Chelsea Hirschhorn’s background as a bankruptcy attorney helped prepare her to be a founder, but perhaps ironically the brand she created solves a problem that no woman could ever be 100% prepared for: motherhood. 

Hirschhorn founded Frida—and its line of products for babies, postpartum moms, and aspiring moms—to be the ultimate toolkit for meeting the most mundane, and most unpleasant, moments of motherhood. It all began with a snotsucker. Frida’s debut product was designed by Hirschhorn after using a Swedish version of the tool, passed to her by a neighbor. As a then-first-time mom, Hirschhorn recognized the mass potential behind the NasFrida, a manual suction that relieves babies’ noses, and went on to buy the Swedish business and launch Frida soon after.

Now, 10 years later, Hirschhorn is a mom of four, sells three million snotsuckers annually, and the company she founded has become a household name for parents everywhere. Its reach is even wider. Notably, Frida’s first television commercial garnered attention when it was banned from airing in 2020. “We made this beautiful commercial for the Oscars about a woman recovering from delivery and labor within the first 48 hours home with her baby. It followed her doing something as mundane as going to the bathroom for the first time when she's home in the middle of the night,” Hirschhorn says. Where retailers were concerned, she found that using anatomical words, like vagina or breasts, on packaging proved to be challenging. And yet, product popularity and sales supported the Frida approach to transparency. “A few years later, we're able to show the first ever breastfeeding or lactating woman on television during the Golden Globe and make progress in exposing the faults when it comes to authentically sharing women's health.”

Under Hirschhorn’s leadership, Frida continues to solve everyday problems for parents—from nail clipping to teeth brushing—and has created a radically transparent approach to community with resources like Frida Uncensored, launched last year. “We still have a lot of work left to do, and I'm not anticipating an easy road, but we've definitely made progress.”

I started my career as a bankruptcy attorney out of school. I had interned for the Mets—at the intersection of my interests in sports business and the law. When [my family and I] moved down to Miami, I took a role as associate counsel and the head of all non-baseball revenue for the Marlins. As a bankruptcy attorney, one of the critical components is getting a look at the underbelly of businesses, how they're built and the decisions they make when things go wrong. That was informative to build in a more entrepreneurial environment for the Marlins. It was sort of an entrepreneurial environment within the confines and safety of a larger organization. It really laid the foundational components of how I've built Frida in a very lean, thoughtful capacity.

The products I was envisioning, and then ultimately creating, were meaningfully helping me as a parent, and subsequently, parents that I was focus-grouping with, like friends, family, and other employees. But, there's nothing like the substantiation of retail distribution. When I built Frida, I was creating a business in a traditional wholesale distribution capacity which bucked the prevailing trend [of direct-to-consumer] at the time. By walking into any one of the 1800 Targets or Walmarts, you can tell if there's product market fit. Seeing your products on the shelf, and watching other customers check out your product, was really encouraging because it's hard to secure distribution and maintain it. That, coupled with the intuitive sense of the product development and innovation side, was the validation that we could make and design products at a financial profile that could afford wholesale as a business model and earn our way into those coveted spots and stay there. 

We faced a lot of rejection launching the feminine care and postpartum line. It took us three years to develop. It felt so obvious that this was a gap that we would be closing on behalf of women's health and the physical transformation that they have into motherhood. But it was really important to infuse levity and lightheartedness into an otherwise dark experience for women. Some of the humor, the more graphic nature of the content, did not land well in advertising, in retailers, or in in-store merchandising. I remember vividly where we were sitting in our office when we sent our first round of packaging to Target. We thought Target was going to be a great launch partner for our feminine care line, and they called us and said, “We don't think that the copy on the packaging will land well with some of our guests in the middle of the country—maybe it's a more coastal experience.” 

We already had millions of dollars worth of inventory on its way to Target. The team and I shared the same conviction that this was the right way to talk to women using the right anatomical words—vagina, breasts, all those things. We said, “No problem, we understand but we're not going to change the packaging and we may have to find another distribution plan for the products or go direct to the consumer.” They took a flyer on it and it sold out within two weeks. 

A lot of what we do involves medical devices, so navigating through the regulatory landscape and getting these products to market always introduces a challenging component to the development process. As it pertains to the Frida strategy, the real challenge from a product-development perspective is: How do you develop premium products—from a material user experience and look and feel perspective—at an accessible price point? That's across the board with our entire line. 

It's easy to create and innovate in an expensive way. Any industrial designer and engineer you hire can live up to that task. The real challenge for our business is our commitment to accessibility and having over a hundred products under the $20 price point, distributed everywhere from Nordstrom and Target to Walmart and Dollar General and everything in between. These are not products for the Kardashian of parents. These are products for every parent.

Regardless of the role, or where I felt in the hierarchy, or the title that I had, I've always felt that there was value in showing up for the job and identity that you want—not necessarily where you are. My uniform changes based on what is on my agenda on any given day or week. It's not like I can throw on a blazer and a silk shirt and then run to dinner with my two-year-old. Those things sometimes are mutually exclusive. So I make the decisions as a reflection of what I'm setting out to do for the day. I love mixing a more professional style with a very relaxed experience, like jeans and a blazer and a T-shirt or a suit and loafers. It has to allow me to integrate my work and my life a little bit more seamlessly without thinking. 

I set lofty, but attainable and realistic, goals. I'm ambitious—not overly ambitious, sort of realistically ambitious. And I'm relentless in the pursuit of those ambitions. So that has helped in the face of a variety of entrepreneurial challenges or periodic rejection or failures or roadblocks. We have a Frida philosophy around getting to yes and pushing past no… Sometimes people can reach a no and feel despair or rejection and get plagued by those feelings. Instead, we try to demonstrate and indicate that those roadblocks are just an opportunity to find a different path.

As my life evolved over the last decade, there's a lot that I wanted to do, but I exercised restraint and prioritized and paced myself with the understanding that I couldn't do it all at once. I wish I got comfortable with the pacing early on, and that speaks to really the integration of my work and personal life as a mom of four. It's about looking at my life in chapters, and this last decade and entrepreneurial growth journey has been about work. Now that the business has scaled and I have the resources to bring on executives and the ability to delegate, I can tip the scales to favor my personal life. I was chasing, wanting to do it all, and wanting to have it done with this comfort. But if you pace it appropriately, you can actually do it all—just not all at the same time.