Pablo Albrecht, co-CEO of period underwear brand Shemsi: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Pablo Albrecht (LinkedIn), co-CEO of Shemsi.

My name is Pablo Albrecht and I am the co-CEO of Shemsi, the first washable and reusable period underwear brand in the Middle East and North Africa, our main market. Along with my co-founder I am a huge believer in period underwear and moved to Cairo in August last year to operate the company and our factory in Egypt.

My days are split into two halves, broken by lunch: I’m up at 7:30am and at my desk by 8:30am, having read Enterprise in the Uber. Mornings are for synchronicity; we run a lot of half-hour, 45-minute meetings and do tasks that connect people or don’t require a lot of focus. After lunch I work until around 8pm, in chunks of 3-4 hours where (ideally) no one interrupts me. Perhaps I have four hours with a dedicated team or I visit the factory.

It’s a hot, free, chef-made lunch for the team: Everyday we have a chef that comes in and makes the team a different menu. We calculated that this saves around a half hour of everyone deciding what to eat plus what you save in productivity is at least 25x what the food costs. It’s also a great way for the team to be together and we can ensure that the food is healthy and good for efficiency. Regardless of the money, every office should do it.

After that it’s a work dinner: Usually I eat around 9pm with a colleague or my co-founder when he is in the country. I find people tend to be more relaxed in a restaurant environment so you can talk honestly and work on solving the real issues.

Weekends are also for work: We’ve been really busy since I’ve arrived and I’ve only managed one weekend out of Cairo. Building a company is a sacrifice, and if you're not willing to make it then don’t do it. It’s just not possible without it.

Success takes preparation: Every quarter we set objectives as a team building exercise. These are translated into weekly and daily goals and to-do lists that are shared with the team or the whole company. It's a way to recognise the small wins alongside the big plus see how others have solved problems.

Our product is a great alternative to sanitary towels and tampons as the underwear can be washed and reused. Shemsi’s underwear is also more comfortable with different styles on offer, better for your health and the environment as they contain no microplastics, and an economical option as they last for years.

The consumer potential here is huge: We started by selling period underwear in Europe and saw that 80% of the women who used the product never wanted to go back to sanitary towels or tampons. We moved to Egypt as there are few period alternatives in the Middle East and with a customer base of close to 200 mn people it’s a market that makes sense. Not to mention the ease of working in Egypt; within the first month we had an office and five employees, something that wouldn’t be possible in Europe.

It’s a Made-in-Egypt brand: Shemsi underwear is manufactured at our factory in Tenth Ramadan and we have our own supply chain and quality control team. The location provides proximity to our other markets: Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Algeria. We also retail in the US, Mexico and Canada and produce products for European companies to sell under their own brand.

Quality is key: Unlike a T-shirt, underwear needs to be made to exact dimensions, or the whole product is a disaster. There is no room for even a 1% or 2% failure rate. When we first arrived in Egypt we did quality control on 100% of the units we manufactured to ensure success. We also flew in a textile engineer who had extensive experience at a French competitor to teach our team the exact process to create the product.

What the industry needs is competition: We have a small amount from companies in Morocco, Dubai and Lebanon but unlike Shemsi they aren’t integrated with the manufacturing process, instead importing the underwear or producing it in a factory they don’t own. It would be great to have some more competitors to get the word out about period underwear.

Our focus is moving towards offline sales: There is a strong e-commerce trend currently, boosted by the presence of buy-now-pay-later schemes. We want to enhance our offline retail, but we’re facing challenges with marketing. Online marketing through social media has been relatively successful and many of our customers have seen us on Instagram or Facebook. Yet as the underwear is a lingerie product there are greater sensitivities when we look to scale up our advertising. We want to sign up distributors as the more we can sell offline in pharmacies and supermarkets, the easier it is to convince others to join us.

My favorite piece of advice is from Jeff Weiner, the executive chairman of LinkedIn. It is only when you get tired of repeating something that people start to pay attention to it. It’s a response I always hear when I ask people for their pieces of advice. You can’t give up.

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