“Oh, Nati, how beautiful your little project is.” That’s what male investors told Nathalie Wilk when she went out to raise capital for an online women’s health clinic, in meetings with people who didn’t understand that menopause exists. The answer was no to the idea. She continued forward anyway, guided by her intuition.
Nathalie was born in Germany, she started entrepreneurship at the age of 21 and admits that she does not know how to close the computer: even in her free time, between hills and kitesurfing, she remains attentive to women’s health. For a year she has also been Noa’s mother. What runs through his story is a simple idea: name what no one wanted to name.
From the drawer of ideas to Culotte
Her first brand, “Das goldene Taxi”, was born out of boredom: on long university vacations in Germany, together with her roommate and best friend, she painted cloth bags, totebags, with a funny phrase: “Don’t push me, I have yogurt in my bag.” The brand went viral and was his first success: he sold the company and went on a trip to South America.
In 2015 he arrived in Chile on an exchange and stayed: for love, for the entrepreneurial ecosystem and for the landscape. To stay he needed a work contract, so he went into consulting, where he learned to manage clients.
During the 2020 lockdown, Nathalie watched the sun rise while working. She was an innovation consultant for a client in Australia, with a time difference of 12 or 13 hours, she had just separated and was alone at home. He worked until it was late at night. One of those nights he thought that life couldn’t be just that, and as a form of self-help he decided to open what he calls his “idea drawer.” That night, in her kitchen, Culotte was born.
With Culotte she saw a clear opportunity: Chilean women had the same needs as German or American women, and menstrual panties were already working in those markets. But something cultural also caught her attention: in Chile they said “I’m sick” to talk about menstruation.
He wanted to change that, remove the taboo and talk naturally about the health behind it. The company grew quickly, and with it the pressure.
- What was it like deciding to sell Culotte?
“It’s like that balance game you use when surfing. I was on the board and it was fine, but one more step to the right or left and I fell. For the first order my dad lent me 5,000 euros; later they were six-digit numbers and I had to pay and wait months until the products arrived at the warehouse.”
“It scared me a little, and I chose Merama because I felt they could help me stay on the board without falling”
The sale included a review of the company, he calls it as if it were a Falabella, when in reality Culotte was not even two years old.
She stayed as general manager for a year, but understood that her thing is to create, not operate.
The most difficult thing to let go, he says, was not the company but the question that in Chile appears in the first conversations: and what do you do? He didn’t know what to answer.
“You define yourself a lot by your entrepreneurship,” he says.
From menstruation to menopause
Neopause was born from a thread that Nathalie sees as “red, literal.” Working at Culotte, he noticed that a part of the public, over 40 years old, bought underwear for urinary incontinence, a common symptom after menopause. They always said it was for their mother or their aunt; never for themselves. That shame was the signal.
- How did you get to Neopause?
“My mother is a doctor, a gynecologist, so I went to ask her immediately: it was my first interview with an expert. She told me that in the last years of her career she was caring for many women in menopause. There I confirmed that there was a huge need and many problems at this stage of life.”
Unlike Culotte, where it was enough to buy and sell a product, here he needed to build a clinic, and for that he raised capital.
It partnered with a former Culotte logistics provider, Allan Guiloff, its COO; Matías Martinez, its CTO; and the gynecologist Dr. María de los Ángeles Larraín, who was already working on the topic and today is also a partner and medical director of Neopausia.
Tests are ordered before the appointment to save the patient money and time. They get on the platform, so the 30 minutes with the doctor end with real recipes and solutions for women.
Almost half of the patients live in regions without access to specialists.
- What impact does Neopause have on your patients?
“Menopause can have a very hard impact emotionally, physically, and on relationships. If you help a woman reduce the intensity of those symptoms, you restore her quality of life, and that is our most important metric.”
“It’s the best part of this company. Every Friday my partner sends the doctors the three top reviews of the week, and the most beautiful messages are the ones that say: they changed my life.”
How cute is your project?
Raising money was not easy. Over time, some of those same investors contacted her again to tell her that they now wanted to invest.
For her, that’s the most rewarding part of leading: seeing a trend before it’s obvious and proving to people that their intuition was correct. When she left, no one was talking about menopause.
- What would you say to a woman who is about to take the leap and found her first company?
“Create something with a personal purpose: I would find it too difficult to get up every day to sell bottles of water just because they have a good margin. And don’t stay in women’s circles: if you want to scale a company, you have to go out, even if the environment is tougher, because those who make the decisions and put up the money are often men.”
Motherhood came to her in full growth. He worked until the Friday before the contractions and, thanks to the capital raised, he was able to hire someone and get everything ready before leaving for a month.
Today, she says, she feels lucky: her daughter walks in front of her office, she can spend the day with her and at four in the afternoon she closes the computer.
“If you are hired, that is not possible,” she says.
Regarding the future, he prefers not to rush: Neopausia already serves patients from other countries, but each market requires adjustments in prescriptions, medications and insurance.
And since the clinic is private, it leaves out many women who cannot pay for it; He believes that insurance and governments should understand that prevention costs less than paying for “the fifth hip surgery.”
To the Nathalie who was traveling from Munich to Chile, fresh from her first company, I would tell her to follow her intuition and do it as is, because she did not listen to the doubtful voices.
If he could change something, it would be to take things a little less personally: it affects him a lot when there are team conflicts and he still doesn’t know how to avoid it.
But this, he concludes, is how business is done. And it is also the reason why a word that almost no one said out loud, menopause, today has its own clinic.
