Frida CEO Chelsea Hirschhorn shares her ‘winning strategy’ as a leader
Chelsea Hirschhorn says when she started her company, it didn’t meet the expectations of how a “traditional founder” would approach business.
According to Hirschhorn, founder and CEO of fertility, pregnancy and baby products company Frida, “many founders are praised for going fast and disrupting things.”
But his approach to building Frida was “a little more measured,” he told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin on the latest episode of the “CNBC Changemakers and Power Players” podcast.
Hirschhorn said his passion for “organization and thoughtfulness” hasn’t held him back. 2025 CNBC Changemaker. In fact, as a leader, he sees this as his superpower.
Before launching Frida, though, Hirschhorn had to learn how to adjust to taking on new challenges.
“From a career standpoint, I’m very ambitious,” he said, but described himself as “pretty risk-averse” before starting his company.
Before founding Frida, Hirschhorn worked as a bankruptcy lawyer. After a neighbor gave him NoseFrida, a Swedish nasal aspirator designed for babies, as a gift, Hirschhorn saw the potential in the product and decided to buy the neighbor’s business selling the devices.
In 2014, Hirschhorn launched Frida with its flagship product, NoseFrida.
He said it was a difficult decision for Hirschhorn to leave his previous career and that he “needed a lot of encouragement” from his husband, who now serves as Frida’s president, to take this step.
Hirschhorn took a cautious approach to scaling his business, deciding from the beginning not to raise venture capital funding to build Frida.
Rapid growth “was never our goal,” he said.
“I approached the process of starting a business with a level of practicality and measured pace that I don’t think is necessarily a reflection of a traditional founder,” he said.
Hirschhorn said this approach, along with his level of “comfort with bucking trends” were consistent threads in his story as a founder and helped him create a “winning strategy” for the company.
How did leadership philosophy develop?
To Boorstin, Hirschhorn described his current leadership style as “empathetic, transparent” and “informed by the stage of life I’m in.”
Hirschhorn said that when he first founded Frida, he “focused specifically on building the true foundation of the business” and prioritized “achieving certain milestones” in Frida’s growth trajectory.
He said he leads “with the expectation that others will follow my lead in diligence, work ethic and commitment.”
His leadership philosophy has “evolved meaningfully” since then, he told Boorstin.
Today, he prioritizes empathy and strives to be “comprehensive in understanding different people’s motivations.”
She said her leadership style is also influenced by her experiences as a working mother.
Hirschhorn recognizes “the dynamics that mothers face and the trade-offs and sacrifices between personal and professional ambitions and time management,” so she offers her team perks like weekly manicures and haircuts.
From the outside, these benefits may not seem “that important or meaningful,” but they represent his determination to prioritize well-being.
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