Clémentine Galey
Bliss Stories

The power of community

When I started, I also launched an Instagram account to draw in women and mothers that
used the platform. I already knew mothers on the platform were vocal. But at that time, they
would only show the attractive side of pregnancy – with beautiful, filtered photos with a
really soft and lovely outlook. What I really wanted was to take away those Insta filters, to
take them away from that way of communicating dictated by the perfect aesthetic and to
talk about real life. It was by infiltrating this community of extremely powerful Insta mums
that I was able to go on and set up my own. Connections snowballed and we now have 180K followers and we are a family – we’ve formed bonds and are like an army of women who are working together to help relay information, and that’s so powerful.

The main aim of this project was also to create an appointment. My episodes come out every Monday. Having spoken to other entrepreneurs, it is quite difficult to create a place for people to gather, like a safe space where you know there is no judgement, where we’ll listen and give tips. But I think we’ve earned this unconditional trust of our audiences. So we now have to honour this trust every Monday and via all the other products we’ve discovered via Bliss. My community pulls me up because it has high standards and I owe it to them to be my best.

Defining the universe

In France, there was no media that covered maternity and motherhood in depth. Bliss Stories launched to give women a platform to discuss the subjects in this way. It was about creating a space for women to use and to share information that had real meaning for them. Since launch we have built 40 million listens in five years, which is quite phenomenal for the podcast market in France, so clearly it found its target. I wanted to accompany women right to the end of the journey with specific content. So beyond the podcast, we have developed paid audio shows, physical products plus a book and a live show. We have Bliss Bump, an audio guide which is about preg- nancy, featuring month-by-month information.

To continue helping, we wanted to create physical products to stand out from the audio. Bliss Vanity is our survival kit for post-pregnancy, created with cosmetics brand Talm. Our first drop was a big commercial hit with our listeners and suddenly this product became emblematic of our community.

The idea of the Bliss ecosystem was always to be coherent and to always maintain the values and draw various threads together from the mother ship that is the podcast. Recently, Bliss became a live show. I didn’t just want this to be a version of the podcast recorded on a stage, I wanted an evening to celebrate women and motherhood and I wrote the show I wanted to watch. It is a lively and entertaining show that also provided information and was emotional and imparted both trust and good vibes, so women would leave the venue with self-confidence and power and the belief that they are capable of anything – like a superhero. It shares the same values as the podcast, Bliss Bump and Bliss Vanity.

Ditch the manual

I didn’t set out to create a brand, I created a medium first that became a brand. I went so slowly, with lots of uncertainty and innocence and ignorance of traditional strategy, and by not knowing how to do something sometimes, without a manual, you can work better. It meant I had complete freedom in terms of possibilities and listened to my instincts. I have a lot of faith in projects that come from within. When you have a project that comes from your gut and your heart, it carries a lot of truth.