Sascha Mayer: [00:00:00] We put one in and the local newspaper, which was owned by Gnet, picked up the story and it went to the cover of USA today, all around the country. We basically had a very rudimentary website and a phone number. I mean, literally, we had one pod. The validation we got from that initial placement just was undeniable.

Chris Kocek: Welcome to any insights yet the podcast that explores the intersection of strategy, inspiration, and branding. I'm Chris Kocek. On today's episode, we connect the dots between breastfeeding, bodacious optimism, and business activism with Sasha Meyer, co-founder of Mamava. Mama What? Mamava, which literally translates to moms on the go.

Chances are if you've been to an airport, sports stadium, mall or university in the past 10 years, you've probably seen one of [00:01:00] these freestanding Mamava lactation stations with their welcoming rounded corners and their enthusiastic smiley face logo. But how did Sasha and her co-founder Christine Dodson come up with this brand new business model and create a category of one?

And how did they go from just one pod in 2013 to more than 5,000 locations across 50 states over the past 10 years. To get there, we'll need to jump into our time machine and go back even further to a confluence of critical moments that happened in 2006. 

Sascha Mayer: So, I was breastfeeding my second child, I was home 'cause it was Labor Day. I had experienced this sort of indignity of using my breast pump in really substandard places when I was traveling and there was an article with an image on the cover of the New York Times that showed a woman in an open cubicle [00:02:00] using a breast pump and the article talked about this, sort of, two-tiered system that had formed around breastfeeding, where privileged folks, people like myself who had a supportive employer and autonomy in my job and just was gonna assert myself to say like, I wanna breastfeed and I'm gonna use my pump and I'm gonna close my office door, or you're gonna have to wait for me after this meeting that we're in at our clients, and I'm gonna be using this restroom to use my breast pump, but for many women who didn't have the same autonomy/authority to say what they wanted and a class system had emerged where sort of health begets health, wealth begets wealth, and it seemed really unfair and the fact that it was Labor Day, the fact that I literally had baby on my breast, I was like, this is a sign, I'm gonna do something about it. 

Chris Kocek: So, how did you kind of gut check yourself to see, is this something that only I'm experiencing? Obviously there was the New York Times article. How did you go about [00:03:00] finding out how much of, sort of a pent up issue this was for people?

Sascha Mayer: Yeah, so again, right in my office, we had a bit of a baby boom. I think eight babies were born within the design studio ecosystem, and I think that we had like maybe 50 employees so that was a massive percentage, and the receptionist quit breastfeeding because we had kids two weeks apart. I couldn't spell her, you know, ordinarily I'd be like, I'm gonna come down and spell you for that 20 minutes you'd need but I was taking my own breastfeeding or pumping breaks and so even right there, I saw somebody in my circle who wasn't able to, uh, have the true choice to breastfeed and then I had this experience where in my brand strategy role, we were doing an offsite with our client, Hewlett Packard, and there was about 15 people in this meeting. The meeting was actually offsite at an industrial design studio in San Francisco and was taking place over three days. I didn't know these people very well, and [00:04:00] throughout this three days I started to notice two other women in this small group were kind of slinking away at the same time with these black bags, and they were taking pumping breaks that we hadn't even built into the schedule or that they were taking during the built-in breaks and were just finding places. I remember vividly I went to this basement storage room in this, in this place. I think one woman went to a restroom 'cause it was about the same time and somebody else borrowed an office. So, that was just glaring even in this small offsite meeting. In a place where we were working on design problems, we had three people.

So, there was evidence all around me and of course when you're in that world of having a baby and your friends and colleagues are having babies, that reinforcement kind of seemed to be everywhere. 

Chris Kocek: Did you run off and tell someone, hey, I think I've just noticed something like this is crazy, I'm seeing it everywhere now or did you [00:05:00] hold onto the idea for a little while? 

Sascha Mayer: Well, the original article from The Times actually talked about Starbucks and Starbucks with their lactation spaces for on the corporate side and free breast pumps but then the mass of of their employees were obviously baristas and often they were majority of women in those positions and so I actually wrote to Starbucks and I said, I saw this article and I think at the time they had a whole program where they were soliciting ideas from customers and they said, you have to build lactation rooms and all your customers would know about them and they would plan it into their day to use those spaces. Later on, we actually thought about naming Mamava “Mama Latte.” because lattes were the things that you get at Starbucks and it had a nice connotation as something that was like something special you do for yourself. That was the [00:06:00] initial action and then the design studio where we incubated Mamava actually set out to solve some of our own problems and set up a workshop or a design charrette, essentially, where we were pitching ideas that we wanted to solve and what was really compelling to us was that we could have an idea that we could work on from a brand and communication perspective, from whole cloth versus that client work where you're never really sure where it ends up, where the client ultimately gets to make those final decisions so the aspiration was solving real world problems through design that we could control from start to finish. 

Chris Kocek: So, you said one of the names was potentially Mama Latte? Inspired by the Starbucks, [00:07:00] part of the article. Were there other names besides Mama Latte, Mamava that you left on the cutting room floor, or how did you end up with the name Mamava?

Sascha Mayer: So, uh, what was interesting and challenging about what we did with Mamava is that we created a whole new category. So, there was a lot of grappling with even what we call the object, right? Is it a booth? Is it a station? And then obviously pod, because of what the form factor came to be, iPods and so on were there, and it sounded just hipper and cooler and maybe even had a community connotation. So, there was grappling with that first and then things like, is it nursing? is it breastfeeding? is it lactation? Combining those to explain what this thing actually was and when you think of the world of online search, nursing means something else mostly, right? And kind of navigating that and then, [00:08:00] you know, with the name, you know, we had names like Blossom and Bloom, and you know, a key driver always for anybody who does naming is what's available as well but the idea of mom on the go and what this object or infrastructure inspires or facilitates is what we felt was the strongest and now we've, you know, continued to use that idea of like mama and va, you know, as a great combination that allows us to go potentially in more places. 

Chris Kocek: What do you have planned in terms of the Mamava expansion? 

Sascha Mayer: Yeah, so one place we're using the language is we on our pods have the mobile app to open them, and there's a smart lock system, we are migrating that now to lactation rooms. So, there's more of like an ecosystem you can find not only our pods about lactation rooms, and now some of those rooms will be managed through [00:09:00] access with the app, and we call that offering “va room,” you know, go room. Again, when you're creating these things, it's what's available, what are the phonetics, what are the implications for international, like is it available or also is it offensive? Things that you don't necessarily, even though we don't, we aren't international at this point, we wanna make sure that like we haven't stumbled on something that doesn't work in some other context. 

Chris Kocek: Do you remember off the top of your head, approximately how many names made it to the final round or how many names you considered at first? 

Sascha Mayer: We had two rounds of names and naming is something that I love to do and I've done a lot of, as a brand strategist, it was a little bit of one of my specialties and I think in each round of names there were like sort of six that we really, really liked and then at the end, this idea of Mama Latte [00:10:00] or Mamava were the winners and it just, I think that our creative director, Michael Jagger, he was like, it's Mamava, you know, he, we give him so much credit 'cause he just, you know, has great insights and we also liked it just again as a form factor, like ma-ma-va and all the As and it and it works, it was short enough and so that's how it really happened. We use it, we play with it as well, we don't have any products called Papava, but we talk about our papavas and our grandpavas and our grandmavas. So, it has a lot of potential for extension. 

Chris Kocek: So the logo itself, we've got the name down, Mamava, now you've gotta make a logo for it, and it's a very happy looking logo, it makes you wanna smile. Is it just a smiley face or does it represent something else? 

Sascha Mayer: Yes, we actually call it our “Happy Breasts” logo, and we even have a little animation, which shows how, you know, the breasts come and you flip it over and it becomes the eyeballs of the logo, and that was really, really deliberate.[00:11:00] There was a lot out there around breastfeeding and nursing, which was very earth-mothery and, and if it wasn't earth-mothery in the breastfeeding space, it could have almost been complainy or shamey, right? Like, don't make women, use their breast pumps in bathrooms and that was definitely the problem we were solving, but we wanted to solve it in an optimistic way and kind of break down the barriers for the conversation and people do not respond to being scolded, right? We're working with facilities managers often they are gentlemen or gentlemen of a certain age, some of them have been amazing “lactivists” and have come to us to solve this problem but some of them, we were explaining the fundamentals of breastfeeding and how it is gross to use a bathroom to prepare food for a new human and so we wanted to approach that in a really positive way so there wasn't shame either for the, for the user of the pods or [00:12:00] for the facilities that were, hosting them and so the happy breast logo was was totally deliberate and the design of the pod itself, you know, we use, uh, this language of bodacious optimism. It has like curve sides, it communicates sort of something bouncy and happy and feminine and that was all super deliberate. 

Chris Kocek: So, you mentioned the word lactivists. The folks that you sell into are, are lactivists of a certain age or, or different backgrounds. That word, is that something that you guys came up with?

Sascha Mayer: I don't think it was used a lot, but what it was, it definitely had existed, but it's something that, you know, we definitely put on our t-shirts, you know, we do see ourselves as an advocate or activist brand, so it makes so much sense. So, I don't think it was original to us, but we love it. There are so many people who breastfeed and it is very much part of their maternal identity and there are others, and we learned this [00:13:00] from being in the field who are not identifying as female and are still breastfeeding or are working in communities who are needing to moderate, sort of, that gender language. So, we had, in our pods, like “looking good mama” on the mirror, and we went into a campus, like a university campus and they'd actually covered up the mama because it was their standard to not have this gendered language.

It's a balance because as I said, so important, in terms of the identity and my personal identity of being a mother, of being a woman but being respectful in this day and age, and the pods are not breastfeeding pods, they're lactation pods and we kind of take an approach in our content language, it's like sort of escalator, stairs, elevator, and we kind of use a balance of that language, parent versus mother, and, and we go back and, and forth, not out of confusion, but like out of [00:14:00] respect to the various audiences for them to see themselves in our brand.

Chris Kocek: What was the hardest thing leading up to the launch of Mamava? Besides coming up with the name and the logo and, and perhaps even the design, was there anything else that made it particularly challenging? You said that there was nobody else in the category, so you were inventing a category. 

Sascha Mayer: It wasn't until we had momentum around compliance and the legal mandates, both at a federal and a municipal and statewide level. So, we didn't really have a business case, and it didn't seem like employers were gonna take action on this, or facilities were gonna take action on this until it actually became the law. So, we went out to raise our early funds. It was really, finally, because we could say, and by the way, there's gonna be a compliance driver to this where people or facilities and employers actually have to do it.

So that's why 2006 to 2013 when we actually put in our first unit, that huge gap there was really just waiting again for culture to catch up [00:15:00] and policy to catch up and then I think the other factor that we were really sensitive to was interpreting this new idea into culture and not having it be about hiding breastfeeding, but about having it be an authentic choice. That was really important and that goes back to like that happy breast logo and you know, my personal experience of like, I'm a hippie, I would breastfeed anywhere, but when I had that second child who was distracted and wasn't gonna get down to dinner unless I could have a environment for him and then the first child was sometimes with me if I was breastfeeding and then we'd be in a public place and I'd have to contain a toddler while nursing is distracted, nursing or using a breast pump, which is not something you generally would wanna ever do in public 'cause you're attaching an apparatus to your body, you need an outlet, you need to be sitting down, you need to be in the head space for proper physiology to, like, be calm and [00:16:00] have the letdown. That was a concern, and we did in the early stages hear from, you know, like “I was a founder of the ‘Le Leche League’ and I breastfed my six kids,” I'm like, well, did you work outside the house? You know? And what we found in a miraculous, amazing way, and we do not grapple with this anymore is that the mothers themselves would step in to the online forums wherever we were hearing pushback and advocate for us from their own experiences and validate us from their own experiences. So, it would almost be like in the early days, we'd see something on Facebook and it'd be like 3, 2, 1, and you'd see a mom zoom in, another mom zoom in, and in a gentle way, provide their own experience to moderate the pushback and now that's not even an issue anymore. People just understand this is like a totem of celebration, of breastfeeding and motherhood. 

Chris Kocek: So the mom of a [00:17:00] community would come in and essentially defend these lactation pods and say, look, they're very helpful and here's why.

Sascha Mayer: Exactly. 

Chris Kocek: I remember in an early conversation with you, you had talked about this idea of going from invisible to visible, and I loved that that structure, that everything about breastfeeding, breast pumps, everything, was made to be invisible for years and years and years, and you wanted to make this natural thing more visible to the world.

Sascha Mayer: And you think about what else? Especially from a design, standpoint, what else that's so fundamental to our human experience has so little design around it. Right? And there was so much opportunity there.

Chris Kocek: Do you know if what you have done has kind of created a chain reaction where, you know, new businesses are coming out and saying, look, the breast pump needs an overhaul, the way it's been done, the way it's packaged and designed, have you had other businesses come to you and say, you've really [00:18:00] inspired us and we're doing something? 

Sascha Mayer: Well, I don't know if we can take credit for any of it, but in the last 10 years, all of the world has radically changed from wearable breast pumps to, I don't know if you followed the Molly Baz endorsement and the billboard on Times Square for Swell and Swell makes accessories and tools for breastfeeding, and I think it was a, like a lactation cookie that they were advertising. It's a great example of how change and how visible breastfeeding is now. I think we're part of that, I think. I wouldn't wanna take full credit. We do know that initiation rates for lactation or for breastfeeding have increased by 10% in the last 10 years and I think that is a visibility phenomenon and sort of, you know, women just asserting themselves more in culture all the way around that has lent itself to that change. [00:19:00] 

Chris Kocek: So today there are 5,000 or so Mamava lactation pods across 50 states. 

They're in airports, malls, hospitals, universities, stadiums, sports stadiums, schools, zoos, corporate enterprises, but, you started your very first pod got launched in Vermont's, Burlington International Airport. How did that happen? 

Sascha Mayer: Well, Vermont is a very small state, and so you're connected to everyone. But we knew the director of the airport and there was an incident, actually, I think it was around 2006, where having nothing to do with the airport, a breastfeeding mother was ejected from a plane by a flight attendant, and it got a ton of bad press, there was a nurse in at the airport and the very excellent director at the time, a [00:20:00] gentleman named Jean Richards, wanted to do something about it and kind of knew because it's a small town, that we were working on something. He also had gotten our very direct letter from someone who was flying through the airport who worked in journalism and had been stuck there, and she was a breastfeeding, new breastfeeding parent and had no place to use her breast pump. So these things were layering on for him, he was the neighbor of our creative director, Michael, and helped facilitate this very first and took a risk, right? So, we kind of went at the hardest thing first when we went after airports and there's many, many reasons that we went after airports, it was a primary pain point for me and my co-founder, Christine, who was a breastfeeding parent and we had to travel all around and we're always in toilets using our breast pumps, but we also knew it would be an amazing pollinator and so with this relationship and basically a handshake and literally I think there was a [00:21:00] contract for a dollar 'cause we did have to make it official 'cause the airport's owned by the city, we got a local kids clothing company to pay us some money in order for us to actually have the money to build the unit.

We put one in and the local newspaper, which was owned by Gnet, picked up the story and it went to the cover of USA today, all around the country, and we basically had a very rudimentary website and a phone number, so we weren't even prepared for it, but it was such validation for the concept. I mean, literally we had one pod, we were still inside the design studio, we worked on it like when we had some free time, but the validation we got from that initial placement just was undeniable. 

Chris Kocek: That's such a great story and I love how there's this perfect storm of pain points that kind of converge and come together where you've got the nurse in, [00:22:00] the woman, unfortunately being ejected from the flight, hopefully not mid-flight…

Sascha Mayer: No. Before, before it took off 

Chris Kocek: …and then the letter from the journalists so all these things coming together and that director, you know, felt like, hey, this is a problem, I need to solve this, I need to find not just a way to say, oh, nothing going on here, no problems here, but what can I do to solve this challenge that we're having, and there you were ready to go with an initial one-off model, which actually you said you were able to get it paid for, not by investors, but by a business, a local business who kind of turned the pod into a billboard, which I actually think is another aha moment in the creation of Mamava, at least initially turning the pods into billboards for brands that share either a similar ethos or you know, as your customers or the end users or they just say, Hey, this is a great billboard space inside of an airport, let's slap some imagery on there. 

Was that something that you knew from the [00:23:00] get-go that you would try to build this brand with advertising revenue as like an out of home play or what happened there? 

Sascha Mayer: Yeah. So, from the get go and actually goes back to a little bit of the DNA of the design studio, solidarity of unbridled labor where we worked our core account for many, many years was Burton Snowboards and in that, Michael Jagger had the insight in the early days that the snowboards were actually a canvas for the zeitgeist of sideways sports and action sports, and they have a front and a back, and guess what? A kid is gonna want a new one every year as we evolve those. So, there's a little bit of that that actually went into the pods themselves. Oh, these can be a canvas for the communication of breastfeeding or for sponsors or for the facility itself and we thought that the initial business model was going to be more of an out-of-home media play. So, in [00:24:00] the beginning, in order to prove the concept in those further airports, including, um, the Port Authority Airports in New York City, my client, um, at the design studio, Seventh Generation, household cleaning and, and at the time, baby goods, we convinced them to put their graphics on the inside and outside of these pods. So, the airport could place 'em and would place 'em at no cost, because again, brand new idea. There wasn't actually any legislation mandating at the time that these were needed in airports but they knew they had the problem because they were also getting customer feedback from people who were flying, or, I think folks who actually worked at the airports as well but they had to solve this. So, for us, we took the money from Seventh Generation, built the pods, put their graphics on it, and then seventh generation of course, got amazing out-of-home media and PR because it was early days and in terms of the business [00:25:00] model of out-of-home media, it was much ultimately better for us to be in Mom's pocket on our mobile app and have her opening the pod and traveling with Mom versus trying to be in the world of JC Deco and Clear Channel and having a very, high calorie burn to actually navigate what it means to be in the media business, like, we needed to sell pods to sell advertising was a whole nother beast and in the end, in the era also of digital advertising wasn't something that was the ultimate path we took. But airports continue to be a huge factor for marketing for us as far as people just seeing them, the high traffic nature of airports.

Chris Kocek: So are the pods, are they wrapped now everywhere or you just, you don't have any more of the, of the wrapping out of home play anymore? 

Sascha Mayer: It depends. So, we go into a stadium and they want it to look like the stadium, so it's like the Cubs or whoever. [00:26:00] We'll wrap it and we have that, at our factory, the ability to put graphics inside and out.

Once in a while we will do a partnership. It's like a Hello Bellow or a like-minded baby brand. The pods are still a canvas for the idea of breastfeeding and for the facility itself to be celebrating it, but it's not the core of the business model that we thought it might be. 

Chris Kocek: Gotcha. And you mentioned the app.

When did you guys come out with the app and what was your realization where you're like, oh gosh, we need to get mobile here, we need to get in the pocket of moms. 

Sascha Mayer: Yeah, so that was also kind of a fake it till you make it, like, how are we gonna show scale? Right? And how are moms gonna find our pods?

So in the beginning we were still incubating at the design studio. We had maybe 10 or 20 pods that were coming out every quarter and that's not very useful, in terms of an app. So we had this idea, how about we scrape the [00:27:00] internet for all of the publicly available lactation rooms? And so people had started to build lactation rooms, we know like some museums have them in some college campuses. So, we hired one intern to do that work and literally put it into a rudimentary spreadsheet and another intern who happened to be working in the building to put a map app together so we could not just have, you know, 20 or 30 pods, but we could have a thousand lactation rooms pretty really quickly to compliment and make it really useful for the moms and parents who are using it. And then ultimately we realized, ooh, this is a really good data resource for us and we can manage access to the pods. Honestly, the rooms and the pods are really quite well respected. You have to be kind of a bad actor and there's not that many people in the world who wanna, like, do weird things, but it made sense to us in the, the context of like airports to put a smart lock on the [00:28:00] pods to make the app free to download and that is how you access them and it gives us like another data set. So we're like, oh gosh, this pod is being used 15 times a day, you need more pods. It also creates just a little bit of friction in the context of like somebody who wants to go in there and just like take their coffee break or charge their cell phone. So, it made sense, but it started out as this very, very simple search app. 

Chris Kocek: Well, I love that because I'm always trying to tell people to build the big tent. So, like with Dove's campaign for real Beauty, they built the big tent around beauty, right? Any conversations around beauty, dove wanted to be there and to essentially instigate the conversation and what I love that you guys did that to me feels similar, is you took publicly available information and with a couple of interns, you said, here are all the locations where you can do nursing. It's not always gonna be in a Mamava [00:29:00] pod, but this is like a community service is what you did. You pulled that all together. Now, the benefit for you is, looks like you guys are scaling quickly, but you built the big tent around all of this stuff. 

Sascha Mayer: Yeah. 

Chris Kocek: And that's a huge thing, and that's you're being a champion for people beyond the product that you know, that you have, which at the time you had a limited supply of. 

Sascha Mayer: Yeah. Even our vision doesn't say like, Mamava has solved this problem universally, the vision is there's a private place for a parent to pump or breastfeed anywhere she goes and it doesn't say that it's a Mamava that's solving that problem. So it's, we really are mission oriented in terms of the bigger picture around solving the problem. 

Chris Kocek: And you mentioned earlier too, pollinators, and I love this word. I love this idea, the visual that it brings up airports as pollinators who were a couple of other spaces or what were a couple of other spaces that you said this is also a pollinator type business, [00:30:00] obviously airports because they're super high traffic areas. What were some other initial pollinators that you were trying to go after?

Sascha Mayer: Yeah, so stadiums and what's nice about actually both of those environments is that they are kind of out of your usual context, they are often positive, they are filled with, you know, the anticipation of the trip or of the game. So, to have that association with our brand and our solution, I think it just rubbed off.

Stadiums often want to be in competition, like what's the next level that they can provide for their customer experience? And so we have found that a number of the folks who brought us into one stadium, they move into another facilities role and they bring us to the next stadium they work at and or they do a wonderful job, they do ribbon cuttings and celebrations around their family friendliness and we're part of that and then the next stadium's like, we need that too. So they are [00:31:00] pollinators. It's a pretty small world, there's not that many big stadiums, and so they really do influence each other. 

Chris Kocek: Is there a favorite place where you see one of Mamava’s pods that you say “I really love this pod and for this reason?” 

Sascha Mayer: We actually, a few years back, put a pod at MoMA in New York City. My parents are artists and this pod is beautiful, it is publicly available, you don't even have to have a ticket to get in to use it or see it and it almost is like both a design object and this infrastructure and they did something really smart, which is they made the interior with the graphics a little gallery of this artist, Betye Saar. So, you can go in and have this little respite if you're pumping or if you're nursing, and you can also still experience this art that's on the interior [00:32:00] of the pod. If there was one piece of material on my vision board, it would be a pod at MoMA and that manifested.

It's kinda like drop the mic. That's it. 

Chris Kocek: Nice. Now in terms of, we've talked about different people that you have to attract with this pod, you have to get in front of, you have to build awareness around. You have kind of a, a multi-layered, complex customer situation, right? There's the end users, the moms and dads, but first and foremost, there's also the businesses themselves, the airports, the stadiums, the malls, even the corporate enterprises, which as I understand, that's where you're really growing now. How do you navigate that? 

Sascha Mayer: Yeah, I mean, in the, in the really beginning we sort of saw these concentric circles of designing from our mom first and having those design charettes, like what did she need? And like the primary thing that she communicated back was cleanliness. So, if you see the interior of the pods, they really look kinda like a kitchen more than anything else and easy to [00:33:00] clean and wipe down and, and good lighting and where the plugs are located, but she is not the purchaser, right? She influences and she might be complaining to a facility that doesn't have lactation. The purchaser is the facilities person, and as I said, that tends to be actually pretty male type of role, and what do they need? They need something to solve the problem quickly, put them into compliance with some of the laws that exist and be affordable and can be an asset that they can manage easily and we hope that the idea of even having the lactation space or lactation pod kind of communicates a values that the organization is trying to put out there. 

Chris Kocek: Before starting Mamava, you worked at Solidarity of Unbridled Labor, a design studio in Vermont. You worked on Burton Snowboard, Seventh Generation.

When you think about the brands that you've worked on in the past, was there [00:34:00] a challenge that came from one of those brands and you were just like, that is a tough thing. That is a really tough assignment. 

Sascha Mayer: So Seventh Generation is based actually in Burlington, and I would love to do ethnographies as part of the work I did, and I would often do East coast, mid country, and then West coast and I remember doing, going into people's homes and be at a home in Boulder with triplets and see, like, these people were, because they had to, were changing diapers in the kitchen, you know, just kind of those insights you, you have, like, whoa, because there was no other way to kind of manage the volume of care that they had to have these babies and it was just fun to go into people's homes and and see how that worked. But I did this research before the movie, Inconvenient Truth and tried to really extract like what do these people care about and what are they connected to? And, and then after, and I cannot tell you [00:35:00] about how much that piece of media changed perception around environment, climate change, the kind of materials we use in our homes. It was like night and day. They were educating me the second time around. I think there was probably a two or three year gap between the first exercise of ethnographies and the second, and it was very inspiring, I guess 'cause this is a subject I care a lot about, but also telling about how influential a piece of media can be to change culture so much.

Chris Kocek: When you're getting started on a new project, whether it's Mamava or any of the projects that you talked about with Seventh Generation or anybody, are there a couple of questions that you routinely like to ask to get to the heart of the problem or really break things open so that you start to get to a different place?

Sascha Mayer: I've been doing this like entrepreneurial thing [00:36:00] for a while, but the model that the design studio uses, still uses today is called The Living Brand and what we do is sort of try to identify the rational, emotional and cultural drivers, um, around the brand and sometimes we'll do that just through exercises 'cause people maybe don't have that language but we'll ask folks to do collage work and then the explaining of the collage, of the vision, we'll actually find those words and then we'll kind of sort them into like, okay, here's the rational dimensions, here's the emotional things that are really important. Important and his is the cultural context in which the brand should play or is playing now.

I think it's definitely how we think of Mamava, like it's gotta solve these problems, gotta be clen, it's gotta be mobile, it's gotta facilitate this breastfeeding thing on a rational level, emotionally, it has [00:37:00] to feel like welcoming and optimistic and that you're not isolated and then culturally, it's just like beeing in the conversation around policy, health and wellness, environment and sustainability, and keeping those things in balance is the model we have used for branding. 

Chris Kocek: Have you seen any TikTok influencers raising the status of Mamava in one of their incredibly creative tiktoks? 

Sascha Mayer: To be honest with you, what is the Polynesian like Hoka, Hoka dance?

Do you know what that is? There was some sports team, I believe, that was doing that at an airport in front of a Mamava pod and that one keeps on coming up and it's like sort of incidental, but we have reshared that a lot of times. Again, it's really, the business is challenging for me right now because I'm a brand person [00:38:00] and an audience builder, and right now, we find it difficult to resource that end of things, and it sort of happens organically versus, oh, we need to invest in these channels to sell pods into retail, into government. So, um, that's always that tension of like, there's value there, we need to be investing there, but we can't like, measure the value as readily as we can if we're going to a trade show specifically for, you know, HR people and our trackingbthe leads all the way through to the sales versus just where the brand is in culture.

So, being super transparent in frustration I'm having right now around brand building versus sort of your classic sales and marketing end of the business. 

Chris Kocek: Well, you must be doing something right because I think it was two years ago you were at about 3,000 locations or 3,000 Mamava [00:39:00] pods. Now you're up to 5,000 plus.

So there's, you've almost doubled in the past two years, what has driven that doubling or that rapid growth do you think? 

Sascha Mayer: Well, a lot of it is, again, zeitgeist, trying to get people back to work, women asserting themselves more in the workplace, and probably the biggest one was the Pump Act, which is this piece of legislation that basically closed all the loopholes around lactation accommodation that was passed at the end of 2022 and provides a pathway for a parent to bring a lawsuit if the employer does not provide a lactation accommodation within 10 days of the employee bringing the issue to them and we are seeing a lot of class action suits actually percolate up from that. Again, it's like when you're building businesses and brands, it's like sometimes you're making the wave, sometimes you're riding the wave, sometimes you're being crushed by the wave.

[00:40:00] So, the wave has kind of caught up with us, frankly, and we are doing a good job of riding it right now. 

Chris Kocek: I mean, it's such an inspiring story because there's this activism component to it, I think you're changing the culture. I mean, the culture is there, but it was kind of nascent and with Mamava, you've really connected a lot of dots for people and given them this, this wonderful thing.

Sascha Mayer: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, we have a feature on our app, which is words of Support, and it's meant for moms to leave words of support to each other because it can be kind of isolating, you might feel like you're the only one who has done this. One of my things that I just do to like, you know, make myself motivated after, you know, it's a grind to be an entrepreneur, but I love this one, I think it was a post a couple days ago, it says, “relax and enjoy a space so many women fought to have, I love being a working mom and still being able to provide for my babe [00:41:00] on work trips. Forever grateful.” 

Chris Kocek: That's beautiful. That's beautiful. You have to have those posted up because there are some days when you feel like you're in the grind and little affirmations or things like that can be very motivating.

Sascha Mayer: I'll cut and paste them and I'll put them in the Slack channel, just like, here's a reminder here it is, I know we're trying to deal with this whatever ERP system and everybody's pulling their hair out, but like, this is why, and that's sometimes hard to remember when you're, you know, at your desk and working through problems. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah. No, that's beautiful. Alright. Speed round. Best part of the whole thing. Here we go. What was your favorite subject in school? 

Sascha Mayer: Ooh, social studies 

Chris Kocek: And why? What about social studies was so exciting to you? 

Sascha Mayer: I don't know, study of people, and I've always been interested. I ended up being a sociology major in college, and it was kind of a combination of like the language arts was in there, there was no math 

Chris Kocek: Ding, there was no math. [00:42:00] It's true. I was in calculus my senior year of high school, didn't understand, I said, if there's this many letters in any one equation, this is not for me. I need it to be numbers. What's one of the most interesting jobs you had before you became a planner that then helped you as a planner?

Sascha Mayer: I worked right out of school for Bernie Sanders, who was a congressman at the time and now he's the senator. Hopefully most people know about Bernie and what I liked about that job was we actually traveled around the state and I was the newbie, so I was the one who actually had to do it on vacations and, when he was back in the state and on long holidays and weekends.

So, interacting with those constituents and understanding their problems that really went into, as I said, we'd love to do ethnographies and just the study of people, I mentioned, I think, that my parents are artists, so when I went into the [00:43:00] design world, it was about like, oh, I don't, I wanna be a business person, I think, and I wanna solve problems, but I know what it is to be with artists.

So being a liaison between the designers and the creatives, at the agency, just intuitively made sense for me and I started like as a receptionist and worked my way up, frankly, but there was something that was really strategic, there was like, okay, like I don't wanna be an artist, but I know how to navigate them. So this, you know, commercial art world might be something that's a good fit for me. 

Chris Kocek: Nice. Is there a brand whose work you admire or that you think to yourself, I wish I'd come up with that?

Sascha Mayer: I would actually say maybe Molly Baz as the brand. She, in terms of how she markets herself and social media and I'm a cook and I love her food, but she did the swell partnership, or she was the spokesperson for that campaign, I thought that was great and we also love Frida. They're a really cool brand that makes, like, [00:44:00] ingenious little tools for raising babies and they have a great sense of humor and every time I go and I look at what they've produced, it's like a new, fun, interesting solve. 

Chris Kocek: Oh, nice. I'll have to check the Frida out.

Sascha Mayer: Yeah, they're based out of Miami. 

Chris Kocek: Okay. What is the most recent good book you've read or movie you've watched or show? 

Sascha Mayer: I just started watching The Rehearsal, which is really strange and maybe not for everyone. It's by Nathan Fielder, who has done a show called Nathan for you and has partnerships with Dmitri Martin and what I love about it is just, like, the craft that goes into like the set design and it's somewhat documentary and it's somewhat comedy and it's very layered and meta. So that is on my mind right now. So I would recommend the rehearsal. 

Chris Kocek: [00:45:00] Okay. Where is it streaming? 

Sascha Mayer: It's on Max. 

Chris Kocek: Okay. Do you have a favorite podcast besides this one? Of course, any favorite podcasts, strategy, podcasts that you listen to, that you would recommend? 

Sascha Mayer: I. I have actually one podcast that I love and one specific episode. So again, as like somebody who studies people as a brand strategist, this is not specifically about brand or business, but it's more about studying people and there is a podcast called Heavyweight with Jonathan Goldstein, has many seasons, although I don't think it's in production right now and basically he goes to tackle people who have a heavy weight that they're trying to unburden themselves and it sounds maybe heavier than it really is, but it's like whatever happened to that person, or like, I feel like I made a mistake here and I wanna go make good on it and it's beautifully produced and I love it very much and there's this one episode, I think it's [00:46:00] episode number 24, that's basically about these kids in like the eighties who take this bike ride, this epic bike ride, and it happens to go from like New York state to Vermont where I live, and it's like, it's a lesson in parenting.

I've listened to this a number of times and I like make my family listen to it on road trips because it's like so hilarious and such a slice of like life from like that somebody who was raised in the seventies and eighties and what parenting meant so I highly recommend that specific one and then, I'm a big fan of Freakonomics and I try to kind of keep up on my sort of business interests and I like how they make connections on that podcast, I'll try to always listen to Freakonomics. 

Chris Kocek: Well, I'm gonna add the Heavyweight for sure. I do listen to Freakonomics, but I'm gonna add the Heavyweight episode 24 and I'm probably gonna listen to it with my family as well. 

Sascha Mayer: Yep. Oh, I should also mention, we have a [00:47:00] podcast called the Bodacious Optimist, where we feature, you know, entrepreneurs and advocates and they can be from Olympic athletes to designers as well, that we are doing in the Mamava World. So, the Bodacious Optimist, I have to make a plug for that.

Chris Kocek: Yes. And you yourself are a bodacious optimist, right? 

Sascha Mayer: I am interviewed on that podcast and I am a bodacious optimist. 

Chris Kocek: What does it mean to be a bodacious optimist? 

Sascha Mayer: Um, it's sort of, taking things on front footed and like you can solve the problem in a bodacious and positive way, goes back to those happy breasts.

So it's like different from audacious, right? Like there's audacious and like the happier version of that is bodacious, like, oh, bigger thinking than just audacious and that's really where, that, we were toying with this language around audacious, we're like, hmm, I think bodacious kind of sounds more breasty and bouncy too. So, we like that word. 

Chris Kocek: I love it. [00:48:00] And then finally, what do you wanna work on next? Is there something percolating in your head that you really wanna work on next? 

Sascha Mayer: Yeah. I always wanna solve big problems and I love problems in the human context, so I actually think a lot about end of life. We have obviously this cohort of the baby boomers and those of us behind us that are not gonna want to do things the same way that they've been done, at least in the last 100 years and I think that has, it's ripe for disruption on all levels, I have a folder on my, desktop called Death of a Lifetime. When I see an interesting article or something that I think is exciting in that area from human composting to, we have a Vermont Forest Cemetery to some of the cool apps around AI that are out there, I put those articles for another day into that file and I guess you're [00:49:00] gonna keep me honest, if I say this out loud, this might be the first time I've said this out loud, outside just my friends and family, that I hope that can be the next thing, that next design project to work on. 

Chris Kocek: It's ambitious, it's bodacious and I hope that it will come to be.

Thank you. So, thank you Sasha, for sharing, a wonderful conversation today and thank you so much for your time. 

Sascha Mayer: Thanks for having me. It was so much fun. 

Chris Kocek: Thanks again to our guest, Sasha Meyer. If you wanna connect with Sasha, you can find her on LinkedIn or via the Mamava website, mamava.com. 

And remember to check out Sasha's newest project, the Bodacious Optimist podcast. That's where Sasha Interviews bodacious, optimistic entrepreneurs, Olympic athletes, creative directors and more. 

If you're looking for even more ideas and inspiration, be sure to check out my newsletter Light Bulb at chriskocek.com/newsletter. Every Thursday, I share three “Aha!” moments that are guaranteed to inspire [00:50:00] your next project, creative briefing or campaign, or check out my latest book, Any Insights Yet.

Connect the dots, create new categories, transform your business. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us five stars on your favorite podcast platform and share it with friends, family, clients, colleagues, even your enemies. Special thanks to Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios for producing this episode.

And thank you to Megan Palmer for additional editing and production support. Until next time, keep looking for patterns, finding contradictions, and asking “What if?” more often.