Attn: Grace, a female-founded company bent on disrupting the incontinence products category for women, has secured $2 million in new funding to fuel further growth on the heels of launching in nearly 1,600 Walmart stores nationwide as well as on Walmart.com and Target.com.
Led by For Later, the oversubscribed round also saw participation from Flybridge as well as existing investors including Kapor Capital, Portfolia, Ingeborg Investments, and Commonwealth.
Attn: Grace said it plans to use the latest fundraise to further expand its distribution network.
“We hear stories from our customers every day about the difference our products are making in their day-to-day routines, and ultimately in their overall quality of life,” said Alex Fennell, who co-founded the company in 2020 with Mia Abbruzzese. “We’re incredibly excited to continue driving our mission forward and increasing access to solutions that don’t force women to compromise on comfort, performance or their larger values.”
19 million U.S. women are affected
Attn: Grace makes products to deal with a problem faced by more than 19 million American women but rarely discussed.
“It’s hardly a niche market,” Abbruzzese said. “However, many women are still turning to period products because perhaps they are more accessible to them, or less embarrassing to purchase, and that’s problematic as their liner or pad of choice is most likely letting them down.”
She said that compounding all of this is the fact that this condition is still so highly stigmatized, it takes an average of six years of living with bladder leaks before the average woman will speak to her doctor about them.
Fennell and Abbruzzese were inspired to launch their company because of personal experiences.
Abbruzzese had seen her then-89-year-old-mother trying to stuff her adult diapers into the plastic bag that the newspaper comes in to hide them.
“Her mom was this incredibly refined older woman; but there she was struggling to manage her bladder leaks with a hodge-podge mix of utilitarian products that in no way matched who she was or what she valued,” Fennell said. “It all felt really archaic and unevolved, and as we both continued to think about it, we knew there had to be a better way.”
Fennell tapped into her positive experience subscribing to a diaper delivery service for her children, thinking the model could be applied to get incontinence products directly to users as well.
A new kind of incontinence product
They set out to create a new kind of incontinence products that could be delivered discreetly and to run an environmentally responsible company. Attn: Grace products are made with sustainable materials and responsible manufacturing practices that replace the petroleum used in other products on the market with renewable, plant-based materials wherever possible, cutting down on pollution and minimizing the environmental impact.
The Boston-based company is a Certified B Corporation, meaning it is committed to meeting verified standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability.
The products use a plant-based material for their top sheet, the layer of pad that sits next to a user's skin, as opposed to petroleum products treated with chlorine bleach, synthetic dyes and fragrances that cause itching or skin irritation in some women.
“They’ve been game-changing for the more than thousands of women who have made the switch so far, many of whom have been struggling for years with discomfort,” Fennell said.
Packaging also counts when it comes to disrupting a stigmatized category, they said.
“There has been a noticeable shift across consumer goods to a more thoughtful, modern design aesthetic in nearly every other category, but the shelves in the incontinence aisle are still overflowing with brands that seem stuck in a bit of a time warp,” they said, noting that their straightforward, clean design is meant to make the products feel more approachable and less overwhelming while also reflecting a commitment to transparent sourcing and clean ingredients.
Early fundraising poses challenges
As far as launching the company, Abbruzzese said fundraising in the early days was “incredibly difficult.”
“Raising institutional capital was entirely new to both of us; we were pitching a brand designed to serve an older demographic that the VC community wasn’t yet ready to focus on, and, let’s face it, incontinence isn’t exactly the sexiest market opportunity,” she said. “There were hours upon hours of pitching to rooms full of blank stares and painfully uncomfortable silence – no one understood why we wanted to build a brand in this space and for this audience.”
But the feedback they get from consumers is that their products allow women o get back to doing the things that they love – comfortably and with peace of mind.
“We routinely hear things like ‘the difference is night and day,’ that our pads are ‘game-changing,’ that women are able to socialize, travel, and laugh openly in public again without discomfort or fear of leaking,” Abbruzzese said.
Attn: Grace is Abbruzzese’s second company. In 2003, she launched a children’s shoe brand with Stride Rite, exclusively for Target, called Morgan & Milo.
“We were the first to combine sneaker bottoms with more formal-looking uppers, so kids could have one pair of shoes that could carry them from dressier occasions to the playground and everywhere in between,” she said.
She sold Morgan & Milo to clothing and accessories firm Zutano in 2019 to focus on Attn: Grace.
