Originally Published on Glamour.com By Eliza Brooke On April 4, 2019
She wants to talk about poop — if we all could just forget what happened when she tried to change the world with period underwear.
In late January the entrepreneur Miki Agrawal held a launch event for her book, Disrupt-Her, at The Assemblage, the latest coworking-slash-coliving space in Lower Manhattan. The room was decorated with wall rugs and cacti; Spanish moss descended around a nonalcoholic bar. Agrawal sat on a low stage with Lauren Zander, her life coach, and the stylist Stacy London, who was serving as interviewer for the evening. A crowd including Assemblage members and Agrawal’s friends and fans perched on couches, armchairs, and floor pillows, sipping water and nibbling on vegan snacks while the three women talked.
“I want to talk about what happened with Thinx,” London said, “because I think that that was an absolute, completely life-changing moment for you, and really worth discussing because we always talk about success and failure, which for me are words that don’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s all experience. So how do we use experience to our advantage, when it feels like we have been brought to our knees?”
Agrawal founded the period underwear brand Thinx in 2014, and as the company’s profile rose, she became a well-known figure on the start-up circuit. Suddenly, in March 2017, Jezebel reported that Agrawal had stepped down as CEO after several employees quit. Days later, Racked quoted, anonymously, employees who described the company as a volatile work environment with poor compensation and benefits; sources said that Agrawal pitted staffers against one another and implied that they were ungrateful for seeking higher pay. Then The Cut reported that Chelsea Leibow, Thinx’s former head of PR, had filed a sexual harassment complaint against Agrawal, alleging that Agrawal routinely made comments about Leibow’s breasts and touched them without her consent. It was a hard turn left for a start-up with a progressive, feminist image.
Miki Agrawal, photographed at her home Michelle Rose Sulcov
Agrawal with her son, Hiro Michelle Rose Sulcov
Speaking to The Cut at the time, Agrawal called Leibow’s accusations “baseless” and denied that she had touched her breasts; a Thinx spokesperson also said in a statement that the company took the allegations “very seriously” and that “the company commissioned an investigation that concluded the allegations had no legal merit” and declined to comment further. Agrawal also put out a Medium post characterizing Thinx’s HR issues as problems that many fast-growing start-ups face. Forbes reported the sexual harassment claim was withdrawn after a private settlement.
Agrawal didn’t mention Thinx by name when she answered London’s question at The Assemblage. In fact, she didn’t use the word once in the hour-plus she spent onstage that night. “There were a few people that needed to be restructured out that were kind of wearing the feminist T-shirts and the vagina necklaces but were singing a different tune, culturally, for the business,” Agrawal said, noting that when she did finally restructure, “it was just twisted out of context, and you know, it was one of the darkest times of my life.”
If this sounds like a vague description of events, it is. For legal reasons, Agrawal says, she can’t say anything about her time at Thinx, her work there, or her employees. I reached out to seven former employees; only two agreed to talk about their tenure at Thinx, and even then requested anonymity. This makes writing a profile of Agrawal challenging, and reading one potentially unsatisfying: Two years after the fact, the Thinx allegations remain a major piece of her public image and business backstory, but if you want the details of what really happened, there’s a blank space.
We’re left to fill in some of the void with reports from that time period. In the spring of 2017, the critique of Agrawal was swift and widespread. Her case seemed like an isolated incident. It predated a rush of workplace misconduct accusations; Harvey Weinstein had just wrapped what we didn’t know would be his final awards season. This was before pundits learned to parse the nuances of “bad behavior” and before scores of famous men issued their careful, vague apologies. As a culture we’re now figuring out what the rehabilitation of a disgraced public figure can and should look like. This is no easy process, and as Agrawal’s case shows, it doesn’t always come with a clear, public resolution.
At The Assemblage, Agrawal described how she got through those dark days, which took place when she was five months pregnant. She remembered crying “all the time” and calling Zander multiple times a day. She said the experience stretched her emotional capacity, and in that, she found gratitude. “I get to feel the depths of betrayal, the depths of sadness, the depths of pain, which only will then accentuate the heights of joy and the height of wow-ness in life,” she said. And it fed her book, Disrupt-Her: “All of that negative shit that I inhaled, that was so painful, that I wanted to just fight back so badly; instead I just pushed it down and put it into this book.”
Disrupt-Her spans the professional and personal, and instructs readers on how to question all manner of entrenched societal conventions, block out the haters, and fight gendered norms dictated by the patriarchy and sometimes reinforced by other women. In it Agrawal talks a lot about transmuting negative energy into positive action, but her underlying principle is this: If you’re a rule-breaking woman in the world, people will try to take you down.
In the book’s introduction, there’s a handwritten message that prompts readers to “press here” on a drawing of a bull’s-eye — “to eliminate all self-judgment + judgment of others.” Were this any other self-help guide, you might touch a finger to the button, earnestly or feeling a little silly, and move on. In the context of this particular book, the request to avoid judgment seems pointed, because many people are likely to go into it with preconceived notions about Agrawal — good and bad.
Agrawal has always positioned herself as someone in the business of taboo-breaking, and that paid off with Thinx: The brand came to many people’s attention when its ads, which mentioned periods explicitly and used photos of grapefruit halves as an artistic stand-in for vaginas, were initially deemed too suggestive for the New York City subway. Thinx effectively put period underwear on the map, and Agrawal became known as an outspoken, successful woman in the overwhelmingly male start-up world, albeit one who very much fit the mold of a Burning Man–going tech executive. (A key difference: While there she posted photos on Instagram of herself pumping breast milk while out and about, writing that she had given it to other attendees to drink.) Like so many entrepreneurs, Agrawal dresses distinctively. Her style identifier is a tall, wide-brimmed hat that adds to her small stature. She talks fast, in an energetic, almost muscular way, occasionally smacking a fist into her palm for emphasis. When she’s onstage at events and conferences, she gets laughs.
It turns out operating start-ups in spaces that, in her words, “make people uncomfortable,” is good business. She opened a gluten-free pizza restaurant called Wild in 2005, at a time when gluten-free food wasn’t as trendy as it has become, and it now has three locations in New York and Guatemala. Thinx came in 2014, and a pee-proof underwear line called Icon followed in 2015; by 2017 the CEO that replaced Agrawal reported that the company (which oversees both brands) was doing $50 million in annual revenue. As chief creative officer of Tushy, a company that makes bidet attachments, Agrawal now has her sights on changing how we poop. The brand is projecting triple-digit sales growth for 2019, with annual revenue under $20 million and, according to LinkedIn, a staff of 11.
“Over these last 15 years, so many people were like, ‘No one’s going to buy your products.’ ‘No one’s going to eat gluten-free pizza — it probably tastes like shit.’ ‘No one’s going to bleed in their underwear,’” Agrawal said at the book launch. “It took a long time to get investment in all of the business ideas, and it turns out that society was wrong. People did want to try these things.”
In fact, society is wrong about a lot more than just “periods, pee, poop, and pizza,” Agrawal said, drawing laughter from the audience. “This generation and the next is not interested in doing the things that people did 100 years ago. Not interested.” To that point, each chapter of Disrupt-Her names a common way of thinking, then explains where it came from in order to present an alternative. For the notion that “failure is embarrassing,” for instance, readers are instructed to “replace the word failure with revelation.”
Disrupt-Her isn’t billed as a memoir, and much of it focuses on universal topics like the importance of investing one’s money, cultivating a partner’s best qualities, and decluttering one’s home. It is a rebirth, in a sense: Before its launch Agrawal released a video-poem that begins with her crawling from a bleeding animated vagina. (A hat is conveniently waiting nearby; she puts it on.) While the public may view it as a comeback, the timeline isn’t so linear: Agrawal founded Tushy two years after she launched Thinx, then hired leadership to run it while she focused on the period-underwear brand; when she left Thinx, she seamlessly transitioned over to Tushy. If Disrupt-Her answers any question about Agrawal, it’s how she wants to present herself to the world after being accused of abusive behavior in the workplace. Less contrition, more ideology.
In her emphasis on transforming anger, betrayal, and pain into empathy and gratitude, Agrawal performs an amazing alchemical act. The book creates a space in which she’s able to comment on the bad publicity — effectively getting the last word — and land on higher ground. This puts those members of the public who are reckoning with how to regard her, post-Thinx, in the difficult position of arguing against positivity, against personal growth, if they question her at all.
Someone who worked with Agrawal at the time, who agreed to talk only on the condition of anonymity, says that Agrawal knows the value of building her personal brand through this kind of storytelling. Publishing a new book in the aftermath of the Thinx allegations reinforces a narrative in which, the former staffer says, “She’s the hero.”
In February I visited Agrawal at her home in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, a sleek space filled with colorful woven rugs and air plants. During our interview, her husband, Andrew Horn, popped in and out of the room on his way to and from errands. Their 20-month-old son, Hiro, occasionally toddled into the conversation, cheerfully making a grab at a water glass or one of the cell phones recording the conversation.
Agrawal wrote Disrupt-Her in the two and a half months following Hiro’s birth in July 2017. Laid up in bed healing from her C-section, she wrote between feedings and while the baby was asleep. “I had so many thoughts around the culture of complaining, takedown culture, feminism, patriarchy, fake feminists, people who wear the feminist T-shirts and the vagina necklaces but are really mean girls on the inside,” Agrawal says. These topics appear in the book, in chapters that deal with woman-on-woman hate and gossipy media coverage — the products, Agrawal writes, of scarcity mind-sets and a news business that rewards clickbait.
Agrawal says she believes in creating a culture that is progressive and supportive of people being themselves — but that doesn’t mean lowering her standards. “I demand excellence. I do,” Agrawal says. “Shouldn’t you demand it for yourself? And if I’m going to bring it out of you, that’s a good thing. If that sometimes requires tough love, like, ‘Hey, I asked for that three times, come on, you’ve got this.’ Then you go back and tell everyone, ‘She’s yelling at me!’ Like, is that yelling or just being like, ‘Come on, you’re better than this!’?”
In her book Agrawal writes that she learned to “constructively look at where I actually did go wrong as a leader and how I can improve.” When I asked what those areas of personal betterment were, she said that she had to become more cautious about who she surrounds herself with. As a more experienced boss (Agrawal is now 40), “I realized that, wow, I do shoot from the hip, and I just say, ‘Oh, you love my idea? Come work with me.’” At Tushy she’s looked for people with a lot of experience in the workforce.
“I spent seven months, myself, hiring my CEO. I spent all of my time calling everyone’s references,” says Agrawal. “I looked at everyone’s social media accounts…. I looked at people’s profiles, I looked at what they wrote, I looked at how they said it — if they sounded snarky or mean-girl-style, no. They had to be bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, loved life, came with a big smile, optimistic.”
While Disrupt-Her bolsters Agrawal’s public image as someone who’s overcome adversity, many of the professional changes that Agrawal has made since moving over to Tushy seem to have to do with protecting herself against a repeat of the Thinx affair. Being a consummate “Disrupt-Her,” she still lives her life out loud, but when it comes to Tushy’s internal operations, it seems she has created boundaries that help her feel safe. Agrawal no longer wants the sticky job of managing team dynamics, so she is Tushy’s chief creative officer, not its CEO: That’s Jason Ojalvo, who spent nearly a decade at Amazon-owned Audible before joining Tushy. Agrawal works from home, sitting at her long kitchen table, and staffers will drop by for meetings. Socially, she keeps a distance between herself and her employees.
“With my team at Tushy, it’s a relationship of respect,” Agrawal says. Earlier in her career “I thought, We’re all friends, we’re all doing this together. Then all of a sudden you have to make hard calls,” she says. It’s part of the complicated work of being a manager — a lesson she learned the hard way. “I’m just like, OK, clearly I get too connected with my team or I get too trusting, and I’m just — I’m definitely not going to do that again.”
Not being a CEO also means that she has more time for the creative marketing work she loves best, Agrawal says. When I ask Ojalvo about Agrawal’s leadership style, he touts her exuberance. “We have really complementary skill sets. Miki is great at getting everyone excited about her creative ideas. Her passion for our products, our mission, and the PR stunts we do is infectious,” Ojalvo writes in an email. “I can make those all a reality by growing and managing the team executing all of it, facilitating communication among the team, and making sure we have the outside funding and/or profit to execute on our dreams — but Miki always brings the enthusiasm and excitement to the next level.”
Agrawal’s creativity is one reason Ojalvo joined Tushy; he says he was similarly motivated by its product and accessible price point ($69 for the bidet attachment), its potential to change Americans’ hygiene habits, and, more jokingly, the opportunity to talk about poop all day (“My inner 14-year-old is living the dream,” he says). At the moment Agrawal is organizing a “funeral for a tree,” a cheeky means of talking about the number of trees that get cut down every year to make toilet paper (and that could be saved by her bidet attachment). “That’s going to be one of our biggest press events of the year, I just know it,” she says.
Agrawal has a complicated relationship with the media. She has deftly used it to raise her companies’ profiles and her own, and embraced stories like those about the Thinx subway ad controversy that cemented her products in people’s minds. The former staffer, who worked with her at the time of the allegations, recalls Agrawal placing a heavy emphasis on using the media to fuel growth. “It became clear to me that there was an increasing dependence on finding the next buzzy thing,” she says. The employee wished Agrawal would have focused more on growing the company than press opportunities.
But Agrawal could at times be critical of the press, even before the allegations of March 2017. After The Cut published an early profile about her, quoting her about how she started relating to being a feminist only when she launched Thinx, she put out a Medium post titled “An Open Letter to Respectfully Quit Telling Me How to ‘Do Feminism’ (and to just support one another, please!).”
In her book Agrawal takes aim at journalists chasing after “inflamed, exaggerated headlines” and writes about being interviewed by a reporter who was “almost licking her lips, like an animal about to get a big, bloody feast.” (Below this there’s a drawing, done by the author, of a wolf licking its chops.) As a reporter working on a profile of Agrawal, it’s hard not to think about this. It’s also impossible not to see a parallel with the current American president’s relationship to the press, a whirlpool of interdependence and combativeness that plays out every day on Twitter and TV.
During her book event at The Assemblage, Agrawal talked about a few of the mental coping tactics that Zander has taught her. One was pattern interruption: When a bad thought comes into your mind and threatens to fester there, you literally change position, stand up, or walk around. She turned this into a game at a recent press dinner.
“I had literally 13 of the top press at my house last Wednesday, and it was the first time that I had met with all the press, post–all the shit that went down a year and a half ago, and I was like, ‘Ha-ha-ha, in my lair, let’s do this,’” Agrawal told the audience, adopting a faux-evil voice.
“It was a 13-course disruptive dinner, and we had them play all these games,” she continued. “Like, dance like you’re three years old! Imagine the New York Times person dancing like she’s three years old.”
I attended the dinner, and that may sound like more of an exercise in humiliation than it was. The email invitation had instructed us to dress in our silliest outfits, which the reporters and editors in attendance did with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Agrawal had on a glittering hat, a bright pink wig, and a gauzy white cape that she’d worn at her wedding. I wore a blue tie-dye shirt. Each course of the meal and its corresponding discussion or activity was based on a lesson from the book, and dancing like children was chapter one: “You can still live in a childlike state of curiosity, playfulness, and awe and be a responsible adult, on and off the job,” Agrawal writes.
Agrawal isn’t afraid to dance. She isn’t afraid to talk about periods and breastfeeding and bowel movements. To tell you that what you think you know about covering and cleaning your ass is woefully misguided.
I am not a performer, and inventing goofy dance moves in front of my peers — or worse, dancing “sensually,” as we were later encouraged to do — felt awkward and embarrassing. But it was effective programming on Agrawal’s part. You cannot argue against this kind of activity, even as you internally debate its value. To not participate, or to participate with one eye on the clock, is to admit that you’re rigid and hemmed in by your self-consciousness, that you’re choosing to bind yourself to the societal conventions you’re supposed to be dismantling. Sooner or later you’ll have to commit wholeheartedly to finding your childlike sense of play and trying something new, because your rationalizing doesn’t matter, and the only way to relieve yourself of the agony of resisting is to give in.
Eliza Brooke is a freelance reporter. She lives in Brooklyn.
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