Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / GEMS: Suing the NYC Subway (& Winning!) with Dame founder Alexandra Fine
Transcript
- 0:08You've just announced this crazy news, crazy win for you guys. But basically to backtrack for anyone who is listening in and doesn't know what the MTA is, which was me before I looked it up. MTA is the New York Metropolitan Transport Authority, I think it stands for. And basically it's the subway. And you as a company sued them some year. You sued them at some point.
- 0:35And can you explain like the context of that process? Like how much does it cost to sue the MTA, by the way? Are you allowed to talk about how much the legal fees for this? I think I am. I'm never like, there's definitely things I'm not supposed to talk about, but like I'm really bad at not talking about things. I really feel like just like in sex, like honest open conversations about money are so important. So yeah.
- 1:03Yeah, we went to go run ads. They said we could run ads and they decided that we couldn't say that no sexually oriented business could run ads. But clearly there were lots of other sexually oriented businesses that were running ads. So getting clearer on what that meant, it really impacted the business. Like we had planned for it and I tried to get some press around it. We got some press, but ultimately I decided like a lawsuit would be in our best interest
- 1:31in that it would hopefully make real change. It would hopefully allow us to advertise and that it would help push forward an important conversation that would hopefully get us earned media. So like, it seems in alignment. I found a lawyer and I think the whole lawsuit, I want to say cost like $300,000. There's a lot of money.
- 1:59I can't tell you about the settlement, but I can tell you that like, for me, the experience was worth it in like brand equity. You know, I think it was one of the most powerful marketing campaigns. It's a really sticky story. And it's weird because like very few people start a company to sue people, right? Like, does that feel like it's going to push us forward in the direction of whatever we're trying to grow at Dame was a really powerful,
- 2:26took me a while to like sit with that thought before I was like, no, I'm going to spend money. Some of which are like investors dollars. And investors were kind of like, you're going to do what you want to get into a lawsuit. That sounds like a distraction. That sounds like going to be a big money suck. But it's, I think like,
- 2:47acknowledging the ways that it could impact us negatively helped us just plan for that. I just made sure that I wasn't giving a lot of time to the lawsuit, only was involved in things that were really important. I tried to, you know, bring it into the narrative of what we do at Dame often. And yeah, I think it was a solid decision.
- 3:11That's just so wild and so amazing. Obviously, congratulations. Go you. What a triumph in the business, but also in the landscape, because of course, this, you know, opens the way for so much to come.
- 3:29Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
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