Julie co-founder Amanda Morrison talks about getting into Walmart, cheeky marketing and donating pills to non-profits.
(Bloomberg) — Julie doesn’t want you to feel ashamed of taking the morning-after pill.
However, Julie isn’t a person, it’s a brand disrupting a typically bland and reserved industry. Just seven months after launch, its emergency contraception is being sold in thousands of US stores, including retail giants Walmart, Target and CVS. The New York-based firm, which expects to control 10% of the market this year, uses a cheeky slogan — “a fun night deserves a better morning after” — and advertises in very public places, such as on billboards and in New York’s subway system. Its packaging is bright shades of blue and pink.
The brainchild of three veterans from the beauty industry, Julie Products Inc. — the company’s formal name — also pushes back on social media against misinformation surrounding emergency contraception. Access to birth control has become more dire in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last year. Some anti-abortion groups continue to falsely paint the morning-after pill as a method of abortion. (Levonorgestrel, the active ingredient in Julie and market-leading Plan B One Step, stops or delays the ovary from releasing an egg.) In one extreme example, Iowa has paused providing it to sexual assault victims.
Bloomberg News recently spoke with 37-year-old co-founder Amanda Morrison, who also serves as president, about Julie’s rapid rise and how it wants to change contraception.
Julie costs about $40 a pill, roughly the same as branded competitors. When you looked at the emergency contraception market, how did you want to differentiate?
People didn’t want a product that looked shameful and clinical and cold. They wanted one that was approachable and somewhat friendly and felt like all the other beautiful things they were spending their money on. Inadvertently, the pharmaceutical world has made it one that is distant and cold and all about scaring people with side effects.
Julie is about creating a conversation and a safe space and inviting people in.
There’s a similar conversation happening in pregnancy tests. Ads used to only show people being elated to be pregnant. What’s the broader shift going on with how companies market products involving pregnancy and pregnancy prevention?
You can’t ignore the people who didn’t want to get pregnant. Companies have had to react and say: “We need to shift the narrative, and we need to be more inclusive.”
A bunch of these pharmaceutical companies and pharmacy retailers have shifted their management teams. You see a lot more women calling the shots and making decisions. Across Walgreens, CVS and Rite Aid, you have all women CEOs. That shift goes all the way down to the ads, the content and the products that they’re bringing to the shelf.
The company also has a philanthropic arm that donates a unit for each one sold to organizations such as Planned Parenthood. Earlier this year, Julie donated 200,000 doses. Why do this?
No matter your socioeconomic status, you should be able to access everything that comes with emergency contraception. We’ve built it into our business plan.
Julie recently launched a two-pack format at CVS. Why?
If you ask the average sexually-active person, “What do they have at home?,” the average woman would say, “I have birth control, and I have condoms.” It’s totally normal. It’s in your nightstand or your medicine cabinet. Emergency contraception is another tool in the “I don’t want to get pregnant” toolkit.
The two-count allows for us to have a conversation: “Go ahead and buy one for now that you need, but pick up that two-count because you might need one for later.”
This has a three-year shelf life, so it’s just as stable as any other product you might have in your medicine cabinet. And the closer you take [emergency contraception] to when you had unprotected sex, the more effective it is.
Why did Julie decide to run ads in the New York subway system?
Everywhere there are women and there is sex, there’s the opportunity to talk about Julie. You’ll find us on the subway, on billboards. There’s a boat that drives around the bay in Miami that has an ad on there. No matter your geography, political ideology, or socioeconomic class, you deserve access to this product and the content that comes with it. It’s not just for a certain type of person.
Our ability to launch in a CVS is what allows us to talk to those in urban areas. But in the fall, we launched in Walmart. We were really focused on the south and the Midwest, and getting to people whose lifeblood of their community is the local Walmart.
LGBTQ people — and especially trans men and non-binary people — can have trouble obtaining birth control for several reasons, including discrimination by doctors . How is Julie speaking to them and broadening the thinking on who can use and buy it?
Julie for All is not only our donation program, which includes LGBTQ centers. We make content that helps people who are non-binary and trans to understand how this product might affect their lifestyle. We try to be very thoughtful about that.
The majority of people who use our product do identify as women, but we’re also talking to men. Fewer than 10% of [male] partners in heterosexual relationships buy this product for their partner. That seems like a real missed opportunity when it was two people who had sex.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed.
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