EVOFEM · PHEXXI
How do you launch into a category women have stopped expecting anything from?
Hormone-free Phexxi, the first and only FDA-approved use-it-only-when-you-need-it prescription vaginal gel, entered a market shaped by compromise. The work made control feel imaginable again.
THE PROBLEM
A genuinely new contraceptive entering a category women had stopped expecting anything from.
THE MOVE
Build the voice before the spotlight — brand behavior, social system, and the runway into the award-winning House Rules campaign.
THE RECEIPT
The #1 most-followed birth control brand on social within six months; +94% new prescriptions six weeks after the campaign it set up.
ROLE
Senior Director, Strategy · Real Chemistry
REMIT
Social & Creative Strategy Lead, overseeing: · Brand strategy · Creative strategy · Consumer engagement · Campaign planning
DIRECT CONTRIBUTION
Research & insight development · Community voice · Style guide · Transition into the fall celebrity campaign.
THE CHALLENGE
A new mechanism entered an old pattern of recognition.
Phexxi arrived with a genuinely different proposition: hormone-free, on demand, and used when a woman decided she needed it. Education mattered. The deeper obstacle was a category that had spent decades training women to treat compromise as normal.
Many had stopped asking whether birth control could work around their lives. Some did not name themselves as dissatisfied. Others assumed that dissatisfaction came with being sexually active.
WHAT CHANGED THE READ
The dissatisfaction had gone quiet.
The research surfaced an acceptance trap: even when women recognized that their current method was not working for them, many stayed because they did not believe a better-fitting option existed.
An efficacy lecture could explain a product. It could not reopen a choice the category had taught them to stop making.
THE SPARK
Women are stuck in a trap of acceptance about their own reproductive health.
THE WAY IN
Control was the benefit people could feel.
Phexxi’s on-demand mechanism changed who set the terms. The functional story — use it when needed — carried an emotional one: your body, your timing, your rules.
My work helped give that idea a consistent social behavior. The brand could be candid, culturally fluent, and direct without losing the discipline a regulated category requires.
DR. CHARIS CHAMBERS, @theperioddoctor — OB-GYN PARTNER IN THE HOUSE RULES CAMPAIGN
THE WORK
Build the voice before the spotlight.
CONTRIBUTION 01
Brand behavior
Strategic imperative, social style guide, content pillars, and rules for how a new brand in a regulated category should show up.
CONTRIBUTION 02
Social system
Planning workshop, anthem brief, an always-on plan, and a community response system designed for a candid voice inside a regulated environment.
CONTRIBUTION 03
The hand-off
Designing the transition from social launch into a fall celebrity campaign.
The campaign carried the territory forward.
House Rules launched in September 2021, shortly after I departed the agency for a new opportunity. Annie Murphy welcomed viewers into a world where she made the rules, and a broader team across the agency’s partners executed the campaign in-market.
The brand behavior, voice, and social runway were built during my tenure; the final campaign execution belongs to the cross-agency team that delivered it.
THE RECEIPTS
The runway
#1
Most-followed birth control brand on social
In first six months of brand launch
200M+
Earned media impressions
In first three months of brand launch
What House Rules went on to do
+94%
New prescriptions
Six weeks after campaign launch
87.8M
Social media views
9.7%
Average social engagement rate
2B
Earned impressions
The accolades
CANNES LIONS
THE SHORTY AWARDS
Silver Lion
Category Winner
Pharma
Pharma & Healthcare
THE ONE SHOW
2 Gold Pencils
Health & Wellness · Pharma
THE CLIOS
Gold CLIO
Healthcare
