What started as a moment of sharp personal frustration for Claire Coder became far more: it was a life-changing epiphany that uncovered a massive, untapped business opportunity.
“Toilet paper is always provided for free in public spaces,” Coder notes. “Why aren’t period products?” That simple, provocative question led 18-year-old Coder to leave college early and launch her company, Aunt Flow. Today, the business has supplied more than 34 million menstrual products to thousands of institutions across the country, ranging from Google’s headquarters to the home arena of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns. Aunt Flow is also a portfolio company of my own venture capital firm, Chloe Capital.
But this story extends far beyond pads and tampons. It’s a masterclass in how to turn a widely ignored, pervasive pain point into a dominant B2B infrastructure business. In Aunt Flow’s earliest days, Coder was a full-time solo founder, handling every part of the operation herself: packing orders and hand-delivering products to new clients. Even while grinding through the day-to-day grind of early startup work, she never lost sight of her big-picture vision.
“I’ve never viewed this as a small, niche mission,” she explains. “Eighty-six percent of women have started their period unexpectedly in public without access to the supplies they need. We weren’t just filling a gap in the market; we were helping establish a new standard for public bathrooms everywhere.”
The game-changing inflection point came when Coder realized that winning the market wouldn’t just require a better quality tampon—it would require owning the entire end-to-end delivery system. While most rival brands focused their efforts on direct-to-consumer subscription models, Coder repositioned Aunt Flow as a hardware and infrastructure company. The team designed custom, proprietary, ADA-compliant “free-vend” dispensers that let guests access products at no cost. By installing these permanent fixtures into a building’s physical infrastructure, Aunt Flow built a formidable, hard-to-overcome competitive moat.
