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In twenty eighteen, a brand new fertility company started building clinics across the country.

Introducing kind Body, a new generation of women's health and fertility care with a redesigned patient.

Kind Body promised an entirely different approach to fertility.

We believe that going to the doctor should feel like a visit with a trusted friend, where you can get all the care you need in one place.

And in a world where costs are notoriously high and outcomes notoriously uncertain for lots of women, this new approach sounded really appealing.

My coworker we were walking past the kind Body and she said, only God, look, they look so good.

They're supposed to be really amazing.

They're geared toward women and helping women and women's health.

I saw it and was like women doctors and the way they made it seem like it was just so easy to do and seamless.

Right away, I just was like, oh, yeah, this is the easiest choice I've had to make.

The vibe looked like it was just straight out of like West Elm or something.

It was very inviting for you to want to come in and sit in the bright colors and just really relaxing, almost like you were going to go get a massage.

To be honest, I saw the aesthetics of it.

I was so excited.

I was like, finally a place is going to get it.

It's going to pamper our patients, give them that clc that they need.

You just got the feeling you were going to be taken care of and you weren't just a number and part of the masses.

So I was like great.

And the company's founder, Geina Partesi, had big plans to turn a lot more women into Kind Body converts.

We're opening Washington, d C.

We're opening Brooklyn, a third locale in New York.

We're actually coming to Columbus before coming to Cleveland.

Our plan costs for fifty locations within the next two years.

That's Gina Bartesy speaking to Griffin Jones on the Inside Reproductive Health podcast in twenty twenty two.

Under Gina, kind Body grew quickly.

The company had signed lucrative contracts with Tesla and Walmart about a competing IVF chain, doubling the number of clinics that operated.

Company leaders ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange.

Its valuation had reached one point eight billion dollars and it seemed to be only going up.

An initial public offering was in sight, and Gina had a specific way she liked to describe this euphoric chapter at kind Body.

They is the.

Rocket ship analogy a lot.

We are on a rocket ship to the moon, and then he Al's talked about like the rocket ship We're going to like last to the moon, help everyone's fertility.

I first heard about kind Body when its ads started showing up in my Instagram and TikTok feeds around twenty twenty three, encouraging me to think about freezing my eggs.

I was right in its demographic, a professional woman in her early thirties living in a big city.

This company seemed to be offering something new, combining the vibe of a health club or a spot with a part of medicine that can deliver pretty miraculous and life changing outcomes.

I got curious, so I started making some calls, and right away it became clear that things at kind Body were not as they appeared.

I heard from former patients and employees.

When you tick the rose colored glasses off, because at first you don't want to see it right as I slowly start to say to myself, Oh, this is not good.

I should have done more research.

I should have been looking into this more, and I would have found so much more.

Looking back on that, I see it as a red flag now.

I kind of had like a mental breakdown.

I felt like I was lying to my patients and I'm just not that kind of person, and it just really broke my spirit.

I'm like shaken just thinking about it.

And it was a real pressing on all of us to go faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, And when you go faster, sometimes you miss an exit.

I remember I was trying to collect payment for one of the services and I couldn't collect the payment, and then my manager was like.

Oh, ha ha ha, we do it this way because he's in prison.

I'm Jackie Devalos, a tech reporter at Bloomberg, and I wanted to find out what led to so many people feeling disillusioned.

I've spent the last two and a half years trying to understand kind body and how it fits into the larger fertility industry in the US.

I've talked to more than one hundred current and former employees and fifty former patients.

I've seen internal company documents and heard from executives and investors about the company's finances and strategy.

Along the way, I had a front row seat as the rocket ship sputtered.

Kind Body declined to speak on the record for this podcast, but over the course of my reporting, it has acknowledged some incidents.

The company said these are not unique to kind Body and pointed to some other examples of errors across the fertility industry.

And this is true.

There are problems across fertility, but kind Body is unique in that it is one of the fastest growing players in the field, and its story shows some of the consequences of that rapid growth.

Kind Body was pitched as a startup, and their approach will be familiar to anyone who knows about the saying move fast and break things, which is mostly associated with the consumer tech companies, but the lack of regulations in the fertility industry made it relatively easy to try it there too.

I wanted to know what happens when a startup takes on one of the most intimate decisions in our lives, making a baby, where the stakes are high, the customers are vulnerable, in people's dreams starting a family hanging in the balance.

From Bloomberg and iHeart Podcasts.

This is IVF Disrupted the Kind Body story.

To understand kind Body, first, you need to understand the woman behind the company, Gina Bartesi.

Gina who is now in her fifties.

It's been in the fertility industry for nearly twenty years, so she's a well known player.

When Gina talks about her career in fertility, she always starts with her own story.

She declined an interview for this series, but here she is telling it.

Back in twenty twenty two, in a conversation with reporter Kristin V.

Brown at thirty eight, I was eating well, I was working out all the time, and you have this false presumption that, oh, I'm a healthy person.

I don't have any issues with my fertility.

So we tried on our own for about the first six months, and then after six months, so many of my friends had gone through IVF and had success and had babies, and I was like, Okay, we'll just go through IVF.

But I can remember how like I was aghast at the I knew it was going to be expensive, but even when he told me how much it was going to cost, I was like, Wow, that's really expensive.

Before starting kind Body, Gina had found it another fertility startup in IVF Referral Network, which became known as Progeny.

Progeny was a middleman between employees and fertility clinics and negotiated the price of treatments with clinics by buying in bulk, and then sold those packages to employers who offered them to their staff and their health insurance plans.

Gina was in on the ground floor of a quickly expanding market.

Now, the science of fertility is relatively new, but the business is booming.

The upsurge is fueled by shifts in social norms, millennials putting off having kids, rising rates of infertility.

One research firm I Mark placed the global fertility market at forty six billion dollars in twenty twenty four and said that it would more than triple in the next decade.

The demand has spelled opportunity for investors, from venture capital to private equity who want to cash in on the lucrative business of fertility and Gina's company, Progeny, became one of the biggest players in the industry and went public in twenty nineteen.

But by the time Progeny iPod, Gina had left and was hard at work at her new company, Kind Body.

With kind Body, Gina dreamed even bigger.

Progeny was just connecting company employees to medical providers.

Kind Body did that too, but it would also be the medical provider.

It would own the clinics, it would employ the doctors, it would treat the patients.

What I learned after kind of being middleman with my previous businesses is the only way to control for patient experience, patient outcomes and cost is that you must be in the provision of care.

So today we are in the care delivery business at our clinics.

You see, we have our own physicians, medical assistants, nurse practitioners to really prioritize the patient experience and reinvent family building care.

That point Gina made about controlling costs, that was a big deal.

Kind Body was promising to make fertility care more accessible by making it cheaper.

IVF is very expensive.

The average cost of one round of treatment is about twenty three thousand dollars.

That's according to fertility iq, a platform that tracks prices and reviews for clinics, most patients end up doing two or three rounds before getting pregnant.

Kind Body promised to make all of this more efficient with its own medical record and patient portal software and by building and running its own clinics and labs.

Kind Body said it could control every aspect of operations and ultimately offer fertility treatment at a cheaper price.

It would be part of a wave of startups them tech companies catering to women's health.

The company had plans to offer an unusually wide range of services.

It wanted to be the place where women would come for regular gynecology checkups, but also for IVF, egg freezing, embryo transfers, and storage for eggs, sperm, and embryos.

There was nowhere else that offered this kind of one stop shopping for fertility services.

We are the doctors, we are the clinics.

We are your end to end family building solution.

Gina herself wasn't a doctor.

Her expertise was in marketing.

Early on, other people in the industry questioned whether someone without that medical knowledge actually understood how to put something like this together.

I spoke to a dozen investors and founders of large chains of fertility clinics about kind Body at the time, and they told me they were skeptical that a startup could offer so many services at once.

But of course, if you're a startup founder, having the incumbents tell you that you don't understand how things work can kind of feel like a sign you're onto something big.

Here's Gina, So I get those criticisms.

If you're the old guard or you're the legacy clinic and you've not changed in thirty years, that somebody comes and disrupts the business, I don't anticipate them to go away anytime soon.

Gina envisioned her new company as a consumer brand.

She was inspired by soul Cycle and Drybar.

Kind Body would have a millennial friendly aesthetic.

Clinics wouldn't be tucked away in a hospital.

They'd be in storefronts, in shopping malls and on busy streets with lots of foot traffic, right next to the barry's boot camps and the trendy juice bars.

Here she is on CNBC in twenty twenty one.

We believe in this consumerism of healthcare, you have to bring care to the patient.

There is a retail nature to kind body.

It's funny because not everyone agrees that healthcare is like any other consumer product.

But for Gina, the experience of being a patient was just as important as the treatment itself.

The lobby would have to be as carefully designed as the exam room.

I think historically in healthcare, you really didn't think about your patient as your customer, right.

You didn't think about hospitality.

And we want to be intentional.

How can we think about the robes that are more comfortable?

How can we have cold water in the Healthcare is not wired like that.

Almost every other industry, as restaurants are, retail, is think about everything else is built around you.

Gina had this idea to house everything under one roof, including the lab where eggs and sperm are handled and where embryos are actually made.

Until this point, most fertility clinics looked like a typical doctor's office.

Patients seeking IVF treatment would usually go to a clinic that was operated by a university health system like Cornell, Stanford, Northwestern, or a smaller, privately owned clinic.

They aren't exciting, viby spaces.

On busy streets, next to restaurants and boutiques.

This was Gina's radically new idea.

It would take a long time to build a sort of clinic.

The Kind Body wanted to start attracting patients early, so it started constructing what it called mobile clinics.

These were basically trailers, like the ones you would find on a movie set.

The exteriors were painted with Kind Body's signature pastel yellow, with the message your fertility Understood in big bold letters.

Anyone off the street could go inside and take a free hormone test that measured roughly how many eggs they had left.

We're here in front of our third mobile pop up event, and we're here talking to women about their pertility.

Here's an early Kind Body executive back in twenty eighteen talking about a mobile clinic.

This video comes from the website Well and Goods YouTube channel.

So in the van you will talk to our fertility specialists.

A nurse will draw your blood and take a test which is called the A and H test.

We get your results back, and we send you a report that fully contextualizes what you need to know and helps you understand what your next steps might be.

The first mobile clinic opened up in Manhattan on the corner of twenty fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, right near Madison Square Park.

Kind Body took the bus on the road to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the Hamptons.

The hormone test was a great promotional tool.

The results gave women the feeling of empowerment and control.

If results showed eggs were dwindling, kind Body said, no problem, just freeze them.

No need to stop your career to have children early on.

This was kind Body's message to women, particularly young women.

Most women who seek IVF are typically in their late thirties or forties.

The kind Body want to reach them sooner.

In twenty eighteen, Gina told the Verge quote, what we want to do is help women live a life of no regrets and have children when they want them, on their own time frame.

End quote.

This was a bold proposition.

Egg freezing does not automatically guarantee a future pregnancy.

Sometimes eggs don't survive thawing, and even if they do, some might not fertilize.

It's not a perfect science and it's very new.

Some experts at the time criticize kind Body for selling false hope and a misguided sense of security.

But for others working in the field, kind Bodies mission and messaging represented a welcome change for an industry that seems set in its ways.

We'll be right back.

Many former employ I spoke to who joined kind Body in the early years tell me they were drawn in.

They loved the mission, the beauty, the way the company presented itself.

One of those early employees was Tracy Sosa, a medical assistant who's been working in healthcare for twenty years.

She was recruited in twenty twenty to work at kind Bodies Clinic in Princeton, New Jersey.

When she started, the clinic wasn't up and running yet, but Tracy had this sense that this company was different.

Once I googled and I researched and I looked, I saw the aesthetics of it.

I'm goosebumps right now just talking to you about it.

I was so excited.

Tracy accepted the job, and together with her coworkers, she set up the clinic from scratch.

We were unpacking boxes, we were decorating.

It was there in there, and we built that thing and opened it.

Frush for I didet right open.

The three of us there was a lot of good things that were there.

It was warm, the color of the practice, it was holly.

It was inviting.

It wasn't cold, it wasn't sterile.

It was clean.

It was crisp.

You would want to go there.

I was so excited.

I was like, finally a place is going to get it.

It's going to pamper our patients here then give them not only just a medical pharmaceutical approach, but also a holistic approach thing for mind, body.

And soul.

I was drinking the kool aid.

I was all about it and all the work that Tracy and her colleagues had done to make the Princeton clinic look so inviting.

It was working.

They were giving gifts.

I think we got little water bottles and a couple, you know, little I don't know, maybe pans or whatnot.

And it was obviously all women, which I thought was pretty cool.

This is Dina.

She visited an open house at the clinic.

In twenty twenty.

She and her partner b had started treatment at another clinic in New Jersey, but they were thinking of switching because Tina's employer was now covering Kind Bodies services.

The women are great, I mean They were really upbeat and just really wanted you to know that they were going to take care of you and the options you had.

Dina's reaction as soon as she got out of there and called me, was like, all positive.

This place is like totally different to the other place.

It's very personal.

You weren't just a number and part of the masses.

So I was like great.

Dina and Be always knew they wanted to have kids.

That was something that was always on the cause for us.

That's Be.

She and Dina have been together for over a decade.

Dina and Bee didn't want to share their last name when discussing this part of their lives.

Six years ago, they decided to tie the knot and moved to a suburb of New Jersey.

It's a short drive away from the school where Dina works.

We took a little while in getting married, but we knew that as as soon as we were married, we planned to buy a house.

And pretty quickly after we got married, we started the process of trying to have a family.

They planned out how they wanted it to happen.

They told me about it when we spoke last year.

It was late in the evening.

We just each knew that we wanted to carry a child.

I think initially we were planning on having them a year apart or so.

We were like, great, Dina will go and she'll get pregnant, and then I'll go like a year or so later, and it'll be great.

We had no idea in the beginning what the journey was going.

To look like.

Between the good vibes at the open house and the fact that Dina's job would cover a big chunk of a cost, they decided to switch from their previous clinic to Kind Body.

Soon after, Dina and B met Tracy, the medical assistant who had helped open up the Princeton clinic they were now going to.

They were lovely.

They were literally our favorite Pasians.

Dina and B spent a lot of time with Tracy.

She became like their guide and a trusted friend.

You go on this journey with them, and because when they start a cycle, you're drawing their blood every day, you're in the room with them when they're doing their ultrasounds, You're in the room when they're doing all their pretesting to get prepped for their cycles.

After going through cycles with patients, you just build a.

Bond with them.

When I went on vacation and went to Vegas, I got them a key chain like I lie love beast too, women like I love them to death.

For anyone going through IVF at any clinic, there's lots of highs and lows.

Dina and B experienced a lot of disappointment in the early stages.

The first step would be for a doctor to retrieve eggs that are healthy enough to be turned into embryos.

Indiana and Bee's case with donor sperm, they both had multiple egg retrievals with kind Body.

It's hard to remember.

I remember them calling and saying that none of them ended up making it.

We weren't getting a lot of them that ended up being viable to be implanted.

Yeah, none of them were very successful at all.

To be honest, the retrievals weren't yielding enough healthy eggs.

Dina and B were both in their early forties.

Studies show that after thirty five women see a decline in the quantity and quality of their eggs.

Still they kept trying.

I mean, I thought the retrieval process was exhausting.

I mean, the injections, it's a lot.

It's a lot physically it's a lot emotionally.

It messes up your body, it messes up your head.

And we didn't have success early on.

So the amount of retrievals we had to do to be able to get embryos was a lot.

So, I mean, our process was very long.

Was it two and a half years, So a lot of retrievals, a lot of time.

It's just like you just lose those years, you lose that part of your life because the roller coaster, like Dina's describing as just incredibly exhausting in terms of your relationship, your extended family, your physical body.

The hormones are insanely up and down and that's just the drugs.

And when they managed to retrieve healthy eggs, the next hurdle was combining those eggs with donor sperm to create viable embryos to be implanted.

We didn't have many embryos at all.

I can't remember how many we were down to, but it was not many to a point where every single one was so precious and valuable.

Some embryos don't develop, others might be ruled out during genetic testing.

They both tried to have healthy embryos implanted multiple times, but none of these resulted in a pregnancy.

I had two.

You had three.

Yeah failed of five total fail so we didn't have many embryos.

We both had unsuccessful transfers.

IVF is hard, and it's not unusual for a woman to go through two to three cycles or spend tens of thousands of dollars on the process, but there were specific things about the way kind Body worked that Dina and B said made things harder for them.

Dina and B were so laser focused on having a baby that to this day they struggle with remembering the warning signs that everything was not okay for them at kind Body.

Only now those signs are coming into focus appointment reminders with B's name instead of Dina's.

Paperwork mix ups on the day of a procedure.

For one thing, the clinic near them in New Jersey wasn't the one stop shop that kind Body had been selling.

Their kind Body clinic in Princeton didn't have a full time time doctor on staff or an operating room, and their IVF lab had yet to be built.

That made their medical assistant, Tracy feel uneasy.

So after the first six months or so, I was like it was still on a doctor like, what's going on As I slowly start to say to myself, Oh, this is not good.

This patient can't have XYZ or they had to go all the way into the city.

It just wasn't appropriate.

You need a full time doctor there.

Tracy wasn't the only kind Body employee who was bothered by this.

Other staff members told me it led to more mistakes because they were coordinating important procedures for patients they didn't really know.

A lot of information can be lost in the game of telephone between clinics, and communication can suffer at a company growing as fast as kind Body was.

But Dina and b didn't have a choice.

They were ready to do another transfer and so they had to go to Kind Bodies, off more than an hour away near Manhattan's Brian Park.

So one day in the spring of twenty twenty one, they headed into the city.

So we had our transfer day, which is always, you know, a big X in your calendar, and it's super exciting and you're all hype about the fact that you're about to go and get pregnant.

For any couple going through IVF, the transfer day is a big deal.

But for Dina and b this day had extra significance.

This was the first time we were going to try transferring mind into Dina.

The plan was to do reciprocal IVF.

It's a technique in which one partner's eggs are used to create an embryo that is then implanted into the other partner, So Dina would get bees eggs.

So I think being in a lesbian couple, it really meant a lot for us to be as jine partly connected as we possibly could.

So for me not knowing whether I will be able to carry or not because I'd not had a successful transfer at that point, it was huge, like, Okay, if I can't carry because my womb was what did.

They call it, not hospitable?

Not hospitable?

Yeah, how nice is that it was important for us genetically for Dina to carry my embryo that way, in the future she may have been able to carry one of her own, but she would be able to put it blond cook my bon So it was a really big deal and we thought, if this turns out to be a successful pregnancy, this would be awesome, like a little piece of both of us in this new baby.

Super excited.

It's like the epitome of everything we've been building up to.

They traveled into Kind Bodies Brian Park Clinic for their appointment, as they had with other procedures in the past.

It's not the most comfortable spot.

We get in the office.

You're in these tiny rooms because in the clinic in the city, I mean space is short, right, You're like shuffling past each other.

You can't even open the door if someone stood there.

Like, this room is tiny.

So we're in this tiny room.

They tell us, this is great, We're here to do a transfer.

Dina, get in the gown, get on the table.

Everything seems to be normal.

So we do all that and then nothing happens.

They waited for someone to come into the room and tell them what would happen next.

And we're like, you're just yeah, we're just sitting there and we're like, okay, like this has been a while case, this has really been a while.

Now.

I know this sounds kind of crazy, but you also have to like you can't pee.

When patients prepare for an embryo transfer, they're advised to go in with the full bladder.

It helps doctors get a clear view of the un on the ultrasound.

I remember this vividly because I had to go to the bathroom so bad, and I was like, this is like I kept being like, we need them to come, like they need to come now, but they wouldn't come, and I'm like, this is strange, Like why are they not coming in here right now?

Over thirty minutes we were sitting there, for sure.

So we were sitting there, sitting there, sitting there, and it's weird and no one's coming in and telling us anything.

Then the doctor and embryologist walk into the room.

The mood shifts.

I don't even remember what it is they said exactly, but to the effect of there's been I don't even know if they admitted to it being a mistake, but there's been a situation.

Let's say there's been a situation where the embryo you chose to be defrusted was not and we defrusted a different.

Embryo coming up on IVF disrupted the kind body story.

You don't even refreeze chicken.

I didn't find out right away.

It was like a few hours into the day and then I was like, wait, what did you guys just say?

Like I think they were trying to keep it as much hash as possible.

How can we establish ourselves so that we are building a lab and like what is our goal?

Like these were just never conversations that were.

Had these air handling systems.

They're not cheap.

I'm like shaking just thinking about it, because that's something that's just hammered into your like, oh my god, the chance command heads that that goes.

Through IVYF Disrupted.

The Kind Body Story is reported and hosted by me Jackie Devallos.

The series is produced by Sean Wen and Jilda de Carly, editing by Caitlin Kenney, Jeff Grocott, and Joshua Breustein.

Blake Maples is our sound engineer and composer, fact checking by Anaica Robbins.

Bloomberg's senior executive editor for Technology is Tom Giles.

Our head of podcast asking is Sage Bauman.

You can reach us at podcasts at Bloomberg dot net.

IVF Disrupted is a production of Bloomberg and iHeart Podcasts