For a stretch in her twenties, Tara Chandra paid £450 a month for a room in Hackney, working shifts as a barista to cover her bills while building an organic period-care brand out of her flat.
She had originally come to London from the US to study at the London School of Economics, and it was there, mid-degree, that she found herself talking to her now co-founder Susan Allen — one of just six women on their course — about the difference in supermarket shelves back home.
Why was organic period care easy to find on any shelf in LA, but nearly impossible to track down in the UK? The two women decided to unpick that question themselves, and it wasn’t long before Chandra’s idea for her master’s dissertation became a real-life business case for Here We Flo.
Today, Here We Flo turns over £15 million a year, split roughly 70/30 between the UK and US, selling plant-based period care alongside newer lines in bladder health and sexual wellness. It sits on shelves at Boots, Whole Foods USA, Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury’s, backed by founders and executives from brands such as Unilever, Method and Charlotte Tilbury.
Below, Tara talks us through the funding hurdles that have shaped Here We Flo’s growth, as well as what it takes to build a transatlantic business as someone who’s chosen to call Britain her home.
What we discussed
Tara’s path from musician to founder, and the ‘toilets at LSE’ moment that led to the founding story of Here We Flo.
The gap she and her co-founder spotted for organic, plant-based period care in the UK.
How Here We Flo went from a £14,000 Kickstarter to a nationally stocked, £15-million-revenue B Corp.
Why the UK’s independent retail scene served as an early growth advantage.
How EIS and SEIS enabled early fundraising, and where UK scale-up capital falls short for consumer businesses.
The real cost and complexity of the US retail system, and why Here We Flo initially stayed deliberately focused and remote with its expansion.
Lessons for founders
Build proof of concept before you need capital. Tara didn’t wait for funding to prove Here We Flo worked. Instead, she got into independent Hackney retailers by walking in and cold-emailing buyers directly. That early traction, built on relationships, is what helped make later fundraising possible.
Lean on other founders who have experience. Tara points to informal WhatsApp and Slack groups among UK brands operating in the US, where founders share brokers, trade-show tickets, and compliance contacts. She sees this peer network as one of the more practical resources available to founders expanding transatlantically.
Be honest with yourself about what US expansion actually costs. Tara warns that trying to launch with major US retailers on British funding budgets doesn’t work, because the capital a US business spends on one launch can match what a British business raises to fund its whole three-year plan. Her advice is to go in with a clear-eyed view of the capital and operational commitment required, rather than assuming the UK playbook will translate.
Lessons for policymakers
Back specialist scale-up funds for the consumer sector. Tara points to only a handful of UK consumer-focused funds that are generalist and later-stage, leaving a lot of potentially successful investments unfunded or with suppressed demand. She contrasts this with the US, where there is significantly more capital in sector-specific funds, meaning founders aren’t competing against hospitality chains and pet food companies for the same cheque.
Extend lending support to early-stage consumer businesses. Tara points to a basic funding gap: UK lenders have little appetite for extending credit to early stage, often unprofitable, businesses, forcing her to raise expensive equity just to fund inventory. In the US, Tara can access lines of credit for exactly that — support she called a huge unlock when Here We Flo finally got it this year. R&D tax credits are the nearest UK equivalent, she notes, but don’t apply to most consumer businesses.
The founding story
You went from a musician to LSE to founder — how did that journey lead you to starting a business in the UK?
My undergrad was at Columbia in economics. I really loved economics because it seemed to be a way that you could solve social problems with data and have a higher likelihood of being taken seriously if you can show a positive economic impact, which in a capitalist society is very important.
I had also trained as a musician from the age of four, most seriously in opera and then jazz. I was in a music performance programme at Columbia. I was also taking quite a lot of classes because I was interested in different things, including my major in economics, but also international policy.
The side effect of that was that I was eligible to graduate in about two years, which gave me an amazing opportunity to think about what I wanted to do next when I was 20, which was two years earlier than I thought I’d have to confront that question. And like most 20-year-olds, I don’t think I made a very good decision. I had been looking at a sustainable development PhD programme at Columbia, but instead turned that down — which I think would have been very interesting, actually — and decided to become a professional musician.
If you think being an entrepreneur is hard, try being a music artist.
I had representation from big companies, but, like most young music artists, I was mostly ignored after signing unfavourable contracts and left to build my career without the support I naively dreamed a big entertainment company would bring. Most musicians, even those with representation, also have to “bootstrap” — fund their own albums and tours upfront and, hopefully, make the money back later. As an indie musician, you spend most of your time working for those incredible moments of being in the studio or being on stage. It’s fantastic for building work ethic and resilience, I’ll give you that! On the whole, I found the music industry a very frustrating experience, albeit peppered with moments of great creative fulfilment and passion. That also got me thinking more about business and how messed up the music industry was, quite frankly, and how much injustice there is in that system.
After a few years of that, I had the real luck and honour of getting to work with a music producer in London I really admired, Steve Booker — he did Duffy’s first record, John Newman’s first record. I loved London and realised it was where I wanted to be, and at the same time, my experiences in the music industry made me realise I wanted to feel empowered around business and management. So I decided to do my master’s at the LSE, and on the first day, I met my co-founder and best friend, Susan. We were alphabetically assigned next to each other. There were only six women in that programme at the time, and only a few of us in our 20s, so we were naturally pushed together.
Within a few weeks, we were in the toilets between classes at the LSE, and Susan was expressing frustration that every single business case we studied — Toyota, Disney, Lego, United Airlines, John Deere — was a similar story: Michael Eisner staring out the window wondering what he was going to do about Disney’s share price. There were never any women mentioned because they were all owned and operated by men. Susan said: “Hey, forget the PayPal mafia; we should start a business — we should start the feminist mafia.”
We were in our mid-20s, so it was a really silly thing to say, but it kicked off everything.
Where did the specific idea for organic period care come from?
I was still that sort of California hippie, real music artist vibes — vegan, talking to people about organic and regenerative farming, drinking almond milk and kombucha. Susan likes to make fun of me and say I did it before it was cool. And I remember saying, what about organic period care? I used to buy that in LA, because you could get it anywhere, but when I came here, it was really hard to find.
It shouldn’t be hard to find. You should be able to get it on the mass market the same way you can get natural baby wipes, organic hummus, organic apples, gluten-free bread, plant-based milk, even in a Tesco Express or Sainsbury’s Local. But clean and green was really missing from women’s intimate healthcare.
Susan was really interested in this idea, and that was where it all started.
Here We Flo’s early days
What did those first two years of actually building Here We Flo look like, from your dissertation to your first production run?
I used the business case for Here We Flo as my master’s dissertation. In that process, we did focus groups, business research, but also environmental and health research. I was living in Hackney, and there were just so many cool people around at the time — one of my friends was also a musician who had just become co-founder of a business called Minor Figures, which at that time was doing cold brew coffee, and now it’s a huge plant-based milk company. So it was a really interesting time to be in Hackney, seeing all the great stuff happening in food and drink.
I kept working in music, as a songwriter for other people, and really enjoyed that. But I couldn’t put down the idea of Flo, and it was super creatively fulfilling. We did all the branding, packaging, and design without having any background in any of it — we taught ourselves. I had been selected by LSE as a graduate entrepreneur, which gave me the visa and the time to keep exploring and developing the idea, and it started to slowly get traction.
We did a Kickstarter, back when that was a thing, but only raised £14,000 because it was really just pushed to our network and friends. We did our first production round of 6,000 pots of tampons and started selling shop to shop in Hackney and Islington, to lots of the independent places, and learned ground up how to run a consumer business. The first two years, 2018 to 2020, were just Susan and me doing it out of our flatshares, hand-delivering to shops, slowly onboarding a warehouse, getting into Planet Organic, WHSmith Travel — the smaller steps.
How has the vision and team behind Here We Flo’s products evolved as the business has scaled?
Things really started to accelerate in 2019. We got listings in 2020 for Boots, Holland & Barrett, and Ocado, so everything started to come together. We raised around a million and a half of seed capital in February 2020, and then spent the last six years scaling up through every kind of global and macroeconomic event and struggle — supply chain crisis, the sluggish broader economy — and managed to fundraise and grow throughout all of that, while refining our vision.
We have always had the people and planet focus. Within people, we are most passionate about supporting girls and women, not only in our bodily cycles but also in our culture, through encouragement, confidence and empowerment. We weren’t interested in solving just a product problem; we wanted to stand for something as a brand and say something - in a unique voice - to the users. That just didn’t exist in the sector at the time.
Then on the product and planet side, we started off thinkingabout the materials that our bodies deserved, both from a plant-based side but also from an efficacy side. If you go too far one way or the other, it’s distorted.
So we really wanted to think about creating products that were both reliable and responsible, that were efficacious,but that also solved a brand, materials and communications problem.
Now we’re a team of 32 women, and it has been such an honour learning from all these amazing people. The smartest thing we did was just hire people who are way cleverer and more experienced than we were, and put ourselves in a position of learning from them while also sharing our vision and keeping everybody aligned with our mission, vision and values.
The empowerment piece has been a huge part too. We’ve been lucky to hire women who are interested in working for Flo because it’s not just about the materials we use — it’s also this idea of a period care company that talks about things, shows up in the world and interacts with culture the same way an embedded brand like Nike or Coca-Cola would.
Women’s health deserves that share of voice, so we think a lot about how we can be funny, feminist and fierce, as well as how we can approach everything with positivity, humour and transparency.
Why the UK
You grew up in Silicon Valley and studied in New York. Why did you end up building Here We Flo in the UK rather than going back to the US?
There are a few reasons. One, I have always loved London, because of the creativity and the diversity around me. It has always felt like there is so much creative, fresh air to breathe. And for a big urban global city at the time I moved, it was affordable.
I was living in a closet in Hackney, paying £450 a month for my room, including bills, so I could work as a barista whilst getting the business off the ground and cover my bills. To put that in perspective, when I was living in LA and New York before, forget it.
My friends who moved back, even earning crazy high six-figure salaries with great stock options, can’t actually live in any of the places where we grew up. They live two or three hours outside. So, compared to the Bay Area, to New York and LA, London felt not only more inclusive and open, more diverse and creative, but it also felt more liveable. I have since moved to Cambridgeshire, to a tiny village, because the cost of living in London has gotten nuts. But at that time, that was definitely not the case. So I really appreciated that.
The second thing is, I was at that age — 24, 25 — when you’re looking for new experiences, thinking about where you want to settle, and it’s so much about people and community. I never quite found my people in New York or LA. I moved to London and very quickly felt like I had found a great community of people I’m still friends with today, whether from the LSE or from my music community, which made it much more appealing and interesting to stay.
Beyond lifestyle, what was the business case for building in the UK?
Because I was studying at the LSE, I was looking at the business case for Here We Flo for the UK and Europe, specifically the UK.
With hindsight, I can say the UK is an amazing place to start a business due to regulatory ease of starting a business, strong network effects, London having easy links to continental Europe (more relevant before Brexit!), SEIS/EIS funding schemes and good movement of labour (at least compared to the US, where immigration is complex and contentious). But honestly, when we were starting Here We Flo, we had such a strong bias to action that we were focused on the quick wins of getting into market - that’s where the UK really stood out.
The UK has a real advantage as it has a lot more independent retailers per capita. I was able to go into independent grocery stores or off-licences that also sold period care for last-minute needs - you know, the corner shop. They’d be owned by local families in Hackney — Turkish, Kurdish, Polish immigrants, or people born and raised there who wanted to support a local business, even if it was from a young woman with an American accent, because I lived in the neighbourhood. So I could walk in and get traction and then product-market fit.
I never would have been able to do that in the States, because there’s no such thing as local for me when I had to drive 20 minutes to get to a big, very corporate Albertsons, Safeway, or Kroger. Now I know how to get into local and independent retailers in the US, but I also have a field sales team, a distributor that specialises in that. Without capital, I don’t think I would have been able to do that.
It was also easier to get proof of concept in the UK for consumers specifically, due to population density. Similarly, the retailers are much easier to get in touch with in the UK — this isn’t the case anymore, but I used to just ring up Superdrug, having no idea what I was doing — I’d say I have a product I’d love to talk to you about, and she’d say, can you send me an email? But I could do that — I could just email the buyer at Boots. In the US, the retailer system is usually done through brokers, and when there are so many brands, it’s very difficult. They get a thousand emails a week from new brands alone, so they can’t look at them all.
What’s been the hardest part of funding Here We Flo’s growth in the UK?
What helped our growth early on was EIS and SEIS, which is an incredible UK-based programme. The real issue we’ve had is the scale of capital, especially within consumer.
There is a tiny ecosystem for funding consumer businesses in the UK at the scale-up stage, and it has gotten much smaller over the last few years that we’ve been scaling. What is there is quite frankly very generalised, whereas in the US it would be, “here’s a $100M consumer fund that just does health and wellness.”
It was a very real problem that when we’d go to market to talk to the few consumer specialist funds that exist in the UK, they were all later stage focused. They’d say they start around £5 million in revenue and write £5M cheques, but then when you’d meet with them at that stage, they’d say we’re writing minimum £10M cheques for businesses doing a minimum of £15M in revenue. Then it became £20M at £20M+. So the goalposts kept moving, but in part because the pool of relevant funds was small and static. And you’d be competing with a pitch from a fashion brand, a makeup line, a candle line, a hospitality business, a pet food company, a soup company, an app — and now AI companies that orient themselves around the consumer - no specialisation.
Ultimately, the scale-up capital, specifically in the consumer sector, because it’s underdeveloped, is really lacking, and that’s what I find interesting — I’m part of Buy Women Built, and there are so many incredible brands you probably shop and didn’t know were female-founded.
But they’re still spending so much time, most of their year, trying to raise scale-up capital via £10,000 to £25,000 cheques from EIS-focused angel investors. And they need to raise millions of pounds as they grow to make it to a meaningful scale; doing that £10k cheque at a time…That is insane, especially given the amount of time that it takes away from actually growing your business. If we’d had growth capital to accelerate faster, we could have been paying the UK a lot more tax, too.
We of course have sector-specific investment vehicles in the UK, as well as generalist funds with dedicated sub-segments, informed by sector experienced people that build Britain’s expertise in these areas. Consumer could benefit from these structures and segmentation: food and drink, wellness, beauty, fashion, consumer tech, hospitality, etc.
Beyond raising equity, what other funding gaps do you think UK policy is missing for consumer businesses like yours?
Well, it’s really just an extension of the same problem, capital shortage: working capital provision for consumer businesses specifically.
We’ve had to raise millions of pounds of equity over the years to spend on inventory, because the UK does not have a high risk appetite for lending to early-stage or growth-stage — meaning unprofitable — businesses for things like that.
The only one was SVB, now HSBC Innovation Bank, but even then, they want to see profitability, which is not always the focus when you’re in your high growth stage. Whereas in the States, we’re eligible for so much working capital finance, whether that be solutions like lines of credit or debt to fund it.
When we finally accessed working capital finance earlier this year, it was a huge unlock for us. You can focus the angel money you raise — even £10,000 at a time! — through EIS on your actual marketing and growth team. R&D tax credits are probably the equivalent from an impact perspective, but they don’t apply to most consumer businesses.
I’d also want to see if the data shows that most consumer businesses are founded or co-founded by women, because you often become a founder for something you use but think you can improve— and around 80% of global consumption is controlled by women, according to Nielsen.
It goes without saying that I want to see more female founders in every sphere. But I’m curious whether you’d redress some of the gender funding gaps if there were structural financial supports for consumer businesses in the same way there are for other sectors. And as TEN has written about, successful founders, FMCG or otherwise, tend to invest in other entrepreneurs, so other kinds of tangible financial support in our sector would be part of a virtuous business cycle.
Crossing the pond (again)
At what point did you realise you needed to go into the US, and how did that expansion actually begin?
We were pulled over to the States by retailer demand during the Pandemic. The UK and Europe shut down with lockdowns, whereas the US was much more open. They didn’t have lockdowns the same way we did. We started engaging in 2020, and around 2021, began slowly putting things in place and built up.
We started with a geographic focus, and for us it was the Pacific Northwest, because there were lots of natural and organic retail chains. We got a warehouse set up — had to do that without meeting anyone, because of Covid, which was insane — and then used our investor network to find a sales agent who helped us for our first 700 doors or so.
Then we mainly did proof of concept for the first year or two, and about four years ago we launched with Whole Foods USA, who reached out to us — but we were already in the USA in a very small way, already set up with their distributor, because we’d already done some early-stage legwork, some early market traction, in a similar way we had in the UK. That is the approach I really believe in.
What’s your advice to British brands about the operational and financial reality of scaling in the US?
Doing a big mass-market retailer launch on British funding budgets doesn’t work, because you can’t afford to invest the same way as your American competition will.
A US consumer business will go out and raise a $5 million round just for launching in Target. British consumer businesses can raise £5 million for their whole three-year plan.
So my advice would be: if you’re a British business thinking about going overseas, it is a completely different retail market, and you need to be prepared for that. You need to figure out whether you’re willing to invest in hiring on the ground in a market with a 2-week notice period and higher salaries - plus the cost of healthcare.
Why have you chosen to stay remote and focused rather than following other UK brands who’ve moved founders to the US?
I’ve seen a lot more UK consumer brands moving founders out to the US in the past year — Misfits, Trip, Lovecorn, Wild — opening up, hiring here, moving people over there. It’s really exciting to see these great British brands entering the US market.
Our focused strategy of starting with US natural and independent retailers — Whole Foods, Sprouts, and a long tail of independents — has allowed us to do almost everything from here so far, with remote working and some agency support in the States. Consumer expansion in the US from over here is admittedly hard to resource in the UK, because it’s a totally different system. You’ve got your broker, your field sales team, then your distributor, who needs managing in their own right — and the retailers pull from them, and there’ll be hundreds of them. It’s complex. We’ve built the knowledge internally through experience and our US network.
It’s easier to do a launch with Walmart or Target because it’s one account, but that one account will have a fines-and-fees culture — plus no retailer has perfect execution in the market, so you’ll need to pay someone to check that the stores you’re in actually have your products on the shelf. That can cost $25,000. You need to know the right agency that does those compliance checks, and they’re not easy to Google.
So there are layers and layers and layers about how the US retail and consumer products market works. I’d say to anyone truly serious about it — get a US funding partner if you can, talk to other brands from here or Europe that have gone successfully into the States, because we do all share resources — we have WhatsApp groups and Slack channels where we go, “Hey, we’re going to Expo West this year, does anyone have an extra ticket?” or “Hey, who do you use for your Costco broker or your deductions management service?”
It’s a whole different universe, and that’s why we stayed laser focused in the States, building up a successful business in the sales channel that’s our best fit before branching out.
This series is run in partnership with the Jessica Vollman Foundation, a non-profit founded to honour the legacy of the late CEO, founder and advocate for women in entrepreneurship: Jessica Vollman.