Some of the most consequential social innovations do not begin with a grand plan. They begin with a question that refuses to go away.
In a recent Changemaker Q&A conversation, entrepreneur Neli Kools traced the pathway that led her to co-found Intimate Queen—a plant-based wellness lingerie brand built around an insight that is simultaneously intimate, everyday, and culturally loaded: discomfort has been normalised for women. Not as an exception, but as an expectation. The project emerged from a further provocation: why can’t lingerie feel like skincare?
This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a design prompt. It is also a changemaking lens—because it reframes what the “problem” is, who it affects, and why it has remained under-addressed. When discomfort becomes culturally acceptable, the absence is not merely a product gap. It is a systems gap. And it is precisely this kind of gap that social innovation, at its best, can make visible.
What follows is an article-length synthesis of the conversation, focusing on the changemaker insights embedded in Neli’s story: non-linear careers as capability-building, innovation in taboo domains, the discipline of listening, and what it takes to build something real—slowly—without losing the mission.
The myth of the straight line, and the reality of capability stacking
Neli describes her pathway as non-linear. It began in architecture, moved into urban planning, expanded through a music business program in the US, and then flowed into founding and growing a digital advertising agency, before arriving at product entrepreneurship through Intimate Queen.
In many professional cultures, especially those shaped by credentialism and linear career narratives, this trajectory might look like zig-zagging. Yet the conversation makes something clear. A non-linear journey does not necessarily represent indecision. It can represent capability stacking—a cumulative layering of skills and perspectives that become strategically valuable later.
- Architecture and planning develop systems awareness, spatial thinking, and the ability to design for human behaviour.
- Music business and marketing train you to understand audiences, culture, and attention.
- Agency work builds commercial discipline: brand strategy, messaging, iteration, market feedback, and delivery under pressure.
When Neli says she feels her earlier stages were “preparing” her, she is pointing to a wider changemaker lesson: your path does not need to be tidy to be coherent. Often coherence only becomes visible in retrospect. The work is to keep learning, keep building, and keep moving towards problems that matter.
A changemaking question: why is discomfort treated as normal?
Intimate Queen began, Neli explains, with observation and personal experience. She and her sister noticed a strange contradiction in the broader culture of self-care: women are encouraged to invest in skincare, haircare, wellness routines, and body products—yet intimate discomfort is rarely treated as something worthy of equivalent care, attention, and innovation.
This disconnect matters. When discomfort is normalised, it becomes invisible. People stop naming it. They stop expecting alternatives. In many contexts—particularly those where intimate health is taboo—women may not speak openly about irritation, rashes, infections, or the everyday friction and discomfort that is treated as “just how it is”.
Changemakers will recognise this pattern because it repeats across issue areas. Systems do not only fail through active harm. They also fail through silence, stigma, and normalisation—conditions that suppress problem recognition.
Neli’s framing shifts the conversation from aesthetics to wellbeing:
- Lingerie is not just fashion.
- It is a garment worn close to the body, often for long periods.
- Its material properties matter.
- Comfort is not a luxury add-on; it is a health-related design requirement.
That is a quiet but significant paradigm shift. It takes an industry that often sells an image and asks it to respond to a body.
Innovation in taboo domains requires education, not just marketing
A central tension in the conversation is one many mission-driven founders encounter: if you are building something genuinely new, you are not simply persuading people to buy. You are persuading them to understand the category itself.
Neli is explicit about this being one of the hardest parts. When your product challenges dominant norms—especially in an intimate domain—your audience may not yet have the language, frames, or confidence to engage. The barrier is not only price or competition. It is sensemaking.
That means education becomes infrastructure.
In Neli’s case, education is required on multiple levels:
- Education about intimate skin wellness as a legitimate wellness topic.
- Education about material science and why fabric composition affects skin comfort.
- Education that counters taboo and stigma, especially in contexts like India where these discussions may be culturally constrained.
- Education that helps women feel permission to prioritise comfort without shame.
Notably, Neli observes that education demands varied by market. As the brand expanded into places like the UAE and the US, the “education load” shifted. That is a useful reminder for global changemakers: the same innovation does not land the same way everywhere. Cultural discourse, health literacy, and stigma shape adoption pathways.
Staying close to the problem is not a slogan; it is a methodology
One of the most practical takeaways from the conversation is Neli’s repeated emphasis on staying close to the problem.
She describes a process that is deeply familiar to anyone who has worked in participatory or human-centred change:
- Talk to women. Not once, but repeatedly.
- Listen before designing.
- Treat feedback as the raw material of innovation.
- Keep testing assumptions against lived experience.
- Let the problem shape the product, not the other way around.
This is more than “customer research”. In changemaking terms, it is a commitment to epistemic humility: the recognition that the people living the issue have insight that cannot be substituted by market reports or expert assumptions.
Neli highlights that they did not simply build a fashion brand. They worked to build a problem-solving brand. The distinction matters. It positions the product as a response to lived reality rather than a trend.
From idea to product: the invisible labour of making something real
Many people talk about entrepreneurship as if it is primarily inspiration and bravery. The conversation with Neli adds texture. It reveals the slow, technical, and often under-acknowledged work that sits between an idea and a product that actually works.
Neli describes an R&D process that took around two and a half years—involving research, exploration of comparable materials and approaches globally, manufacturer engagement, prototyping, and testing. She notes there were iterations that did not work, materials that failed, and designs that had to be abandoned.
She also describes learning by doing in a literal sense—upskilling, experimenting, and making prototypes themselves, even when they were not from a fashion background.
For changemakers, this is an important corrective. Impact-driven innovation is rarely clean. It is experimental. It involves failure. It requires the endurance to treat setbacks as information rather than evidence of incompetence.
The practical message is straightforward, even if the work is not: if you are building something that genuinely supports wellbeing, you cannot shortcut the testing and refinement.
Purpose and profit: why “go slow” can be a serious impact strategy
A recurring theme in the conversation is the tension between making money and making impact. Neli’s response challenges the default assumption that profit must come first.
She argues for starting slow:
- begin with direct engagement (exhibitions, in-person conversations),
- learn the market through listening,
- iterate based on real needs,
- and allow profit to follow once product-market resonance is real.
This is a recognisable logic in many theories of change: you invest in foundations before scale. In policy terms, you build the evidence base before the window opens. In program design, you pilot before expansion. In business, you validate before growth. The domain changes, but the causality holds.
Neli also highlights that “marketing” is not simply ads. It is the entire communication architecture: messaging across contexts, cultural sensitivity, and the ability to speak to women in different markets in ways that feel truthful rather than extractive.
For mission-driven founders, this is crucial. Growth that is disconnected from learning can accelerate the wrong thing.
Changemaker insights you can carry into your own work
Neli’s conversation offers a set of grounded insights that translate well beyond lingerie or consumer products.
Non-linear careers can be an asset: They often build cross-domain capability that becomes decisive later.
Taboo issues require sensemaking infrastructure: Education is not a marketing tactic. It is often the pathway for social permission and adoption.
Stay close to the problem—and close to the people living it: Listening is not soft. It is an innovation method.
Build slowly when the stakes are embodied: When you are designing for wellbeing, iteration and testing are part of integrity.
Authenticity reduces leadership friction: The less energy spent performing legitimacy, the more energy available for clarity and impact.
Profit and purpose are not solved once; they are managed continuously: The balancing act is ongoing. A slower start can protect mission alignment while you learn.
Closing reflection: innovation as care, and care as change
The most compelling thread through the conversation is that Intimate Queen is not simply selling lingerie. It is challenging a cultural script: that women should tolerate discomfort, and that intimate wellbeing is too private, too awkward, or too taboo to be treated as a legitimate site of innovation.
Changemaking does not always arrive through policy reform or large-scale institutional transformation. Sometimes it begins through naming an absence—comfort, dignity, care—and building something that makes that absence harder to ignore.
Neli’s founder story is a reminder that change can be practical. Material. Designed. Slow. And, in the most meaningful cases, grounded in listening.
If you are building in your own domain—policy, activism, service delivery, business, community work—the question that anchored this conversation may be worth borrowing:
What has been normalised that should not be?
And what would it look like to design for a different standard?
