Getting Sticky with Alex Taylor

Brilliant, civic-minded, and impeccably chic, Alex Taylor, the co-founder of Perelel, may be polished but she’s not one to mince words. A mom of two, she’s running one of the most innovative wellness companies while advocating in D.C. for an increase in funding for women’s health. 

Before all that, she was an almost casualty of the girl boss era, cutting her teeth at Vogue, Free People, before taking the helm at Who What Wear. She worked long hours, prioritized work above all else, and the week she made Forbes 30 Under 30, she broke out into shingles. The subsequent health challenges and very strange symptoms lead to an autoimmune disorder diagnosis. This experience navigating her own treatment birthed the idea of Perelel: creating research-backed vitamins dedicated to supporting women throughout the prenatal, postpartum, and menopausal periods. 

Below she talks about her bout with postpartum anxiety, why accepting support was painful at first—read: she had a, self-described "Supermom complex"—and why the fight to equalize women’s health funding has only just begun.

Words by Emily Barasch. Images by Lindsay Molk.

This girl boss is tired 

When I was a young executive, I had a very demanding job. I was the president of a large company at a young age. I like to joke that I was girl bossing too hard. I was the woman waking up at 5:30 a.m. in the morning, having my lemon water and going to SoulCycle. I had this very high-cortisol lifestyle. I was first one in, and the last one out at the end of the day. I put my job before everything in my life at that time, which I have learned is not the way to do it. I learned no job is worth your health. Life has a way of making you recognize and face your priorities. 

As I was being honored on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, I broke out in shingles. I started to experience a full confluence of different strange health issues from my hair falling out to extreme lethargy. Throughout the course of a year after I broke out in shingles, which was the straw that broke the camel's back, I saw doctors and spent a year trying to figure out what was going on in my body. I learned that I had an autoimmune disease, a thyroid condition, and it was likely stress-induced. As in, I gave it to myself. That was probably one of the most profound moments in my life because I let a job control my life and compromised my health for a job. That felt pretty bad, and it wasn't something I could magically undo. This autoimmune disease would then have implications on my fertility. I was in the throes of trying to start a family and frustrated that I couldn't. It would shape my pregnancy, postpartum journey, and my life from there on forward. There was no going back.

The women’s health research gap is always personal 

A few realizations became instantly clear in that moment, so much flipped into focus. I really saw: Wow, I am a white woman. I live on the west side of LA. I'm deeply privileged just inherently by that nature, and I have great access to care, and I'm very aware of that. And yet, even for me, it was hard to get answers, support, and feedback. I felt hurt as I was navigating my own journey.

I learned that 80 percent of autoimmune cases manifest in women. It's disproportionately women. Why? We don't know. As I started digging deeper, I learned about the women's health research gap, women of childbearing potential were largely omitted from clinical trials through the nineties.

Most of what we know about our collective health is based on white men. And it's not their fault. This is how the cards have landed, however, we owe women a history of research to make up. The reason why women are diagnosed later than men for over 700 diseases is a direct correlation to this gap in what we know about our health. I started to realize, wow, my story isn't unique. This is the case for women who are navigating heart disease, Alzheimer's, and a whole bevy of various issues including fertility. I mean, the fact that we even have a medical term called “unexplained infertility” in 2026 is pretty mind-boggling. These are just indications of where we just haven't invested. 

Having this eye-opening experience with my own health, seeing where we have failed women and where we need to make up the gap, was something that stayed with me and had a profound impact on my view of the world, my purpose, and where I would go next. I started to navigate my autoimmune disease disorder and learn about how to take care of myself. I had to take prescription medication. I had to change my lifestyle, reduce stress, lol. How do you do that? 

I changed my diet and I also turned to supplementation, which was something that everyone in my care team recommended from my hard-hitting Western medicine endocrinologist and my OBGYN to my functional medicine doctor and my acupuncturist. Everyone really supported the impact of supplementation on my health outcomes. So I started to piece together my own routines. It was cumbersome. I would find myself standing in the aisles of Whole Foods, looking at all these different bottles. I wondered why the onus was on me as a consumer to put this together? Can I get my whole care team on a Zoom to agree on what vitamins I should get? It felt very haphazard and confusing as eventually I navigated my fertility and pregnancy journey. I started supplementing with different types of vitamins, depending on what my goals were when I was trying to conceive. 

I had this great care team that was guiding me. But as I pulled back and started to connect with the woman who would later become my Perelel co-founder, she too recognized the fact that, wow, our bodies are changing. Why aren't our nutrition needs changing too? And why don't we have comprehensive routines that are put together by the doctors and experts who know best? 

Doctors do know best 

At Perelel, we are hyper-committed to ensuring that everything is backed by a wide and vast body of clinical studies, and also the unique clinical insights that our physicians bring into our formulations. What's really special about our brand is that for an ingredient to or nutrient to earn its place in a formulation, it's got to work really hard. It has to be backed by a whole body of double-blind clinical studies and then additionally, our physicians are actually actively practicing doctors. That is a really important distinction because our doctors that formulate these products are working with patients day in and day out. They're seeing their labs, they're tracking their symptoms, they're seeing what happens when they take the maximum dose of whatever the recommended nutrient is and maybe they're saying they can't tolerate it. So we're picking up on all of this incredibly rich and human led insight from our doctors working with patients. 

Forget immediate bounce back, try a seven-year claw back 

Motherhood was really the most profound identity shift. It changed the way I see everything from my work, my priorities, and even time itself. Before kids, my life was very achievement-oriented, and after becoming a mother, it felt much more purpose-oriented. Success stopped being just about building something. It was about building something meaningful enough to make the world better. I'll never forget that moment: I looked at myself in the mirror after having my first. I wondered: Who is she? Who is looking back at me. Will I ever have the old me back? 

It was shocking. Becoming a mom really rocked my world and I realized now that I am officially seven years into my journey, I've unfolded into someone really different and I've clawed back. I really had to claw back those old pieces of myself that were important to me or parts of my life. At the same time, so many parts of me have bloomed into something new that I never knew existed or I was capable of. 

Motherhood has made my world smaller, but in the most beautiful way, because it's made my purpose bigger and sharpened my focus.

Matrescence, ever heard of it?

Postpartum was a minefield of shock and awe. First of all it was the shock of what my body had physically experienced, the psychological shift that has been termed as matrescence. It's one of the most massive shifts not only in your physiology, but also your mental rewiring. It's a larger shift that's even greater than adolescence. The fact that we didn't even really have that language popularized even seven years ago, even though it was coined in the seventies, to me is the benefit and the beauty of the Internet is that we're all talking about this and naming it.       

You prepare for birth for so long. There's almost no time preparing for what comes after. I was shocked by how quickly that care and that support system evaporated the second I gave birth. You go from constant medical attention during pregnancy and then very little structured support in postpartum. You check the box on that six-week postpartum appointment and suddenly, at least in America, you are deemed ready to go. I was talking with our medical co-founder, Dr. Bayati, and I was shocked to learn that postpartum can last up to five years.

The depletion on your body and the impact is deeply profound. You have thrown an entire human in your body and that is no small feat for anyone. You are depleted. There's so many shifts that are recalibrating after you give birth. That disconnect made me realize how unspoken, overlooked, and underfunded the whole category of woman's health is and that's only magnified in the postpartum period. I found that to be just wildly disappointing. We as a society systemically have failed families and provide adequate support in postpartum period, whether it be paid leave, whether it be adequate insurance coverage, whether it be even a system that allows families, and especially mothers that are recovering, to lean back into life and nurture their families and their new roles. It's an impossible task. We're asking an impossible job of people as they're navigating this.

It was a rocky journey too. I struggled with postpartum anxiety, which I had never really heard about, and that was only seven years ago. Now there's a lot more dialogue about these things. I had heard of postpartum depression, but that wasn't quite what I was experiencing. I dealt with a lot of intrusive thoughts, constantly thinking I was going to trip and fall or someone was going to die. 

Does motherhood make you less ambitious?

I remember being on the precipice of becoming a mother. And it felt like this massive, looming, unknown, heavy cloud that would strip me of my ambition and my ability to grow because I was afraid that motherhood would make me less ambitious. And what it did instead is it made my ambition more meaningful. It really sharpened everything that I needed to do and gave me extreme clarity that I couldn't have gotten without that experience of becoming a mother. That has been just tremendous for me. 

But it's still impossibly hard. There is no balance. It's essentially being lopsided, but knowing where your weight, your center of gravity needs to be. Because I'll tell you, there are no perfect days where I think I was a great boss and a perfect mom. I'm doing my best, but the reality is there's days where I need to be really lopsided and lean in heavily with my team and my business. And there's days where I have to be lopsided and lean into my family. I have to understand where my weight is needed and where I can't fall. I need to be very disciplined there. 

But honestly, the hardest part is just the logistics. The travel, the long days, missing bedtime. Processing the self-inflicted guilt that I give myself for missing said bed times, but then rationalizing it because I'm showing my kids what it means to pour your heart and soul into building something that can leave a legacy. Emotionally, motherhood has strengthened my resolve. I’m not just building a company; I really believe we're building something that can improve. Care for women and eventually for my own daughter—I come back to that often. 

When I think about my life, I think about these three key buckets that I need to nurture. The first bucket is the depth and richness of my relationships, and that's my family and my friends. And the second bucket is my business. I have made a deep commitment to our shareholders and our customers to create a company that can make a positive impact and provide that support. And really the third bucket for me is now the work that I'm doing in my advocacy, raising awareness about the women's health research gap. 

It's just being ruthless in that prioritization. The logistics, the day to day, got to get to drop off. I had a really important meeting this morning, but my partner was sick. It's just the mental Olympics there. It's what I signed up for. 

The other thing I've learned in motherhood is like the theory of right now. When I'm like, this is hard, I'm like: it's hard right now. My kids aren't going to be little forever and they're going to have different needs and things are going to be different. I have to remember that it's all temporal and it's not going to be forever, this logistically difficult. It'd probably be difficult in other ways, but that keeps me really grounded.

 “I had to get over myself to get there.”

In the early days, I did not have much of a support system, and part of it was a byproduct of being extremely financially strapped to get this business off the ground. I couldn't afford a nanny. There were those constraints. I have always had family nearby. I'm very, very fortunate to live near my family. So in the early days, it was my mom and my mother-in-law leaning in to help and support me, but I had a really tough time accepting help.

I've always been plagued with an extreme dose of Super Woman syndrome for better for worse. And so I didn't accept help. And so I tried to still do it all on my own, figure it out, and coordinate everything. There was a day that I, you know, took my daughter to school, like I snapped at her on the way. I was so upset that I had snapped at her because I was just under so much pressure between work and motherhood and everything. I just cried the entire walk home from dropping her off. And I was like, I can't do this. This is not sustainable. I need help.

I have to accept help. It really took that breakdown. I spent that day just in solitude. I remember like we had a little hike near our house. I went and hiked it. I just was like, I need to change something because I can't go on this way. I need to accept help. That is going to unlock so much for my family. It's going to bring out the best in me. 

We got an au pair. My husband has shifted his work life such that he can be more present. I brought on a bigger support system through Perelel. 

Sometimes I feel like our own personal trappings and boundaries can also really hold us back and that was a big one for me. So when I finally learned to accept help, my whole life became more expansive and more impactful. That was a big lesson for me. Now my support system looks really different now because my kids are a little older. My family still helps. We have a part-time college student who helps us. I knew that your support needs really change depending on how old your kids are, like it's so much more intense when they're zero to three and then once they start preschool, it changes and it changes again once you're in elementary.

I have a lot of help. I have an incredible executive assistant who is incredibly helpful too. I don't do any of this on my own. I have an amazing team. I learned you have to accept help. It has allowed me to be more limitless in what I can do. I had to get over myself to get there.

When advocacy becomes a North Star

I spend a lot of time pounding the pavement in DC, I spend a lot of time educating the public on this issue. My goal is to increase the amount of funding women's health receives via the National Institutes of Health. As it stands, women's health receives about less than eight percent of our government-funded medical research budget and given the disparities and the time we need to make up in terms of what we know and the impact that it has on women's lives every single day. That has become a North Star for me to continue to push that rock up that hill and unlock more federal funding because when you look at this issue, there's so many different ways to solve it.

One of the things I've learned through this work is that no meaningful progress happens alone. I'm incredibly grateful to be part of a broader community of researchers, advocates, policymakers, founders, and philanthropists who have dedicated their careers to advancing women's health. Leaders like Kathryn Schubert at the Society for Women's Health Research have spent decades building the scientific and policy foundation that makes progress possible. Public voices like Halle Berry have helped bring long-overdue attention to issues like menopause and women's health in a way that reaches millions. Champions in Congress, including Congresswoman Lauren Underwood, have been tireless advocates for maternal and women's health and have helped elevate these issues at the national level. I'm also grateful for Perelel's partnership with institutions like the Magee-Womens Research Institute, whose researchers are helping expand our understanding of women's health across the lifespan. And I deeply admire organizations like the Foundation for Women's Health and its founder, Katie Brodsky Falco, for mobilizing private capital and philanthropy to help close critical research gaps. If there's one thing this work has taught me, it's that progress happens when people across sectors come together around a shared goal: creating a world where women have access to the research, care, and support they deserve.

Maybe it's the delusional entrepreneurial spirit in me. I think every founder has to be wildly persistent and a little delusional to just go do something big and outlandish, but I really wholeheartedly believe that the way to create change for women's health is to get it more funding and the greatest way that we're going to be able to make a change is unlocking federal funding to close those gaps in care and research, and really the bottom of the pyramid is research. If we don't understand how a woman's body works, how can we create care, therapy, and systems that genuinely support her?