How Melanie Cristol is Revolutionizing Women’s Intimacy with Lorals

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios, it’s time for Women In Motion. Brought to you by WBEC-West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Women In Motion and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, WBEC-West. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Women In Motion, we have Melanie Cristol with Lorals. Welcome.

Melanie Cristol: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Lorals. How are you serving folks?

Melanie Cristol: Yeah. So, Lorals are a sexual wellness product that I had been basically dreaming up for several years. What I was realizing is that so many women were able to experience a variety of forms of intimacy, but often a lot of that intimacy was tailored to what felt great for their partner and what led their partner to be able to climax.

Melanie Cristol: And what I realized through being a sex educator during college and through being involved with sex education for, basically, about 15 years after that point, I realized that what we generally think of as foreplay is the activity that will often lead women to be able to experience all of the joy of intimacy and to be able to have as many climaxes as possible. And yet there were so many products that were designed for intercourse rather than foreplay, and so I realized that I really wanted to dedicate a company to the activities during intimacy that helped women experience so much joy and excitement and led them to climax.

Melanie Cristol: And so, my company is called Lorals, it is short for our tagline Love Oral Always. And we essentially make latex lingerie that is ultra thin, incredibly stretchy, and it allows women to be able to experience the full sensations of oral, but then it blocks anything that might be holding them back from fully enjoying the experience.

Melanie Cristol: So, for example, our products are FDA cleared to protect against STIs. People will also use Lorals as a way to experience intimacy if they or their partner are overstimulated by scents, taste, or textures. They will be able to use our products to experience joy and satisfaction during menstruation. They’ll be able to use our products to experiment and have fun maybe in a way that’s sort of informed by 50 Shades of Gray. And basically be able to pull these on as sexy latex lingerie and say, yes, every single time.

Lee Kantor: Now, can you talk about going from the idea to actually a product, what were kind of some of the challenges or some of the things you ran into when you were trying to get it out of your head and actually onto a person?

Melanie Cristol: Yeah. So, this was a very involved product to bring to market, probably much more so than I anticipated when I came up with the idea for the company. So, there is a product called dental dams or oral dams that has been on the market for about 30 years. As you might guess from the name dental dam, it actually is a product that was originally derived from dentistry. Basically a 10 inch by 6 inch sheet that was designed to isolate a tooth during a dental procedure. But then over time, it became the go-to product for STI protection during oral sex on a woman.

Melanie Cristol: And when I was a sex educator and teaching about dental dams, I really felt like they had a lot left to be desired. You had to hold them in place. You had to ensure that they didn’t flip over to the other side and potentially pass STIs onto the person that you’re deliberately trying to prevent them from being transmitted to. You also have this product that didn’t really have any marketing behind it and certainly didn’t have a lot of design work done towards it.

Melanie Cristol: So, I really wanted to reinvent that product and create something that was hands-free, that was beautifully designed, that really felt like fun lingerie. And so, I spent some time initially figuring out what type of manufacturer would make this product. Would it be a clothing manufacturer or would it be somebody who has a lot of experience making latex products like condoms and gloves? And it quickly became clear that the condom and glove experience and knowledge and expertise of being able to create multiple of these products using sophisticated machinery and ensure that they are ultra thin, that they’re incredibly stretchy, that they don’t have holes, that they can be stretched without breaking, those kinds of things, that that experience really existed in the condom and glove manufacturers.

Melanie Cristol: And so, after I realized that, I learned that the brain center for condom and glove manufacturing is located in Malaysia. Basically, the world’s largest number of condoms and gloves is produced in Malaysia. So, although Malaysia was very far to me – I had never been to that country before. I hadn’t even been to Asia at that point before – it also was convenient to know that, really, if I wanted to get more involved in this industry, there was one country that I could explore that would lead me to a lot of knowledge regarding this particular kind of product manufacturing.

Melanie Cristol: And so, I started networking from afar and I connected with several factories, probably about a dozen factories in Malaysia, started speaking with them generally about the type of product I was making. And then, I arranged several appointments with factories out in Malaysia. And so, several years ago, I had my first trip out to Malaysia, and I met with, probably at that point, eight or nine different factories to figure out who was the best partner to work on with this.

Melanie Cristol: And, you know, so many trials and tribulations through meeting with different factories, figuring out which one was the right one, then doing a ton of prototyping, a lot of product development. You know, there were plenty of ups and downs that entire time, but we eventually got this incredible product and we were able to bring it to market.

Lee Kantor: So, how long did it take from kind of idea to a product?

Melanie Cristol: Yeah. It was about three years, from the time that I started working on this to the time that we were in the market and selling the product. And I initially was maybe a little bit disappointed in myself. Like, you know, why didn’t it happen faster? And then, I learned that one of the most recent condom innovations, which was basically to take the existing structure of a condom and turn it into a whole bunch of small little hexagons, that innovation was created by an entire team at a large company, and it took them seven years to get to market. So, I was pretty proud after I learned of that transition time. And now we’re just so proud and excited to be able to provide our products to people worldwide.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you had the idea, was this something that you got investors and you went all in on or was this something you were doing while doing something else?

Melanie Cristol: So, before I started Lorals, I was a corporate litigator at a large international law firm, and I had done that for several years and had saved quite a bit of money. As I watched all of my friends buying houses and investing in real estate, which was probably a very smart thing to do as well, but that wasn’t really my dream. And I was trying to figure out what am I going to do with this money that I’ve saved up and how am I going to use it to make the impact on the world that I want to be able to do? And so, having that money saved definitely helped tremendously in being able to bring Lorals to market. We also did bring in several different investors and raised some money in addition to the money that I invested in the company.

Lee Kantor: So, you didn’t do this as kind of a side hustle. You kind of stopped lawyering and then went all in to being an entrepreneur?

Melanie Cristol: Yeah. It just felt at the time like this was a really big idea. And I felt as though if I were lawyering, that I wasn’t going to be able to give it the time and attention that it deserved. And that I just really felt like I needed to go all in completely or perhaps it would just kind of get left on the wayside and, you know, turn into another hobby that I had started.

Melanie Cristol: And so, looking back, I’m really glad that I made that decision because, I mean, honestly, it was so much harder than I anticipated it being, and I think that there would have been so many opportunities to just let it go and quit along the way, quit Lorals, that is. And I’m so glad that that was not an easy decision to make, to quit it and to have to try to find a new career again or to go back to law, but kind of, you know, start from scratch. So, not having a very strong and secured backup plan, I think, kept me from giving up at the various times that things got really tough. And I’m really glad that I didn’t because I’m so happy about where we are today.

Lee Kantor: Now, can you maybe share some advice for other people that are maybe in corporate jobs that appear secure and that are financially rewarding, but they have this itch that they’d like to scratch of a dream or an entrepreneurial path, but they haven’t kind of taken the leap yet. Any advice for going through that decision-making process?

Melanie Cristol: Yes, absolutely. So, I would spend a lot of time thinking about what are your values in life. What is important to you overall? How do you want to spend your day-to-day? And also what kinds of resources you need to have at your disposal in order to feel secure and comfortable and happy? I think that varies tremendously from person to person. And I think that a lot of things that entrepreneurs during the early years go without are comforts that many folks in corporate jobs just would not be interested in giving up, and rightfully so. It really just depends on who the person is.

Melanie Cristol: So, I love putting together charts when making hard decisions like this. So, personally, what I would probably do is kind of list all of the things that are important to me in my daily life and goals and values, and then probably assign weight to each of those things, and then go through and look at my plan for what would it mean to continue in my corporate job, what would it mean to continue or to go off and do this venture.

Melanie Cristol: And then, I don’t know, maybe a third option of something, you know, in between that’s still within the corporate realm, but maybe utilizes different skills or passions that the person has. And then, I would kind of do this like weighted analysis of each of those options and figure out numerically how awesome for you each of these particular routes could be. And then, use that to gauge your decision moving forward. You know, like if you find that you score 80 points out of 85 with moving forward with some kind of awesome venture like this, then that’s telling you a lot of good information, especially if you’re comparing it to, you know, 40 points from continuing in your career.

Melanie Cristol: But if you’re analysis ends up making you realize that you’re getting a lot of what you need out of life from staying in this corporate job, then that’s fantastic for you. And maybe you can find a way to do something like this as more of a hobby, you know, create an Etsy page and sell things here and there, or talk about your interest on social media or something like that.

Melanie Cristol: There’s plenty of outlets to do creative pursuits that do not involve quitting your corporate job and throwing everything at this one particular passion and interest of yours. So, yeah, I would say figure out what is important to you and what is going to get you to that point.

Melanie Cristol: And there’s a couple of books that I recommend for that. One of them is What Color Is Your Parachute?, which is a really awesome career change book that helps you really evaluate what you’re looking for in a workplace and in a career. I also read and enjoyed 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. I learned through that book that I don’t necessarily need or desire a four-hour workweek. But what I thought was really valuable about that book was it really helps you think about what you would like about life on a day-to-day basis and how much money it’s going to cost to support that lifestyle.

Lee Kantor: Now, you mentioned that it took three years from idea to actually having a product in your hands. Were you getting clues that the market was receptive to this along the way or was this kind of, you know, build it and they will come until the very end when you actually had a product and you’re like, “Okay. Now, we’ll see if anyone’s actually going to buy this”?

Melanie Cristol: Oh. That’s such a great question. And absolutely, I think that, you know, to modify my advice from the last question, I do think that if you have a product that you are personally excited about, you really do want to test the market and figure out whether there is interest. That’s actually a component of the 4-Hour Workweek book. It goes into some detail about how to test the market and figure out whether there is interest out there. And, yeah, I engaged in a variety of surveys and tests to ensure that this wasn’t just something that I wanted, but that it was something that a wide variety of people wanted.

Melanie Cristol: And one of the things that I learned through that is I think that oral dams have, like I mentioned, existed for, like, about three decades and it’s a relatively large market. I don’t know, millions of units are sold per year. It’s not tens of millions, so it’s not a huge market. And it felt like I knew and our surveys reiterated the fact that we were going to be making a really notable improvement to dental dams and oral dams when they’re used in an intimate context. But is improving on a product that sells several million units a year, is that a large enough market?

Melanie Cristol: But what I learned through all of these customer interviews and surveys and all of those kinds of ways of assessing the market was that the oral dam was not serving the full range of interests people potentially had in a product that facilitated intimacy in this way. If you are feeling shy about intimacy, like for example, a lot of folks would tell me I really love the sensations of oral, but then when it comes to the reality of it, I don’t want somebody up close and personal like that. Those folks are not going to utilize an oral dam in their activities. They’re already feeling shy and uncomfortable. They’re certainly not going to want to hold up this bright colored sheet of latex in front of them. But the idea of incorporating lingerie into that activity is suddenly really exciting and erotic.

Melanie Cristol: And then, there’s a variety of other use cases that wouldn’t have worked for an oral dam, but then when you are talking about ultra thin, sexy lingerie, then the market suddenly becomes so much larger than millions of units per year. And so, that was an important thing that I learned during this surveying research process, that the interest of the market in a product that does what Lorals do was not being adequately served by oral dams, and thus our market for Lorals could be basically seven to eight times larger than the existing oral dam market. Plus, if we turn oral dams into something that is easy to use and fun to use, that massively increases the potential size of the oral dam market as well.

Lee Kantor: Right. That becomes the floor, not the ceiling.

Melanie Cristol: Exactly.

Lee Kantor: Now, why was it important for you to become part of the WBEC-West community?

Melanie Cristol: Yeah. So, that was one of the recommendations by a mentor that I have at JP Morgan. She was talking about all of the awesome small and medium-sized businesses that she works with that are in a growth stage, and was saying that so many of them are able to benefit from basically having their diversity related credentials certified by these independent agencies like WBENC. And that was leading them to be able to work with large buyers who have so many choices of potential vendors and will often provide additional support for folks that fit within the diversity spectrum. And then, often sometimes we’ll have quota programs that require them to purchase a certain number or a certain volume of product from companies that fit this diversity criteria.

Melanie Cristol: So, recently we got our certification as a woman-owned business, also as a woman-owned small business, also as an LGBT business enterprise, and also as a disability-owned business enterprise. And as somebody who has been impacted by being a woman, by being LGBT, by having a disability throughout the time of creating these products, it feels really special to be part of these different organizations that acknowledge the fact that because of those things, it can often be a lot harder to start a business and to grow it.

Melanie Cristol: And so, it’s really exciting that utilizing these certifications, we will be able to partner with more vendors over the coming months and grow our business and be able to take advantage of these awesome programs that are out there that are created by buyers.

Lee Kantor: So, what does Lorals need more of? How can we help you?

Melanie Cristol: We always love new forms of being able to get out to the market and let people know about our products. Social media has been a really huge gift for us, particularly TikTok. We are now at about 160,000 followers and I think we’re at about 7 million likes on that platform. And then, also, really big followings on Instagram and YouTube as well. But, you know, those are only portions of the potential market out there. Not everybody is on social media. And not everybody who is on social media is able to come across our content. So, it’s really exciting to be able to reach new audiences through things like podcasts and through things like WBEC-West.

Melanie Cristol: And also to meet folks who either are potential partners or are connected to potential partners. Over the course of the next few months, we’re definitely looking to expand in terms of our retail relationships. At this point, we just got a couple of new big accounts, so I think we’re in over 300 doors and e-commerce stores throughout the U.S. and the world, and we certainly want to be growing that substantially. And so, we’re making a lot of efforts to connect with retail partners. We also are sprucing up our packaging so that it flies off the shelf and is able to explain really clearly and in a fun and exciting way what these products are.

Melanie Cristol: Yet, you know, we recognize that we are making intimacy products and it’s something that a lot of folks are shy about. And so, we have figured out how to talk about our products in a way that is inviting and helps people feel comfortable bringing this product up to the register and purchasing it and going home and having a wonderful, exciting time.

Melanie Cristol: So, yeah, looking for new ways to reach new markets, new retail partnerships, and we just welcome any kind of exchange and connections that are out there.

Lee Kantor: So, if somebody wants to learn more, is there a website or you mentioned several social channels, like what’s the best way to connect? Where can they look?

Melanie Cristol: Sure. So, our website is mylorals.com, and that’s spelled M-Y-L-ORAL-S, so M-Y-L-O-R-A-L-S-.com. And then, our handle on all of the socials is @mylorals. Also, you are welcome to reach out to us at hello@mylorals.com.

Lee Kantor: Well, Melanie, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Melanie Cristol: Thanks so much. I really appreciate that. And thanks for providing this podcast for founders and CEOs and for having me on it.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Women In Motion.