The morning-after pill brand handed out at Olivia Rodrigo’s concert is fighting stigma against emergency contraception
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! It's dealmaking time for women's soccer teams, an Austrian heiress is letting strangers donate her $27 million inheritance, and a morning after-pill brand fights stigma—including on Olivia Rodrigo's tour. Have a mindful Monday.
- Gutsy move. At Olivia Rodrigo's GUTS Tour in St. Louis last week, the Missouri Abortion Fund handed out free condoms and emergency contraception. The pop star had already announced her plans to donate a share of proceeds from her North American tour to abortion funds.
But the freebies quickly went from an exciting gift for concertgoers to a controversy. By the end of the week, Rodrigo's team announced that abortion rights groups invited to set up at her shows would no longer hand out the morning-after pill because "children are present at the concert." The decision disappointed some women's health advocates, who pointed out that teens have sex and distributing contraceptives—emergency or not—can help ensure safe sex.
At that Missouri show, the brand of emergency contraception being given out wasn't Plan B, the best-known morning-after pill, but Julie, a relatively new brand selling the same 1.5 milligram levonorgestrel pill for around the same price, $45-$50. Cofounded by Julie Schott, the founder of acne patch brand Starface, the brand is led by CEO Amanda E/J Morrison.
Launched in late 2022, Julie aims to put a fun and accessible spin on emergency contraception. Morrison calls the brand a "content-first pharmaceutical company." Its innovation is not in its product, but how it talks about it.
An Olivia Rodrigo show is squarely in the Julie wheelhouse. The brand, which Morrison describes as a knowledgeable "big sister," has gone after Gen Zers and millennials, emphasizing education and reduction of stigma. Its ads include billboards with the taglines "don't turn this semester into a trimester" and "when you don't want to be a mommy influencer," plus a commercial featuring two men fighting over the last box in a drugstore. Alongside this kind of advertising, the brand hopes to address common myths, like the fear that repeat use of emergency contraception could lead to infertility, and has donated 1 million boxes of its emergency contraception to community health organizations and other partners.
Julie launched in a category that has a clear leader: Plan B, a brand synonymous with the product itself. "We appreciate that they launched on the shelf and they did the work with the FDA to get [emergency contraception] cleared for over-the-counter—thank you for the access," Morrison says. "And now it's time for phase two."
The Rodrigo hiccup shows how stigmatized emergency contraception still can be; it's not helped by anti-abortion legislation that conflates the pill, which prevents ovulation, with ending a pregnancy. (I spoke to Morrison before the Rodrigo show, and the brand didn't respond to request for comment about the incident.) Next, Julie is aiming to expand into other sexual health categories, including herpes and STD care and birth control.
Morrison says she doesn't spend much time worrying about what would happen to the brand if emergency contraception were banned. "If there's a world where [emergency contraception] is banned, the business is so secondary," she says. "Because that would be a huge blow for women everywhere."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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