From delivering on Uber Eats for one year to pitching to a room full of investors in Australia, Suraya O’Brien shares with Idealog her $50,000 award-winning pitch.

A competition for Uber drivers and delivery drivers, dedicated to support drivers’ entrepreneurial passions, saw Hamiltonian, Suraya O’Brien become the first Kiwi to win the company’s Business Booster programme.

When O’Brien received a notification about the programme, she knew she just had to sign up.

With a background of garment construction, O’Brien has always been passionate about period care and never found something that appealed to her.

“This came about because I was solving my own problem. I’m one of around 30% of women who prefer G-string style underwear over all else, and that’s literally all I would wear, except when it comes to that time of the month, where I would have to rearrange everything and wear different stuff,” she explains.

“I was googling ‘Heavy Flow G-string’ myself going, ‘surely somebody’s got to have thought of that before’. But there wasn’t anything. And so, like many people when Covid hit and we all had some time on our hands, I thought, ‘why don’t I see if it’s possible?’.”

After recognising a gap in the market, O’Brien began working on the product.

Before coming up with the product that she would eventually pitch to investors, O’Brien revealed to Idealog that she came up with 13 iterations.

From trying different fabrics to different designs, trials and tribulations, O’Brien came up with the final design.

But she was only solving a problem that she faced, not knowing other women were also facing the same problem as her.

The Heavy Flow G-string is a sort of period underwear that holds up to two tampons worth of flow, providing variety into the mix.

At around this time, as she was delivering on Uber Eats one day, O’Brien received a notification of the Business Booster programme, which for the first time ever, was available to Kiwis.

Read more: Uber brings its Business Booster programme to New Zealand

“Honestly, I thought this has to be a programme built for me. It just made so much sense,” she says.

“I was like, ‘oh my goodness, this is perfect. This is an answer to my prayers’. Because I knew that I had something that I wanted to share, but I don’t have a background in business. I have a lot still to learn.”

O’Brien says she saw the programme as a bridge to close the gap between her product and getting it out to market.

On the Business Booster programme, she says she has learnt so much, from how to use resources, advice and most importantly, a masterclass on pitching, which was helpful for the final night of the Uber Business Booster programme.

It was a nervous experience for O’Brien, who felt time flew by during her visit to Australia. She says she applied everything she learnt in the programme and before she knew it, it was time to announce the winner.

“I’d sat there and watched all the other pitches and I’d heard the third place and the second place winners. I really, with that information, I wasn’t really picking myself,” she reminisces.

“He said, ‘the winner all the way from New Zealand’, and there was two of us from New Zealand. I went, ‘Oh my God’. And then he said, ‘she’. I was just looking down at the ground and I didn’t even look, I just couldn’t even look at anybody. I was just like, ‘Oh my God’.”

O’Brien won first place, $50,000 and the pride of being the first Kiwi to ever win the programme.

She says with this chunk of money, she is going to take her product and work on branding, marketing, IP protection, stock and manufacturing.

And before you know it, the Heavy Flow G-string will be on shelves.