talk openly about women’s health and try and educate women about their bodies? There are women, to pull it back to basics, who don’t even realize that they have three holes down there and their whole life they’re trying to insert a tampon into the wrong hole.
And I mean, this might sound crazy, but this is actually the large majority of women who’ve grown up not knowing anything about their bodies.
It pisses me off like it really does, you know? For myself, when I grew up and got my period, I remember just being so ashamed, like feeling this really heavy weight and you know, if the girls found out in school you got your period, you were bullied, like that was the reaction people had, which is nuts, right?”
The platforms are broken
“The best kept secret is performance marketing isn’t that hard. And so if you are hiring a performance marketer, what are you getting from that? Because performance marketing isn’t a performance marketing play. It’s a creative play. And most performance marketers are horrendous at creative.
I don’t hire performance marketers and I don’t hire video editors, it’s one role, it’s growth, and you are in the account doing the performance marketing. And you’re making the creative, and I think that’s where e-comm will go because the platforms are broken. They don’t work like they used to. You don’t have to be smart. Like it’s literally silly stuff that works, actually the sillier the better and the more naive you are, you’re better of just trying random shit.
And if it sticks, go all in. That’s 15%. And then the other majority is creative velocity and quality.”
Move, fast, make mistakes, learn
“When you’re moving so fast, you’re bound to have mistakes. And so we always make sure that Ovira mistakes are very safe. It’s okay. One of the biggest…Vicky for example, accidentally in the early days of Facebook, turned on, quite a large budget campaign and accidentally targeted men and it went off. And if she didn’t make that mistake, we never would’ve known. Who are we to decide who our customer is?”
Links from the episode
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