Women In Wellness: Mia Clarke of Nyssa on the Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Stay informed. I know it can be overwhelming to look at the news when the world feels on fire, but as I said earlier I believe part of wellbeing is not living in a bubble developing knowledge and compassion about what other people are going through in this world.
As a part of my series about the women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mia Clarke.
Mia Clarke is the co-founder of Nyssa, a company intent on changing the landscape of women’s wellbeing through product innovation and educational content. Prior to Nyssa she worked as a copy and brand naming strategist, a music journalist for leading international publications, and played guitar in the British indie band, Electrelane.
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?
So far, I’ve had what some may call a ‘squiggly’ career path that consists of seemingly unrelated fields that are, it turns out, deeply intertwined and inform one another in ways that continue to surprise me. I started out at 16, writing about music for my local paper in my hometown of Brighton, UK. Around that time I joined Electrelane as a guitarist and spent the next several years making albums, touring the world, and covering music for publications like The Wire, Pitchfork and The Guardian. I then moved to Chicago and wrote an opera column in Time Out Chicago for four years before making a career shift and joining a brand consultancy firm as creative strategist and copywriter. That experience taught me a great deal about innovation and brand-building. After I gave birth to my daughter, Neva, in 2017, my friends and I found ourselves profoundly let down by the lack of products available to help us heal from birth. We knew that, with our collective experience, we could do something about it. So we started Nyssa and launched our first patented product, FourthWear Postpartum Recovery Underwear, at the end of 2019. Since then, we’ve expanded out of postpartum into body awareness, period care, and an upcoming line of products and resources for teens.
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?
This isn’t a story per se, but something I have found extremely interesting are the similarities between playing in a band and running a business. Electrelane was myself and three other women. Nyssa is myself and three co-founders. If you’d asked me ten years ago, even five, I would have said that starting a business wouldn’t be for me. I thought I needed to be in a ‘creative’ field to be happy. But running a business is highly creative and a huge aspect of my work with Nyssa is creating and evolving our content and brand. Both creating music and creating a product and building a brand from scratch necessitate deep collaborative input and, ultimately, the creation of something tangible from an idea. Making the invisible visible. Bringing execution to vision. It’s taught me first-hand just how lateral two seemingly different career paths can actually be. Everything is connected.
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?
In my early music writing career, I allowed myself to be influenced by older male journalists who would lecture me for hours on what constituted ‘good’ music writing. I’d try to emulate them, so it took a while to find my own voice. With Nyssa, a mistake I made early on was not really understanding what myself and my founders were getting ourselves into. Starting a business requires constant sacrifice. Had I known, I absolutely still would have done it: but with my eyes wide open to the reality of how it would impact my financial and personal life. I suppose my big lesson is to expect the unexpected, always. And starting Nyssa reinforced my sense of purpose: if my partners and I didn’t believe Nyssa could change women’s lives for the better, we wouldn’t be able to sustain the sacrifices of the last few years. We know, deep inside, that all the uncertainty will eventually be worth it and that we will have the impact we dream of and are working so hard to build.
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?
We started Nyssa to solve for the ‘unmentionables’ of womanhood through next-level wear and care innovations that speak to women across their life, from puberty through to post-menopause. Just as important to us is creating content and resources that interrogate those unmentionables and share expert perspectives and knowledge. Every day, we receive messages from people that say how we’ve helped them in their recovery after birth, or shared some information about female anatomy that they were in the dark about before, or that our VieVision Between Legs Mirror gave them the tool they needed to talk to their children about their bodies from a young age. We want to keep doing that, on a continually bigger scale. There are so many ‘unmentionables’ women have to deal with every day. Helping others navigate and address those aspects of womanhood feeling confident and informed…well, that’s a life’s work! (not to mention finding ways to give back, our future desire to establish an innovation fund for young female innovators and much more).
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.
- Find tiny moments of specialness and bring a few into your every day. For me, that’s buying myself a bunch of daffodils, drinking my espresso from a lovely handmade cup or putting on red lipstick even if I’m just at home working all day. It sounds a little trite, but those tiny things do bring me joy.
- Explore small ways to give back. This could be anything from showing little gestures of thoughtfulness to your loved ones, or volunteering or donating to a cause you care about. For me currently, that is campaigning for more affordable childcare in the UK and US and donating to organizations supporting families in Ukraine.
- Get into nature. Nothing beats it. I moved from the neon wilderness of Chicago to a town by the sea in England and am grateful every day that I live so close to the sea and countryside. It is immensely grounding.
- Stay informed. I know it can be overwhelming to look at the news when the world feels on fire, but as I said earlier I believe part of wellbeing is not living in a bubble developing knowledge and compassion about what other people are going through in this world.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
There are so many angles I’d like to approach this from, but I think I would start with a movement that educates and empowers young people to really know their bodies, especially preteen and teen girls. I’d want an educational movement that taught all young people the correct terminology for their anatomy, that encourages people to look at and know their vulvas at an early age, so that they are learning about their bodies from a place of strength and wonderment instead of shame and misinformation. I think if we can successfully establish that foundation, the next generation of women will be better able to advocate for themselves and their health, from the doctor’s office to the bedroom. This belief is a huge part of why Nyssa is working on products and resources for teens this year.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
- Be open to change. Most of us don’t have a ‘by the book’ career path now. Understanding your core strength and learning new skills will help you roll with the punches.
- Never stop pushing yourself. I don’t mean working yourself to the ground, that’s no good for anyone. But complacency breeds mediocrity. Try to have a growth mindset.
- Networking isn’t a dirty word. I used to roll my eyes at the thought of networking. But having a strong community is galvanizing and I love introducing great people to other great people.
- You can always change your mind. You have the power to reinvent yourself and change, as long as that change is coming from within, from your own voice and sense of purpose.
- Find a great mentor. I feel extremely lucky that Ellen, my mentor at my old brand agency job, eventually became a partner in Nyssa. And even though Eden (Nyssa’s CEO) and I were friends for over a decade before working together, she is certainly a mentor, too. I pinch myself that I get to work with them every day on this wild, ambitious project.
Sustainability, veganism, mental health, and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
They are all extremely important, of course, but if I were to pick just one it would be environmental changes. The impact of climate change on different sectors of society, agriculture, and individual health are inexorably connected.
What is the best way our readers can follow you online?
Nyssa’s website is nyssacare.com and we are @nyssacare on Instagram. We also have a new Substack newsletter, Body of Knowledge, where we go deep on a specific ‘unmentionable’ topic each month. At the moment, we are working on an issue around pre-menopause and what we call ‘The Lightyears’- that disorientating time in one’s late 30s to late 40s when life seems to move at ‘lightspeed’ and you may be navigating that difficult tension between having ageing parents and young children. We will also be covering topics like raising teenagers, the importance of being about to advocate for yourself, pregnancy loss, physical postpartum recovery and lots more. we’d love for any readers here to join us.
Thank you for these fantastic insights!
Women In Wellness: Mia Clarke of Nyssa 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.