Kellogg Chronicles: How two MBA students are tackling the stigma of women’s health

This content was originally published in Poets&Quants.

By Catherine Malloy ’25 MBA and Neha Mehta ’25 MBA

At Kellogg, we’re taught to chase big ideas. Sometimes, the most powerful ideas start with a quiet truth: women are suffering in silence throughout menopause.

That’s what we discovered when we started a venture in business school. We would ask midlife women about their daily experiences. The answers were surprising — because these women weren’t just talking about hot flashes or mood swings. They mentioned feeling overlooked, dismissed and isolated.

And perhaps most tellingly, we heard the same phrase over-and-over: “No one talks about this.”

Getting a ‘Jumpstart’ on their venture

Once we saw the scale of the problem and the lack of products catering to these women’s needs, we asked ourselves: what would women’s health look like if it was actually designed for women, by women?

As MBA students at Kellogg, we co-founded Rora, a consumer health startup to serve the millions of women navigating menopause each year. Our first product is a hands-free, hormone-free mist that provides instant relief from external vaginal dryness (also known as vulvar dryness) — one of the most common and painful, but also most ignored, symptoms of menopause.

We’ve taken advantage of the variety of entrepreneurial resources that Kellogg has to offer in building Rora, such as The Garage’s summer accelerator program, Jumpstart. Jumpstart is a 10-week long pre-accelerator incubator where 10 startup teams from across Northwestern come together to advance their startups, backed with support from the university through dedicated programing, funding and mentorship.

Every day during Jumpstart, we had programming led by incredible founders, operators, professors and mentors covering everything from financial modeling and accounting to brand strategy, investor pitching and live testing.

The Garage’s maker space also gave us the ability to test and iterate on physical components like packaging and bottle design before we had the capital to do it professionally. We 3D-printed packaging mockups and designed early labels, which we used alongside our in-house formulation to bring Rora to life at Demo Day, Jumpstart’s pitch competition, of which we were lucky enough to win first place.

Finding insight and inspiration overseas

After Jumpstart, we took advantage of the Levy Inspiration Grant, a program that enables Kellogg students to travel anywhere in the world to pursue their entrepreneurial ideas, whether through conducting ethnographic research, meeting with customers, or consulting industry experts. We chose South Korea for its leadership in skincare innovation and cultural emphasis on wellness across life stages.

We used our time in South Korea to dive deep into the wellness ecosystem, with three specific goals in mind: understand what it takes to manufacture Over-the-Counter (OTC) skincare products, explore how packaging design influences consumer behavior and study how brands break through in saturated markets using science-backed storytelling.

We learned that manufacturers often lead the research and development (R&D) process themselves, developing and proposing new formulations to brands rather than the other way around. We also saw how these one-stop shops are increasingly serving global clients, highlighting a shift in how wellness products are being developed and scaled.

We came in focused on product development but left thinking more expansively about the role Rora could play in reshaping vulvar care as a category. Our overseas trek also taught us something fundamental about growing a venture: cast a wide net in the types of meetings and experiences you want. We returned more confident in our vision for Rora and more inspired to bring the same level of care, science and design to vulvar wellness that we saw embedded in Korea’s skincare ecosystem.

Finding support among Zell Fellows

Neha was also selected as a Zell Fellow, a competitive, year-long venture accelerator for student founders. The program has been instrumental in helping us pressure-test our business model and think critically about how to launch a consumer health brand in a space where education, trust and stigma all intersect.

As part of the program, each fellow is paired with a personal advisory board of seasoned entrepreneurs, operators and investors who offer individualized mentorship throughout the year. Even more, Zell surrounded us with a community of bold, mission-driven founders who understand the rollercoaster of entrepreneurship and make you braver just by standing beside them.

We’ve also had the chance to connect with the Sam Zell EGI team, adding a deeper sense of legacy and support behind what we’re building. It provided strategic support and funding for Rora, while also creating space for Neha to reflect on her leadership style, personal growth and what it really takes to build something from the ground up. It is that rare mix of practical advice, personal mentorship and true camaraderie – and it has made all the difference.

Read the original article in its entirety on Poets&Quants to learn more about how Neha and Catherine are pushing back on women’s health stigmas through Rora.