Dear {{first_name | friend}},

Last week, we looked at what's happening to the checks. This week, we’re looking at the research funding that goes to women, because we're announcing our first two Summit speakers for the Women's Health panel. And the numbers behind their work deserve a hard look.

Women are half the U.S. population. From fiscal 2013 through 2023, women's health research got 8.8% of NIH grant spending, and that share actually shrank over the decade while the NIH budget grew. That's the finding of a congressionally mandated National Academies report, which recommended $15.7 billion over five years just to close the gap. Two weeks ago, a new National Strategy to Close the Women's Health Gap went further. 37 organizations, from cardiology to neurology groups, endorsed a $20 billion, ten-year plan built on one argument. Women's health was misclassified as a niche specialty, when sex differences run through all of medicine. → Read the strategy

Here are the founders building where the research hasn't caught up. They'll be on our stage October 16 as speakers on our Women's Health panel: "What Medicine Still Gets Wrong”.

Cleo Davis-Urman, founder of Barrière, the transdermal vitamin and adaptogen patches you've seen on half of downtown New York. Like every woman on this panel, she turned her own health experience into a company.

Jenny Duan, founder of Clair Health, building non-invasive continuous hormone tracking. She closed an $11 million round this summer backed by Khosla Ventures and Anne Wojcicki, for a wearable designed around hormones from day one instead of retrofitted for them. → Read the Fortune profile

Two more panelists drop next week. The Womansplain Summit is 80 days out, on October 16 with 120 founders, operators, and investors, keynoted by Robinhood CIO Stephanie Guild. General Admission (Early Bird) is $175 through August 31. → Reserve your Summit ticket

And if one day isn't enough, founding membership in The Collective gets you the room all year at $400, locked for life before the rate moves to $500. Your Summit ticket comes with it, along with the private Slack, 1-1 founder matching, members-only dinners, and quarterly office hours with the two of us. → Join The Collective

On the fence? Come to a virtual member info session and we'll take your questions live. → Raise your hand here

Now, about that episode.

Until next week.

—Brooke Sowa & Sola Park, Womansplain Co-Founders & Co-Hosts

Madeleine Cohen got laid off from her dream job at Bala, stepped out of the shower one morning and counted 30 pairs of jeans in her closet. She hated all of them.

So she Googled "best jeans for short girls," didn't like what came back, and texted her sister the idea. Her sister's reply: "Well, you're not doing anything else."

Eleven months later, Nelle Atelier launched with a Vogue profile on day one.

Before denim, Madeleine did the full consumer tour: the Estée Lauder rotational program, then Casper pre through post IPO, where she helped open 52 stores in a single year and ran product launches. In this episode, she gets into how she funded her first production run with pre-orders from two try-on events, why she launched with raising a fraction of a $400K goal because she got antsy, the sample maker who tried to charge her $600 and why she walked out of his warehouse, and what it means that women cry in the fitting room, the good kind.

→ On the two things no tailor can fix: Knee placement and rise are locked in the moment a jean is finished, and they're what make petite women feel like clothes were never built for them. Nelle Atelier re-engineered both, which is why customers told her they'd never put on clothes that fit them that way before.

→ On launching before you're ready: She set out to raise $400K, only had $90K, and went anyway. Two pre-launch try-on events pulled in roughly $10-12K in pre-orders, which was a real chunk of her first production run. She paid the rest with sales, sold through 600 pairs, and was reordering by February.

→ On growing without ads: bootstrapped meant paid ads were off the table, so she bet on PR, events, and influencer gifting. The Vogue profile landed on launch day, a New York pop-up followed two weeks later, and she barely touched paid marketing until this January.

→ On the market hiding in plain sight: Half of American women are 5'4" or under, and a 500,000-person Reddit thread about petite clothing was her first validation. Early repeat rates hit 40%, wild for a brand under a year old, because she wasn't competing for her customer. She was often her customer's only option.

→ On solo founding: Every problem is your problem, and if there's no money in the bank, it comes out of your bank account. The trade is speed. No one to negotiate with means she took Nelle from idea to launch in 11 months.

🎁 A gift from us + Nelle Atelier: Use code WOMANSPLAIN at nelleatelier.com for 15% off orders of $200+. If you're a petite girly, this is your sign.

Find Nelle: 🔗 nelleatelier.com 📲 @nelleatelier

🌟 Community Win: Teja Urankar, founder and CEO of Butter Be Kind, is officially live on Ulta.com. Teja is a biotechnologist who was born with chronic eczema, left a career in pharma during the pandemic, and formulates her sensitive-skin line herself. From posting wins in our Slack to Ulta's digital shelf, this is exactly the trajectory we love to watch. Congratulations, Teja. → See the launch

💰 Funding: Mila, the design-led intimate wellness brand from Ada Trujillo and Kim Aviv, closed an oversubscribed $2.5 million pre-seed led by Mensch VC and angels from Spotify, Dyson, Tetra Pak, and BrewDog. Their pitch: beauty gave every part of the body a ritual, and intimate care never got its turn. The capital goes to R&D, a patent-pending device called Aura, and retail partnerships. → Read the announcement

📈 Trend: U.S. startups with at least one woman founder raised $73.2 billion in Q2, the second-best quarter on record. Before you celebrate, read the fine print: a single company's megaround drove nearly nine of every ten of those dollars. It's the same story we flagged last week. The headline numbers are climbing while the number of checks keeps shrinking, which makes rooms like ours matter more → Read the analysis

💡 Resource: The Hey Helen Grant from Visionaries awards $10,000 in unrestricted cash to one woman founder building a mission-driven, for-profit business in the U.S. You must be 100% women-owned with under $1M in annual revenue. This round closes August 30 at 11:59pm ET, and after that, grants go monthly. → Apply here

🎧 Listen: Season 6 keeps rolling. Episode 4 with Madeleine Cohen of Nelle Atelier is live now, and if you're catching up, Episode 3 with Kailey Bradt of Sonsie, Episode 2 with Sandra Powers Murphy of Scarlett Chase, and Episode 1 with Robinhood CIO (and Summit keynote) Stephanie Guild are all waiting → Listen on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts.

🎀 The Womansplain Summit, October 16, The Malin Chelsea, NYC

Our inaugural Summit: keynotes, founder-led panels, hands-on workshops, and the first Womansplain Awards. 120 founders, operators, investors, and creatives, one full day. Founding members get in with their membership; General Admission (Early Bird) is $175. → Reserve your ticket on Luma: here.