When Chelsea Hirschhorn started her company, she didn’t buy into the expectations of how a “traditional founder” would approach the business, she says.
According to Hirschhorn, the founder and CEO of Frida, a fertility, pregnancy and infant product company, “a lot of founders are celebrated for going fast and breaking things.”
However, her approach to building Frida was “a little bit more measured,” she told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin on the latest episode of the “CNBC Changemakers and Power Players” podcast.
Her penchant for “organization and thoughtfulness” doesn’t hold her back, said Hirschhorn, a 2025 CNBC Changemaker. In fact, she considers it her superpower as a leader.
Still, before launching Frida, Hirschhorn had to learn how to get comfortable with taking on new challenges.
“From a career perspective, I’m very ambitious,” she said, but prior to starting her company, she described herself as “pretty risk-averse.”
Hirschhorn worked as a bankruptcy attorney before she launched Frida. After a neighbor gifted her a NoseFrida, a Swedish nasal aspirator designed for babies, Hirschhorn saw potential in the product and decided to buy the neighbor’s business selling the devices.
In 2014, Hirschhorn launched Frida with the NoseFrida as its flagship product.
It was a difficult decision for Hirschhorn to leave her previous career, she said, and she “needed a lot of encouragement” from her husband, who now serves as the president of Frida, to take the leap.
True to form, Hirschhorn took a careful approach to scaling her business, and she decided from the beginning not to raise venture capital funding to build Frida.
Rapid growth was “never our objective,” she said.
“I approached the business building with a level of practicality and a measured pace, I think, that is not necessarily a reflection of a traditional founder,” she said.
That approach, along with a level of “comfort with bucking the trend,” have been consistent threads in her story as a founder, Hirschhorn said – and it helped her build a “winning strategy” for the company.
How her leadership philosophy has developed
Hirschhorn described her current leadership style as “empathic, transparent” and “informed by the stage of life that I’m in,” she told Boorstin.
When Hirschhorn first launched Frida, she was “singularly focused on building the actual foundation for the business” and prioritized “achieving certain milestones” in Frida’s growth trajectory, she said.
She led “with the expectation that other people sort of follow my lead as far as the rigor and the work ethic and the commitment,” she said.
Since then, her leadership philosophy has “evolved meaningfully,” she told Boorstin.
Today, she prioritizes empathy and strives to be “comprehensive in my understanding of different people’s motivations.”
Her leadership style has also been informed by her experiences as a working mother, she said.
Hirschhorn is aware of “the dynamics that mothers face and the trade off and sacrifice of personal and professional ambitions and time management,” so she offers perks like weekly manicures and haircuts for her team.
From the outside, those perks may not seem “that significant or meaningful,” she said, but they represent her commitment to prioritizing well-being.
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