For Laine Bruzek, her work—from Google Creative Lab to the Tribeca Film Festival to now being the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Evvy, a health startup focusing on vaginal health—is guided by making energy for the people who work with her, who work for her, and in her wider community.
Soft skills and ‘spidey’ sense
Laine says she had a crisis of confidence during her senior year. “I was so freaked out because I was like, ‘What are my skills? What are my hard skills?’ Like no one's hiring for generalist thinker… I’m not very good at these things that people are calling design.”
But what she excelled at, like writing, storytelling, and communication was design. “I left Stanford with this unbelievable spidey sense for how to ask the right questions, how to know when something’s not answering what’s actually behind the question,” said Laine. She considers a very valuable soft skill. “That will get you so far in life. Not just your professional life, but your personal life.”
Laine also met one of her co-founders for Evvy, Priyanka Jain, at the d.school. The two met while taking design classes together and stayed in touch.
“We speak the exact same language. When we argue, it makes the idea better,” said Laine. “You have great collaborators like you have great loves. It was so apparent that we were capital G, capital C, Great Collaborator.”
Figuring out founding
Becoming a founder was “the most consequential pivot that’s been in my career,” according to Laine—a fairly major statement for someone who has changed industries several times. But she’s grateful to have Priyanka and Pita Navarro, Chief Science Officer, with her on the journey. “You have to have unbelievable, unshakable self-assurance to even become a founder in the first place… and I never would have wanted to be a solo founder,” she said.
One of the values of Evvy is Figure it out. “That is the single Evvy value that I think defines the whole team and founder set. And that’s by definition, ambiguity,” said Laine.
She says that while it’s not necessary to know the path through, working through challenging periods helps to establish the confidence needed to navigate the next time it happens. “You go through these extremely difficult things then the next one comes and eventually you're like, ‘I know I can do this because I've actually already done it.’”
Since Evvy’s launch in 2021, Laine says they’ve gone through five or six major challenging periods, moving from at-home vaginal microbiome tests that use metagenomic sequencing to a clinical care platform that synthesizes testing with clinician care, coaching, and data tracking.
The gender gap
In many ways, Evvy’s mission is to close the gender gap of healthcare. “Vaginal health has never been well-designed… because vaginal health has never been considered worthy,” said Laine.
“If design is about the intuition for problems, there is total opportunity when it comes to women, and it’s just very motivating for me to be working on things that promote equality… and that feels fun to have in your work.”
Laine is especially proud of her work in Evvy’s Gender Health Gap book, which has a literal hole on every page, symbolizing the health gap that excluded women and people of color from clinical research.
“It was just amazing to do the research, to figure out the visual design language of the gaps. It’s a call to action, but it’s also a physical artifact that can live in waiting rooms, living rooms, and offices,” said Laine. It’s one of the most comprehensive compilations of gender health gap facts ever made.
Design as the line
“My career makes no sense except that the throughline is design… It's actually been the one constant thing despite all my projects looking like different shapes and different industries,” said Laine. And while it’s easier for people to identify the visual aspects of design, she says she sees it in everything, from UI interfaces to how sentences are arranged.
“I feel like once you come out of the d.school, you're like ‘everything is design,’” she laughed. “But I feel like it's taken me a long time to advocate and talk about the fact that design is writing, design is storytelling, design is communication. It is the thing that underpins literally everything I do.”
You can see it in the way Laine speaks to the camera on TikTok (@laine.bruzek) and her passion for work as a CMO at Evvy. “I’m a woman, I experience the health care system, I experience what it’s like to be left out in certain ways. A lot of the passion resides there authentically.”
Credits
Thanks to Tran Ha and Amalia Rothschild for originally interviewing Laine for the d.school’s “This Is Design Work” exhibition; Mark Grundberg for shaping the interview content; Second Peninsula for producing the video; the d.school’s academic team and teachers for guiding generations of designers; Eli Ramos for writing this article; and Jenn Brown for her persistently collaborative editing.
