Like many things involving parenthood, men’s roles in the the trying-to-conceive or TTC process haven’t traditionally been front and center. New prenatal supplement brand WeNatal wants to change that.
It launches today with two daily supplements, Him and Her, designed for men and women, respectively. They’re sold exclusively on WeNatal’s website and available as a monthly subscription bundle priced at $99 for couples or $49.95 for individuals. The subscription features WeNatal Journal, which is valued at $24.95, to support people enduring often long and stressful fertility journeys.
WeNatal co-founders and best friends Vida Delrahim and Ronit Menashe teamed up with functional medicine doctors, nutritionists and fertility experts, including physician and author Mark Hyman, functional medicine and ancestral health expert Chris Kresser, and holistic and celebrity nutritionist Kelly LeVeque to develop the supplements. Hyman, Kresser and LeVeque are members of the brand’s medical advisory board.
Him contains selenium; vitamins A, C, D, and E; CoQ10; and NAC to promote robust sperm production, shape and motility, testosterone levels and immune system function. Her contains choline; vitamins A, B, C and E; selenium; iron; and copper to assist with egg quality and provide nutrition from preconception to nursing.
Menashe and Delrahim were inspired to create WeNatal after each experienced pregnancy loss. Discussing her first miscarriage, Delrahim says, “My personal journey is how alone and how much self-blame I went through the six months post-pregnancy loss. I literally was like, ‘Was it something I ate? Was it a workout? Was it that I worked too much?’ It was horrible until I grieved, and I went on to have a healthy baby girl.” A few years later, she suffered another miscarriage. Soon after that, Menashe called Delrahim to tell her that she, too, had a miscarriage.
Menashe and Delrahim decided they had to research what was going on and create products to help people confronting similar experiences. According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 20% of women aged 15 to 49 years old are unable to get pregnant in a year of trying. The Mayo Clinic figures 10% to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. Informed by their fertility histories, Menashe and Delrahim spotted a gap in the market they believed they could address with supplements.
“You either have prenatals like the ones that we were taking—expensive, very niche, many capsules, not accessible—and then you have the more accessible prenatals that are cheaper, and some of them are starting to have better quality ingredients, but some have crap ingredients, or they have good ingredients, but very low doses, not enough to make a difference. Many prenatals have colors and binders, and all these excipients that nobody is talking about,” says Menashe. “We sought out to make a clean prenatal with functional doses in less than three pills. Everybody needs access to a good prenatal.”
“We sought out to make a clean prenatal with functional doses in less than three pills. Everybody needs access to a good prenatal.”
The pair met 15 years ago working at Nike. Delrahim is still senior marketing director at Nike, and Menashe, who’s spent more than a decade in the wellness field in marketing and strategy positions, is focusing on WeNatal full-time. Following Menashe’s stint at Nike, she joined Dr. Hyman Enterprises as director of operations. Hyman and LeVeque are investors WeNatal along with dietitian Brigid Titgemeier, who also joins them on its advisory board. Menashe and Delrahim contributed funds to getting WeNatal off the ground. They decline to specify the amount the brand has raised.
WeNatal was initially bootstrapped as Delrahim and Menashe set out to prove its concept. The original plan was to bootstrap it for six months post-launch and then start an official fundraising round. “We were quite humbled that several of our close advisors and friends and family actually said, ‘This is a brilliant idea. We want to back you,'” says Delrahim. “It wasn’t really intentional that we wanted to go after money.”
Early this year, WeNatal closed a friends and family funding round to spread its message about the importance of preconception and release its products to the public. It’s expected the cash will sustain the brand’s business this year. Delrahim says, “We’re pleased with where we’re at and not ready to share any figures at this time, but look forward to continued growth in the future.”
WeNatal joins a growing crop of modern, mostly direct-to-consumer startups such as Perelel, Bird&Be, Natalist and Modern Fertility in the fertility space. They offer a wide variety of consumer goods and educational platforms aimed at parents-to-be and new parents. WeNatal’s co-founders aren’t fazed by the competition.
“Though the prenatal industry is very saturated, there is actually a big need,” says Menashe. “The rates of infertility are so high. The rates of miscarriages are so high. We need a bunch of companies to innovate together and change the space. We saw that there was a hole…Vida and I love to see that there’s actually growth in innovation in the last few years because we’re all in this together.”
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