THE FINE LINE | with Victoria Thain Gioia
The Fine Line | Victoria Thain Gioia
Victoria Thain Gioia has spent her career building for one of the world's most overlooked consumers: women navigating the constant transitions of hormonal health.
As co-founder and CEO of Perelel Health, the first OB/GYN-founded vitamin company designed to support women from fertility through perimenopause, she's helping reshape the conversation around maternal care, reproductive health, and the gaps that still exist long after pregnancy ends.
Since launching the company in 2020, Victoria has become a trusted voice on fertility, prenatal and postpartum health, women's health innovation, and the importance of building products that evolve alongside women's lives. Most recently, Perelel closed a $27 million growth round to further expand that mission.
But Perelel wasn't built from a distance. Victoria launched the company while pregnant with her third child, an experience that fundamentally changed how she leads. Motherhood taught her to make decisions with imperfect information, trust her instincts, delegate without guilt, and let go of the pursuit of perfection. Today, as the mother of four, an HBS alum, and a two-time Inc. Female Founders 500 honoree, those lessons continue to shape both the business she's building and the culture she's creating.
For this edition of The Fine Line, Victoria reflects on how motherhood sharpened rather than softened her ambition, why supporting women through every stage of life isn't simply good policy but good business, and what it really means to build a company worthy of a woman's trust.
How has motherhood shaped the way you lead, build teams, and make decisions?
Motherhood made me decisive.
When I was launching Perelel, I was pregnant with my third child, and that stage of life forces you to prioritize fast, trust your instincts, and move forward. You don't have time to agonize over the small stuff.
It also taught me to let go of perfection, because perfection isn't sustainable. By my fourth child, I'd gotten comfortable asking for help and accepting some things as ‘good enough.’ I have no shame anymore.
That carries into how I lead: I trust my team, I delegate, and I don't pretend to have every answer. And sometimes we have to make a decision with the information at hand and learn as we go.
You've built a company around supporting women through different seasons of life. What do you wish more workplaces understood about the realities of motherhood and women's health?
That women's health isn't a nine-month window, and it isn't a niche.
We built Perelel on the insight that women's needs shift constantly - through conception, pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause - and most of the world is still operating on an outdated assumption that this is a narrow, temporary phase.
Workplaces make the same mistake. They treat motherhood as an interruption to manage rather than a season to support.
But these phases aren't edge cases. They're the lived reality of half the workforce. Perimenopause alone affects energy, sleep, focus, and mood, and most women navigate it with zero acknowledgment at work.
What I wish more workplaces understood is that supporting women through these seasons isn't a cost. It's how you keep your most capable people. The onus shouldn't be entirely on her to figure it out alone. That's true for products, and it's true for culture.
Moms know how to prioritize, delegate, and make decisions quickly. They should be thought of as every company's superpower.
How has your own definition of ambition evolved since becoming a mother, and what does success look like to you today?
Ambition used to be about achievement: the next milestone, the next proof point. Motherhood reframed it.
Now ambition is about impact, building something that lasts, that's profitable, that actually serves people, and that matters.
That shows up in how we built the business. We were deliberate about being profitable and growing sustainably. We never wanted to chase growth at all costs, but instead really focus on serving our customers. That's ambition with discipline. We're not looking for a quick spike. We're building a long-term brand that can hold this woman's trust through every stage of her life.
Success today looks like this: my children are healthy and I'm present for them, my team is excited, and we're genuinely improving how women experience their own health. It's not one number. It's whether the thing we built holds up, and whether I'm someone my kids are proud of while we build it.
FOLLOW ALONG
Follow Victoria’s journey on her Instagram, and explore Perelel’s products and community for mothers.
Follow Brigade Events and stay tuned for the next iteration of The Fine Line at @brigadeevents.
We’d be honored to include you — or a woman you admire — in this series. If you or someone you know has a story to share, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us at carly@ingoodcompanypr.com. Together, we can uplift, support, and redefine leadership for the next generation.
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