Today Major Mouvement takes over our podcast La Famélia to interview Marion, co-founder ofElia. In this podcast, Marion shares her experiences around her desire for motherhood, her PMA journey, her fight against endometriosis, and the birth of Elia.
Why change jobs?
"In my old life, I was a salesman in a tech company and beyond being a salesman, we designed tech products to help merchants create communities. In my personal life, I had other expectations that weren't necessarily aligned with the job I was doing. I was working 15 hours a day and at least 80 hours a week. I made dozens of trips in France and abroad to see customers. In fact, all this pace of life was no longer in line with what I wanted to do with my family life. And in a way, I was no longer being honest with myself, since my day-to-day life wasn't aligned at all. I was happy from a personal point of view, I still am and that's pretty constant. I was less happy at work and I was very happy with my customers, so it was more the context we'll say, that didn't make me too happy anymore."
"By desires, desires for motherhood, desires for a calmer life. Desires to be able to recognize myself in what I was doing on a daily basis and to tell myself that I was doing something that made sense. I couldn't find that at all anymore because my desires had changed, so it kind of fell apart and it took me a while to listen to myself too and understand that I wasn't aligned at all anymore."
" Indeed, I felt less and less at home in the company, so I interacted a lot less with my colleagues. I was just doing the job. As I was always on the outside, it's true that I was already disconnected from the corporate culture. I lived my customers' corporate culture, so I was very much aligned with their needs and a little less with the company's internal needs. After that, my personal life came into play."
How has endometriosis impacted Marion's life at work?
Pregnancy and work
"With this desire for pregnancy and this desire for a baby that has impacted my daily life, but in a rather violent way for me since I stopped taking the pill. I have a disease called endometriosis, which I've had since - I think - the start of my periods, since I was twelve, but it was really detected when I was 18. In a rather violent form since I had an ovarian torsion."
"I had a rather large cyst that tipped my ovary over and cracked, creating a haemorrhage. I had to have emergency surgery. I'm talking to you about twelve years ago, so I was lucky to be well accompanied and well taken care of by doctors. By cleaning out the endometriosis and the after-effects that were all around in my small pelvis, they removed part of my ovarian reserve and so I found myself at 27 with the fertility of a 50-year-old woman to make a child what."
"I was 27. We '
Work and PMA
"Today, it's important to talk about endometriosis because I think it's an issue that comes well upstream of decisions about the couple, PMA, the daughter or other matters. It's a visceral need that I have today, for people to discover and talk about endometriosis, to open up this subject. And from early childhood, in fact, from the onset of menstruation, because there was indeed a time when I lived the myth that menstruation is painful, that it was normal. I found myself with hot water bottles on my belly in the middle of summer, under 40 degrees in the South, and that wasn't normal. If I'd known my ovarian reserve was so low, maybe I would have made the decision myself at 20, or 25, to go for egg freezing much earlier. It still takes some stress off you, of course."
Finding meaning in her work
The menstrual panties project
"I discovered menstrual panties on an American website. I bought them and thought, this is great! It radically changed my daily life. I thought it was an incredible innovation. Except that after a few washes, they were dead. Menstrual panties replace conventional sanitary protection and can be reused over several years. At least, that's what it said on the paper. That wasn't the case for the one I'd bought, and I thought they were nice menstrual panties, but they were a bit ugly. They were really panties that you put in the back of your drawer and just take out during your period. And I needed to feel feminine at that time and to feel good in my underwear."
"At the same time, I had a check-up with my gynecologists, because at the time I was using a lot of tampons, even when I didn't need them, because I was afraid of having spotting or periods. Spotting is when you lose blood at different times in your cycle, but it doesn't count as a period. And I had them regularly, so I used tampons. The vagina is the most permeable part of the body. So I used tampons and that dried out the area, so I had mycoses and cystitis all the time. As part of my MAP process, we went to look into the endocrine disruptors I had in my blood and it was monstrous. I tend to eat organic food, no ready-made meals, so we identified tampons as one of the causes."
Reinventing menstrual panties
"I thought menstrual panties were great. On the other hand, they didn't correspond to my values, and above all to what my gynecologist was suggesting and prescribing, which was to use organic cotton pads so as not to irritate the vaginal flora. So I thought I'd wear cotton panties. Except that on the market, all I could find were panties that looked a bit like grandma's. I couldn't see myself wearing them. I couldn't see myself wearing them every day. So I started designing the first pair of panties in 100% organic cotton with a bit of lace.
So I designed them and then had them prototyped. My mother gave me a sewing machine for Christmas, but I've never used it. It's not my thing. To each his own. But I thought, what are the ideal panties? So I designed these little organic cotton panties with a lace triangle, which are now called Philomène on our website.
Then, the idea was to produce locally, which are values I believe in. Local production, keeping the French economy going and above all supporting French innovation were important to me. But I had a second factor to take into account: I work a lot, so I needed something that was close enough to home for me to get there. And it just so happened that one of our workshops was in the area where I had a lot of customers at the time. And so it's funny because I used to go and see my customers for my old company and between 12 and 2pm, I'd go and see the workshop, I'd make a couple of moves. For the absorbent zone, I called on a friend whose sister was a researcher, and we went to test different materials. The aim was to find the most eco-responsible, healthiest, most breathable material to dry the waste. And so we chose oak fiber, which is a fiber derived from eucalyptus wood."
"Then Apolline, my partner, joined the adventure and we very quickly launched a panty according to the different flows. It's still the same technology. You have to know that menstrual panties are quite technical, contrary to what you might think, they're not just a simple pair of panties. And especially with us, where we have a lot of lace on certain models. It's a fairly intelligent assembly of materials, which have to live with the person's body, but also with washings. So you have things to respect because the fabrics aren't identical."
Today, all Elia lingerie is certified Origine France Garantie, made from organic cotton. The quality of our menstrual panties means you can keep them for 5 to 7 years if you take care of them (especially when it comes to washing).
Heavy flow
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