Why I’m building Strand

For the past three years, hair loss has taken up far more of my life than I ever imagined.

I’ve seen specialist after specialist, spent money I couldn’t afford to waste, and received diagnoses that turned out to be wrong. I’ve had to push for blood tests, question conflicting advice, and keep explaining my history to someone new. Between appointments, I became my own researcher and care coordinator, trying to make sense of information that nobody seemed to be looking at together.

Then there was the work of everyday life: keeping up with demanding routines, remembering what I’d tried, taking photos, tracking changes, and wondering whether anything was helping.

I was exhausted. And underneath all that effort, I was grieving something people around me couldn’t always see.

As a woman, losing your hair can reach into your sense of identity, femininity and confidence. There’s shame in it, too, which makes it harder to explain how much you’re struggling. Friends would reassure me that my hair looked fine. I knew they meant well. But I needed someone to understand what was happening to me, and how much space it was taking up in my life.

I wanted one place to hold the whole picture. My history, my routines, my questions, the things I was learning. Somewhere I could prepare for an appointment without having to reconstruct years of experiences from memory. Somewhere to find other women who understood.

That became Strand.

As I researched women’s health apps, I also thought carefully about how I wanted that place to feel. So many experiences were busy, overwhelmingly pink, or filled with cheerful illustrations that felt disconnected from the weight of what I was going through.

I wanted warmth and femininity expressed with depth. A place that felt thoughtful, welcoming and grown-up, where difficult feelings could exist without being hurried into positivity.

My mood board took me to Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus: the softness, the movement, the sense of emergence. And then to the pearl.

I kept returning to the image of an oyster responding to an irritant by surrounding it with layers of nacre. Slowly, something forms around what it cannot simply remove.

For me, that became a metaphor for care. For the small, repeated acts of looking after yourself while living through something you never chose. There is no obligation to turn pain into a lesson or emerge from it more beautiful. You deserve care while you’re still in the middle of it.

That idea sits at the heart of Strand.

I’m building the companion I needed: somewhere to bring the pieces together, feel understood, and carry a little less of this alone.