Rachael Rapinoe and the Benefits of CBD

Rachel Rapinoe share about the founding of Mendi, the CBD products industry, and ensuring success.

You are the co-founder of CBD sports medicine brand Mendi. Can you begin by telling us more about it and why you wanted to start this venture?
We are a cannabis sports brand creating all naturally derived recovery tools to keep athletes on top of their game in a healthier, safer, and more sustainable way. That, for me, came from a very personal need. I come from a long family history of drug addiction. I grew up in a very rural town in Northern California that got hit very hard by the opioid epidemic. I have a brother who is a heroin addict, so I grew up with an interesting and emotional relationship to drugs and alcohol. 

I also played elite soccer, went on to play division-one college soccer at the University of Portland, and went onto international championships. By the age of 21, I blew out my knee, and from 21 to 26, I had six surgeries, four knee surgeries, ankle surgeries, and I was prescribed, taking, and misusing more opioids than anyone should ever be prescribed, especially at that age. It is so addictive, and you are just not prepared for the type of effects that you are feeling. That immediately kind of catapulted me into a very passionate career in health and wellness. I started a training company after my master’s program. I have my master’s in health and exercise, and I built a performance training company here in Portland training elite collegiate and professional athletes.

Mendi started, honestly, because a lot of my athletes were using cannabis products, and we have seen for years that athletes have been crying out for the destigmatization of cannabis in sports and for them to be able to use healthier pain management tools. They don’t want to use opiates; they don’t want to use prescription sleeping aids. Five years ago, I started using this stuff myself, and it made a huge difference in my life mentally, emotionally, and obviously, physically. 

My co-founder, Brett Schwager, and I decided about three-and-a-half years ago that there needs to be a trusted sports brand that is sincerely formulating products from the ground up to meet the needs of athletes. The big thing is, most athletes are struggling with the same issues that the broader cannabis market is, which are mood, stress, anxiety, sleep, pain management, and inflammation. So, our strategy was to keep athletes at the center of influence and to tell their stories because it can tap into a much larger cannabis market. 

Specifically, what kind of products does Mendi offer?
Cannabis is not a one-size-fits-all, so we offer a range of topicals, bath salts, and a range of ingestibles. With that, there are various dosages that you can take as well. We typically are on the higher end of baseline dosages because efficacy is so important when you are working with professional athletes who have a public relationship with us. So, we have anything from gummies, soft gel capsules, tinctures, day and night tinctures, bath salts, lotions, and massage oil. Then, we are launching a hydration product in the fall. It really is a suite of recovery products to kind of meet athletes or everyday weekend warriors, wherever they are at in their routine.

It sounds like there are many benefits to cannabis in the sports world.
There are, yes. We create products that solve real problems in people’s lives. Everything is benefit-led with us in terms of our formulations and the efficacy of it. We are specifically targeting pain management, inflammation, sleep, and mood, and mood can be broken down into a reduction of stress and anxiety.

What were some of the challenges of getting Mendi started? I assume COVID played a big factor?
We went to market at the end of 2019, and we kind of blew into the scene because we launched our brand during the Women’s World Cup. Of course, my sister, Megan Rapinoe, who is, like, the global, football, lesbian icon–that was her breakout moment. She was definitely on a path to stardom pre-2019, but she had a phenomenal tournament, and her individual brand just blew up after that. She was our first athlete that we signed, so we kind of came in hot into the market championing equity, equality, and healthier recovery for athletes. 

Then the pandemic hit. Having that happen during our first-year startup has been difficult to navigate, but even more than that, women in particular have been hit very hard with this pandemic. More job losses have been female jobs; females have been for sure underpaid, and female-founded companies have been hit very hard in terms of the capital landscape. We were already around 3 percent, so about 3 percent of female-founded companies pre-pandemic were getting institutional funding. Now, it is even less than that. 

So, the pandemic has been a challenge, but just the inequities in general in this space, both in a sports and cannabis space for women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community. That is even more important why a brand like Mendi needs to exist. To be leaders in this space because we need equity, and we need this industry and the sports landscape to work for everyone. 

Speaking of Megan, how special was it to have her involved and be the official athlete brand ambassador? Was she supportive of this venture from the beginning?
That is a great question. She truly is a big reason why I started down this path. I have always been interested in health and wellness; I love sports science; I love human physiology and anatomy, but she was one of the athletes that introduced me to cannabis because she needed something healthier. She was using it as a wellness tool, and she encouraged me to use it because I have a lot of inflammation and pain in my knees and joints. 

I told her what Brett and I were concepting, and from day one, she has been all in. She has been looking, selfishly as an athlete, her and Sue were looking for cannabis companies to trust. They were kind of bouncing around from different brands; they didn’t really know what to trust. So, we have been their trusted brand, and we have been their resource for cannabis education. Her support has been the world, but she has really been with us since day one. 

There has been a lot of misinformation about CBD. How is Mendi changing the narrative and fighting against that negative stigma?
That is definitely something that has hurt the landscape, for sure. It has caused a lot of confusion, but it will help immensely when we have the full support of the FDA. Hopefully, that will rule out some rules and regulations that will create more continuity between brands and in the landscape, especially for the retail market. We are science-backed, so we have a sports scientist on our advisory board, and we have two other sports physiologists that are on our advisory board as well. 

That was the first thing we did. Even before getting athletes’ names out there attached to Mendi, we wanted to solidify ourselves as a sports performance company that was grounded in and backed by science. All of our products are formulated from the ground up with our chemists, our sports scientists, and our product teams, and we follow what the data says. There is a ton of evidence out, a ton of research, and our sports scientists have been doing this type of research for over 35 years. We use a lot of his markers to guide us in our language. 

Also, we do not count CBD as a cure-all. It is a wonderful, natural tool that can be used every day as part of a healthier recovery system of tools that someone is using, but if you are taking a CBD pill every day, then drinking a 12-pack and chilling on the couch all day, then obviously, it is probably not going to solve all your pain management issues. We tell the real and sincere story of what it can do when combined or put into an all-natural recovery system.

Since Mendi’s inception, how has it been received?
Great, phenomenal. I cannot even tell you how many athletes are like, “Thank God there’s a brand out there that we can trust and is third-party tested.” We are very transparent with our ingredients, and we have been wonderfully received by pretty much every major sports league and sports team out there. We are, obviously, heavily integrated here in the Pacific Northwest because we are an Oregon-born company, but yes, we have been received very well. We are young, and we have a lot of growing to do, but our path is very bright.  

What are you personally going to do to ensure that Mendi stays a success?
That is a loaded question because I do a lot. I would say, I am going to continue being the fearless leader of Mendi; I will not let the inequities in this landscape hold us back at all, and I will continue advocating to destigmatize cannabis in sports. I truly believe this plant needs to be free, and every athlete should have equal access to it so they can perform at the highest levels and recover better.

What are some future goals you would like to see Mendi achieve in the next couple of years?
We definitely want to be a leader in the industry. We want to have a strong, online footprint; we have a very scalable, D2C business model, and we want to continue getting brand visibility. We also want to continue being entrenched in all the major sports leagues: basketball, football, soccer. 

Obviously, right now, we are championing our Olympic athletes and into the Winter Olympics, but after that, we are going to focus on some of the more institutionalized sports. At the end of the day, we want to be a brand synonymous with healthier pain management and recovery tools. When you go into your cabinet to get Tylenol, we want Mendi to be synonymous with that. That is really our ultimate goal.

Before we wrap up, is there anything else you would like to mention or plug?
This is a very exciting time for cannabis. The World Anti-Doping Agency lifted the CBD ban a couple years ago, so this is the first Olympics that athletes have been able to use these products to get them to the world’s biggest stage, and that is really the story that we are trying to tell. Cannabis, for the first time ever, is on the world’s biggest stage, and this is what the face of cannabis and sports actually looks like.

There is definitely a real stigma that only certain types of athletes are using cannabis products, but in reality, the majority of athletes are using products, and it is not a one-size-fits-all. There are topicals, tinctures, gummies—it’s just a matter of what works for you and what you are currently using in your recovery routine. I think the story we want to tell is, here’s the face of cannabis, and it is on the world stage. That is a big game changer in the world of sports.