Women In Wellness: Lulu Ge of Elix On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” — Building a passionate and motivated team is more important than having the “perfect plan.” By launching during the onset of the pandemic, I experienced firsthand how plans might need to pivot based on factors outside of our control, but by having the right team members on board and creating an environment where everyone can strive towards their potential and collaborate on meaningful impact-driven work, our culture enables us to continue to grow and scale (while having fun!).
As a part of my series about the women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Lulu Ge, founder and CEO of Elix.
Lulu is a behavioral change psychologist and MBA who spent over a decade in management consulting focused on the intersection of healthcare and consumer-retail. Born in a Southern China hospital run by her grandfather, Lulu’s personal roots in herbal medicine run through multiple generations. Elix is the culmination of her lifelong advocacy for integrating Traditional Chinese Medicine with Western healthcare, especially in treating and regulating women’s health conditions.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
I was born in a hospital my grandfather ran in Hunan (Southern China) and grew up with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as a way of life. Even after immigrating to the U.S. at five years old, I remember drinking medicinal mushroom soups and superfruit tonics long before they became the trends they are today. To be honest, I always felt a bit embarrassed being “that” kid with smelly herbs.
Fast forward a decade or two later, armed with an Ivy League degree, I landed some of my dream jobs in NYC. At a time when I was over-caffeinated, sleep-deprived, working crazy hours, and always focused on that next promotion, I simultaneously went off birth control and experienced extreme hormone imbalances. This manifested itself as chronic fatigue, period pain, migraines, anxiety, bloating and more.
That’s when my grandfather helped me find my way back to Chinese herbal medicine to lower my inflammation, rebalance my cycle and finally start healing my body from within.
Elix is excited to be the first brand and platform to bring personalized TCM to women’s health. We have a free online health assessment that you can take to learn more about your cycle and receive an herbal treatment formula recommendation. We’re really proud that 93% of women experience an improvement in their menstrual and hormone symptoms using Elix Cycle Balance! Our mission is to democratize access to these beautiful healing herbs and excitedly, we can say that women in all 50 states are using Elix to support her health!
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
In developing the concept for Elix, I was in business school and had the rare opportunity to meet with the CEO of a major multi-billion dollar healthcare company and another senior executive of a major pharmaceutical company to get their feedback — it’s important to note that both individuals happened to be men.
I pitched them on building a platform to personalize clinically-proven herbal remedies for women’s health, which would combine ancient wisdom with modern science to bring more innovative, all-natural and side-effect-free solutions to addressing chronic conditions such as endometriosis, PCOS, PMDD, fibroids and other menstrual and hormone health symptoms. They were extremely enthusiastic about the business model and confirmed the need in the market, but they told me it would never succeed because hormonal contraceptives can be applied to “solve” these conditions. While they acknowledged that women did not appreciate the side effects, their solution was to evolve the existing products rather than come up with novel solutions.
The lesson I learned from this interaction and feedback is that sometimes it takes an outsider with real-world experience of the pain point to recognize an opportunity for status quo disruption. Whether it be insight from someone of a different background, gender, business or industry entirely, it’s important to consider all perspectives in order to create a successful, inclusive business.
Can you share a story about the biggest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Despite the challenges that came with launching Elix during the onset of the pandemic and having to quickly cancel our in-person launch events and pivot our focus to online community building, Elix experienced rapid growth. Since day one, we have always focused on creating a safe space for women and all menstruators to learn and have conversations around the importance of menstrual health. As a small team, we quickly realized we needed to implement a community experience platform that enables greater efficiency with communications — unfortunately, there was a tech integration oversight in the set up of this platform, which resulted in dozens of previous conversations that did not migrate over. Unfortunately, we did not discover this issue until weeks later when comments surfaced in a community survey.
The solution? We were honest about what happened, apologized and offered a one-on-one group chat with our medical advisors to ensure community members were getting the information they needed, and we also offered early access to new product launches. This experience taught us the importance of owning up to our failures and working hard to make things right.
Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
Today, there are still stigmas associated with menstrual health. At Elix, our mission is to spark much-needed conversations on traditionally taboo areas of women’s health and democratize access to personalized, clinically-backed herbal remedies for chronic conditions, beginning with menstrual care.
Most of the conversations today around our periods usually revolve around how awful they are, rather than viewing them as a vital sign of our overall health. While we are certainly starting to see people think about menstrual health in a more holistic way, there is still a lot of work to be done. Our Elix users have shared hundreds of stories about how they were dismissed when they identified and tried to treat their pain — and they’re not alone. In today’s health care system, only 4% of research and development addresses women’s health issues, so this leaves massive gaps in access to proven solutions. Also, the biggest misconception is that pain with our periods is ‘normal’ and that we just have to ‘suck it up.’
For far too long, society has made periods an embarrassing topic, causing us to keep our pain private and hindering us from finding more natural and personalized solutions. We really want to challenge the outdated one-size-fits-all approach. Our flagship Cycle Balance is a tincture of potent, medicinal herbs which is tailored to heal menstrual symptoms over time by treating the hormonal imbalances and inflammation that cause them. Hormones affect how our immune system functions, so as part of our overall health routine, it’s even more important than ever before to pay close attention to our hormone health.
Overall, we want to empower people to be their own best healer and health advocate by tuning into their minds and body and taking control of their health from a holistic perspective.
Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.
- Intention Setting: Setting and living your intentions allows you to focus on the things that matter most — it helps us to recognize our values, and in turn, provides a roadmap for how we can design and live our lives. As part of celebrating the holidays and New Year with my family, we carve out time to set our intentions for the upcoming year and it’s something I review on a monthly and weekly basis.
- Eat the Rainbow: Chinese medicine has always shared this healthy eating practice as a way to get the vital nutrients our bodies need to keep our immune systems strong. Every hue of fruits and vegetables contain their own unique blend of nourishing phytonutrients that sustain our health, so it’s important to incorporate a variety of different colors onto your plate. Our stomachs are our second brain, so when we give our bodies fuel and nourishment, we can think more clearly!
- Micro-moments of Mindfulness: If we can spend small amounts of time in our daily lives to observe the beauty of the current moment, we can bring more happiness, gratitude and generosity to our lives.
- Hormone Hacking: Hormone hacking can help us essentially ‘engineer’ our quality of life. When we can hack our natural hormones and live with our natural circadian rhythm — by making intentional changes in our daily lives, from the food we eat to the way we deal with stress, to how we prepare our bodies for sleep — we can help support our natural balance for a healthier life.
- Notice Joy: Did you know that laughing decreases pain and may help your health? When we stop for a moment, look around and notice the things that bring us joy, we can live a more meaningful and healthy life, both physically and mentally.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
If I could start a movement, it would be around self-healing. When we can look at our health from a holistic perspective, understanding our mind, body and spirit as one unit, we can make intentional decisions on our own behalf that positively affect our overall health.
From a narrower point of view and personal experience, I’ve realized how powerful self-healing can be, specifically when it comes to menstrual pain and using natural herbal remedies to manage ailments. I grew up eating soup and drinking tea made with healing herbs, so it’s been something important to me from very early on in my life and career.
Self-healing can mean more than just physical healing — it can also be useful for our mind and spirit. When we have thoughts or feelings that leave us feeling down or interfere with our daily activities, self-healing can help us to overcome these negativities and make room for us to lead a more fulfilled, positive life.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
- “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” — Building a passionate and motivated team is more important than having the “perfect plan.” By launching during the onset of the pandemic, I experienced firsthand how plans might need to pivot based on factors outside of our control, but by having the right team members on board and creating an environment where everyone can strive towards their potential and collaborate on meaningful impact-driven work, our culture enables us to continue to grow and scale (while having fun!).
- Trust your instincts — There are so many moments along this journey when I have received conflicting advice from “experts.” If what you’re building has never been done, then chances are no one has the right answer for how it should be done — staying focused on the positive impact and intentions for a brighter future you want to create is part of the challenge and the fun.
- Celebrate the failures — At Elix, we reframe all failures as learnings and celebrate how the insights gained can help us in the future. By creating an environment where it’s safe to experiment and learn from our failures, it gives our team space to try more new things.
- Whenever you feel lost, listen to your customers — At Elix, we are building with and for our community. The best decisions we have made are taking action based on feedback from the community we serve.
- Create a personal advisory board of believers — The startup journey is hard. Unexpected challenges will inevitably occur. Surrounding yourself with mentors, advisors and loved ones who believe in you and your vision will help pull you through the toughest of times and amplify the joys and wins.
Sustainability, veganism, mental health and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
The causes dearest to me are sustainability and mental health, as the two go hand in hand. The best example of this is through Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which is the first modality to recognize the mind, body and spirit connection, as well as emphasize the importance of living with the rhythm of nature.
At Elix, we believe that nature is one of our most powerful healers, and by tapping into herbs and botanicals that have been proven for their medicinal healing capabilities, we should also be conducting business in a way that’s sustainable for Mother Earth — that’s why we sustainably and ethically source all of our organic ingredients while using a clean extraction process and composting the remains. We use recycled packaging for all of our mailers and encourage our community members to reuse or recycle their Elix bottles. On our blog and Instagram, we often feature ways of reconnecting with nature as a form of mental health healing and grounding for our central nervous system.
I believe that as more people reconnect with our natural world, the desire to live more sustainably will become a priority, which in turn, will promote mental health healing and help to preserve our environment for future generations.
What is the best way our readers can follow you online?
Readers can follow me on my personal account at @luluge and Elix at @elixhealing on Instagram and Twitter.
Thank you for these fantastic insights!
Women In Wellness: Lulu Ge of Elix On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.