Transcript from the October 7, 2025 event
Speakers
Ann Marie McQueen, Founder of Hotflash inc
Cortney Bigelow, Co-Founder of The Carry
Esther Sedgwick, Co-Founder of The Carry
EJ Kim, Co-Founder of NNABI
Marina Pen, Co-Founder of NNABI
INTRO
I’m Amy Cuevas Schroeder, founder of The Midst!
For the last several years, The Midst has been primarily an indie media company, covering the modern midlife experience. We were early to writing about perimenopause and now have one of the largest collections of content written by women in perimenopause.
We have 2 primary channels: the-midst.com and The Midst Substack — and we’ve grown our audience to more than 65,000 organic views per month and 9,000 Substack followers.
Through surveys and feedback from our readers, we’ve learned a few things about our audience:
They are PERIWOKE and MENOWOKE, meaning they are proactive about their health and wellbeing in midlife
Most are professional women — many of whom have either moved up their career or corporate ladder or have stagnated and are thinking about what they want to do next.
They have mad skills and lot of experience in their fields.
Many are interested in entrepreneurship, solopreneurship, and connecting with other professional women in midlife.
And that’s why we started our Founding MidstHer community — to shine a light on and connect women 35+ who are building their next thing. All of our speakers today are Founding MidstHers.
Let’s introduce our panel!
Can you tell us:
Where you live
About your business
And how you earn a living … in case you do other work in addition to your business?
ANN MARIE MCQUEEN, FOUNDER OF HOTFLASH INC
I had a brutal perimenopause and didn’t know I was in perimenopause for a long time. And then when the penny dropped, I was in my late forties and I was sort of having that moment where the career I had, I was a features editor … it just felt a bit like golden handcuffs and I couldn’t imagine anything else I would do, but I got this idea. I’m like, I just think I could do a newsletter. And it was before Substack, and anyone I would tell that I wanted to charge for the newsletter would be like, no, you can’t charge for your newsletter. Your newsletter is to sell products. I got that so many times of people who didn’t understand.
So I feel very vindicated about that. Not that I’m supporting myself selling my content, but just the fact that there’s a whole book on it called Content Inc and this whole Substack and everything. So I just wanted to start it. It was a mission of just like, I love content. I know I just want to share content about menopause. I don’t like the content that’s out there. I think I can help. So I just got people and started the newsletter and I could have done things way better.
And then everything after that is just sort of, I’ve been pushed. Like I started a podcast because Heidi said, I’ll sponsor a podcast if you do a podcast, which I thought, OK, well, that’s good. I’ll do that. And I’ve gotten sponsors from that. And I have never known what I’m doing. And I have never. I just knew I wanted to build. And then I would worry about monetizing later. So I stopped saying I’m not a businessperson.
But I still don’t know that I’m a businessperson. And I have worked full time the whole time, either freelance — I’m doing content for a museum. So the risk of burnout is real. And I know there’s other people here who know what I’m talking about.
MARINA PEN, CO-FOUNDER OF NNABI
I’m Marina Pen. I’m co-founder of NNABI and I live in New York. NNABI is a women-founded wellness company that’s focused on perimenopause and the mission behind the company is redefining the way women go through perimenopause with education, with a community of like-minded women, most of them in perimenopause, and then we also have science-backed, doctor-formulated natural products like Peri-Essential 5, which is a botanical supplement.
It’s an herbal supplement that supports the main areas that get disrupted by hormonal fluctuations that happen during perimenopause. And we are really looking to support women and help them build resilience throughout this transition that can last 10 years or more. And of course, there are so many things that women need throughout that stage. And the founders that you brought in today, Amy, have to do with that, like community, information, exercise and working out, different things that you would incorporate during this time.
I recently left the corporate world. I have over 20 years as an advertising exec, specifically leading brand strategy for very big brands across the globe. I’m originally from Argentina. I’ve been in New York for 11 years now. And so bringing a lot of that background into what we’re doing with EJ and with NNABI. And I just jumped in, not fully full time into NNABI, but more time. For NNABI and freelancing as a side gig, just so we’re able to dedicate more time to our startup.
EJ KIM, CO-FOUNDER OF NNABI
I am the co-founder of NNABI, along with Marina. Since Marina already explained what NNABI is about, I’ll just add one more fact about NNABI, because everybody loves it when they actually get to understand what NNABI means. It’s not an acronym. It’s actually Nnabi, the word in Korean means butterfly. And when we think about the peri journey, which is what NNABI is all about, many extraordinary things are happening during this life stage. There are challenging parts as well, the transformation of it all, resembling the journey of a beautiful butterfly. The symbol of the butterfly is love, hope, beauty and transformation. We thought that this name captivated what Peri journey is about, what we were all navigating. So we had to have that name. I’m based in New York City. I am proudly doing a double day. That’s also my apology for running a couple of minutes late.
But we’ll talk a little bit more about how I navigate that in a bit. In addition to NNABI, I am also leading an intelligence consultancy within a company called FleshmanHillard, which is a communications agency.
ESTHER SEDGWICK, CO-FOUNDER OF THE CARRY
Hey, everyone. I am the co-founder of The Carry. We are the first weighted vest and rucking brand purpose-built for women. I live in Seattle. Cortney lives really close by to me, which makes it really nice partnering together to launch this. And yeah, prior to co-founding The Carry, worked in tech, so Microsoft, in the hardware space, and then at two Seattle startups, and just got really passionate about women’s health and midlife and beyond after just my own experience having perimenopause symptoms when I was just 38 years old.
I met Amy when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next, like with my career, do I keep going in tech? But the whole experience just kind of rocked my world. And I’ve gone on these long walks in my neighborhood. And I was like, I can’t believe no one told me about this. I’m so unprepared for this. I went from postpartum into perimenopause. No one seems to be able to help me. And it just kind of changed my trajectory forever.
I became obsessed with learning about hormone health and midlife and beyond, started a Substack, wrote an article for The Midst, learned a lot along the way, and just fell in love with what I was learning. Wanted to serve this community. And being someone who is interested in fitness, my whole life, as a former athlete, and someone who worked in hardware, and someone who had incorporated weighted walks and walking with a weighted vest into my new health routine, I just kept testing the ones on the market, got Cortney involved in testing.
I couldn’t find one that checked all the boxes that met our needs. And I was like, you know what? We can make a better one of these. And think about how many amazing women we’re going to serve and meet and what we could turn this into in the community. And our whole thing is about inspiring women to age powerfully. And Cortney will tell you a little bit more about what that means to us, but excited to be here and to be in community with all of you and learn from your experience.
CORTNEY BIGELOW, CO-FOUNDER OF THE CARRY
I’m the coinciding co-founder of The Carry. We’re doing all the things and splitting all the roles, but Esther is acting as CEO, and I’m acting as a chief brand officer. So I’m responsible for community partnerships and sales amongst the day to day. We’ve been at this for over a year and as Esther mentioned, when she learned about rucking and walking with a weighted vest, she shared that with me and we were new mom Millennial friends, by way of our kids’ preschool.
And it was just something that I was super interested in. I was like, what is this idea? What is this rucking? Tell me about it. As someone who has always prioritized movement and been obsessed with wellness, which is kind of what we were bonding over, I was interested in learning about it. And so I bought a weighted vest and quickly became obsessed with the workout, but also just saw a gap. The ones that we were testing out, we ended up buying several, just were a little problematic.
And as someone who has really fallen in love with emerging brands and how brands have been able to connect with consumers on a personal level, especially in wellness, I just became excited about the opportunity. So The Carry Weighted Vest is comfortable. It’s adjustable in weight. It’s ergonomic to a woman’s body. It’s made of premium materials. It’s also stylish, which is something that was really exciting for me.
I have a background in marketing. I spent the first decade of my career mostly in startups and tech and was last found working on brand strategy at Nordstrom. And then over the last decade, I’ve been finding my way as an entrepreneur. What started off as a style blog with a mission of trying to inspire other women to find their edit or their personal style, I was also trying to find mine. That evolved into building a community online of a significant amount of women you know, were resonating with what I was putting out there.
And I worked with some really great brands as a creator and became a more conscious consumer myself. And then that evolved into becoming a photographer. I’ve always loved taking pictures and I wanted to further my mission and empower women specifically through self-love portrait photography. And I’ve kind of found this theme of like, you know, finding these new ways to build my brand and business around just ways to connect with myself.
And so when Esther tapped me with this idea for The Carry, it was just like, oh my God, I have to do this because I’ve always, like I said, prioritized movement, been obsessed with wellness, but strength training was something that was not, I just never really integrated into my routine. And it was something that I really wanted to prioritize. And so that’s what we’re doing at The Carry. We’re re-imagining strength training for women and we’re combining fashion and function and the community in a way that just is, is really exciting to me and helping women age powerfully.
So it’s kind of come full circle.
