An AgeTech Collaborative™ (ATC) startup, Bream first joined the ATC in 2023 as a platform for lifelong learning and wellness, helping older women and men alike stay active, connected and inspired through curated content such as on-demand art and movement classes.
More recently, based on learnings from member engagement and from direct user feedback facilitated by the Collaborative, Bream has pivoted to a new focus on serving active, engaged women 50 and older, creating community through forums and affinity groups that aim to help make meeting new friends simple, trustworthy and fun.
We recently sat down with Ryan Reid, Bream’s founder and CEO, to discuss the company’s new direction. She described why Bream decided to pivot, the importance of supporting women through life’s changing seasons, and the power of friendship in community.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you tell us about Bream’s new direction?
Bream is the place where women over 50 find new friends, affinity groups and experiences, because we believe friendship makes us feel alive and joyful.
I’m passionate about building community, and I’ve spent my whole career designing products and services with older adults in mind. I lived in Nepal for a year as a Fulbright researcher, studying the way that Nepali women age together in community, which is very different from how people age in the U.S. I formed an intergenerational collective or community of Nepali women and girls where we talked about their lives and experiences. At the same time, I was researching the way that women build communities together and use that as a source of support in their lives.
How is your research in Nepal informing your work with Bream?
In Nepal, the approach is much more collective- or group-minded than the more individualistic mindset common in the U.S. There’s also not an “amnesia” about aging — everyone is aware that it’s just what happens and no one tries to avoid it. What I found is that women there are a source of support for each other: They’re intentional about spending time together and making spaces where they can be in community. Especially because women tend to be the caregivers, they have figured out how to support each other in that role. I saw how potent and influential that is for women.
A lot of what I learned there is how we’re thinking about building community with Bream. Here in the U.S., we know that a lot of the women we’re serving are going through changes and transitions in their lives. Maybe they’re exploring retirement, or getting divorced or experiencing empty nest syndrome. So we’re thinking about how a group of women can support other women through times of change.
Bream started out with a different business model in mind. Can you describe that?
Initially, we were selling Bream into organizations in a B2B model, and we served both men and women. We produced a lot of virtual content with classes facilitated by experts — classes on meditation, movement, art, wellness and similar topics — with the community-building aspect more or less on the side.
What we discovered is that the community side of Bream was gaining a lot of traction, and we saw a lot of engagement with women especially. Around that time, I brought in my co-founder, Emily Bell, who has built community engagement platforms at early-stage startups. With Emily on board, and based on what we were seeing in our community, we started asking, “What would it look like if we focused just on the community piece of Bream?” Eventually, we also narrowed our focus to just women. So we pivoted to that new focus and to a B2C model. We still have content and events inside Bream, but we’ve flipped it from being content with community on the side, to having community at the center.
The AgeTech Collaborative played a role in the pivot you described. How did that work?
We ran a lot of tests and experiments, which started with the AgeTech Collaborative facilitating several focus groups. In those groups, we talked about the impact of social isolation, how people spent their time and how they wanted to connect with each other. It was those early conversations that gave me the initial conviction that we should focus specifically on women. Ultimately, that led to co-design sessions with women over 50 to help us focus on what would be a strong and affirming community for women over 50. Having the AgeTech Collaborative involved was very helpful — discovering that we should focus on women first was a huge business decision and insight.
The Collaborative also sent out surveys out to hundreds of people, which gave us direct access to older adults who wanted to have a conversation about either loneliness and isolation, or about community building and other topics that helped us shape where we’re at today.
Regarding the new focus on community-building, are these virtual or in-person communities?
It’s a combination of both. When women join Bream, they’ll be paired into pods, which are groups of eight women in similar life stages or with similar interests. If Bream is live in their city, they’ll be paired with women locally; otherwise, their pod will be a virtual one. Our events are either in-person or virtual, again depending on the person’s location.
We also have forums, which one woman in our co-design sessions described as Reddit, but exclusively for women over 50. The forums are a place to crowdsource ideas and recommendations and just to talk with other women. We also have affinity groups: Based on their interests and life stage, women can join an affinity group or even start one on their own, which gives them a say in the direction that the community grows.
The original B2B iteration of Bream has been live, but your pivot to the B2C, community-first angle launches … very soon!
We have been live selling content to organizations under the B2B model. We still have those contracts running, but otherwise we paused in order to focus on our new direction as a community for women over 50.
We launched a pilot of the new iteration of Bream in the Bay Area last month, and we’ll be launching our beta version on March 13th, which will go out to everyone who’s joined our wait list prior to that date. After that, people can still join our wait list, and they’ll get access to Bream when we go live publicly in April, which will include launching our phone app as well.
What do you think is the greatest opportunity for Bream and its mission?
I believe that women over 50 have been profoundly failed by the market; there are very few great companies built specifically for them, with products that center them in the design. One of our core principles is to change that as much as we can, which is why we are intentionally centering women and building Bream for them. We want women to feel seen.
This is all reflected even in media representation: Our research shows that women over 50 are represented in only 1.5% of all advertising. But here in the Bay Area, a local billboard mogul donated 10 billboards to Bream. We held a photoshoot with women over 50, and before long images of these older women having fun and wearing bright, vibrant colors started showing up on all these billboards with messages about building community for women.
As a company, we believe that friendship makes us feel alive and joyful. That’s why the friendship movement that we’re building will be so powerful, because being in community is essential for women’s health and well-being.
You can learn more about Bream at their website, and check out our Startup Directory to discover more startup participants in the AgeTech Collaborative.
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