Revolutionizing Women’s Health: The Ritual Story with Founder, Kat Schneider
Dear FoundHer...Real Founder Stories for Women Small Business Owners
Lindsay Pinchuk
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Holiday Special: Join the Dear FoundHer… Forum at 30% off our annual rate and lock in pricing forever. After December 19th, we will never offer this rate again. JOIN US HERE
You don’t need permission or perfect credentials to build a trusted brand in women’s health.
Lindsay Pinchuk sits down with Kat Schneider, founder and CEO of Ritual, for a conversation about building a category-defining company without a science background or a perfectly mapped plan. Kat shares how Ritual began during her first pregnancy as a response to unanswered questions about trust and transparency, and how choosing a DTC model early allowed the brand to educate customers, show real proof, and earn credibility instead of asking for it. What changes when you build trust before scale? How do you move forward when you do not feel fully ready?
Kat also reflects on how that DTC foundation shaped Ritual’s growth and made expansion into retail, including Target, feel intentional rather than reactive. She talks about leadership lessons learned along the way, from hiring mistakes to the pressure many women feel to be experts at everything, and why surrounding yourself with people who are stronger where you are not can change everything. Tune in to understand how intuition and decision-making become the real competitive advantage when you are building something meant to last.
Episode Breakdown:
00:00 Why This Conversation Matters for Women Founders
02:20 How Ritual Started With One Pregnant Founder Asking Better Questions
05:52 Quitting a Job While Pregnant and Challenging a “Niche” Industry
07:39 Building Ritual Without a Science Background
12:58 Launching One Product and Earning Trust Through DTC
20:56 How DTC Education Enabled Expansion Into Target and Retail
32:30 Leadership Lessons and Early Hiring Mistakes
38:14 Three Core Lessons on Intuition, Rejection, and Decision-Making
Connect with Kat Schneider:
DearFoundHer… Links:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to another episode of Dear Founder. I'm your host, Lindsay Pinchuk, and in just a second, you're going to hear Katarina Schneider, founder of Ritual, share her story with us. |
| 0:11.0 | Kat does a great job encouraging women entrepreneurs to trust their intuition and embrace challenges all throughout this conversation. |
| 0:18.9 | And while yes, this is a key part of entrepreneurship, it is much easier to do when you |
| 0:24.1 | have a support system by your side. |
| 0:26.2 | This is why I built the Dear Fountain Forum, our online networking community for women |
| 0:30.6 | business owners over 40. |
| 0:32.5 | Inside the forum, you will find the most generous, smart, experienced, no bullshit women, women who share resources, |
| 0:40.9 | ideas, contacts, and opportunities because they want you to win. You'll get monthly office hours |
| 0:47.4 | with me, expert workshops, a resource board, accountability connections, and most importantly, |
| 0:53.0 | a community that feels like the room |
| 0:55.3 | you've been missing. So if you're a woman building a business, if you want support along the |
| 1:00.5 | way, if you want to grow in 2026 with clarity and confidence, the forum is for you. So join |
| 1:06.6 | us inside. From now until December 19th, we're extending our holiday special one last time. |
| 1:12.6 | Get 30% off our 2025 annual membership rate and lock it in forever. The link is in the show |
| 1:18.8 | notes. And now on to today's episode. Welcome to Dear Founder, the podcast that pulls back the |
| 1:26.4 | curtain on what it really takes to build and grow |
| 1:29.0 | a successful business. No gatekeeping, no fluff, just real talk. I'm your host, |
| 1:35.6 | Lindsay Pinchuk, award-winning entrepreneur, founder, and proud member of the 1% of female founders |
| 1:41.9 | who've led their company to an acquisition. |
| 1:44.7 | I bootstrapped my first company from $500 to seven figures before selling it, |
| 1:49.6 | and learned more from the mistakes than from the wins. |
| 1:52.9 | What started as a podcast here has grown into a movement, |
... |
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