YouSaid · the spoken record

Lauren Wang

lines on the record: 45
first: 2024-12-05
most recent: 2024-12-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“While we have new products coming out next year, which I'm very excited about, so we're really deepening our relationships with our retail partners now, where we're now doing joint planning on innovation, which is a big step forward for us versus in the past, we would just, you know, go to sales meeting once a year and be really lucky to get that meeting. Now we're kind of in this more strategic partnership field, which I appreciate. And I think international will be something really important for us in the future. I lose sleep over the fact that 51% of the world's population could use our products, yet they don't know about us or can't get them. And, you know, we're going to need more capital to be able to spread the word in order to do that. But in the meantime, Very focused on growth and scaling in the US.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think people really find the brand to be authentic and trustworthy because of some of the reasons they talked about before, because we're not trying to preach to anyone and we're not trying to scare anyone and we're just kind of creating this welcoming space for people.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It takes time away from me running the company. And it's not something that I naturally just love being on camera or anything like that. But that's good. And we have a new kind of creative process that we're using that's more, I think, scientific than what we did in the past. Also in the past, we were. So focused on hitting those EBITDA targets that we were a little bit nervous if we did stray too far and add creative. Then we wouldn't be getting like the bread and butter that we always were getting. But now we found we can get the bread and butter that we were always getting and then so much more. By implementing new processes and structures for creative.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've always had a really heavy period. I used to bleed through super tampon in just a couple of hours. I was 22 working in corporate America in the middle of a meeting with the CEO and I stood up, looked down in my seat and I'd completely stained it with blood. It was a nightmare. I'm Lauren Wong. I'm the founder and CEO of Flex.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we are going to need to invest more on top of funnel. And over the last few years, we've been so focused on profitability and hitting our EBITDA targets. One big unlock for us has been kind of finding new ad creative. That's it.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't want to use a cup, which by the way, we make the best selling menstrual cup in the US now with a patented design that removes like a tampon. So I'm not knocking cups. I still like cups. But our disc, the disc is what people don't know about. We have 3% awareness in the US.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, thinking back to my years of researching, why am I getting infections and I'm not getting any answers? It's only one study. And we still don't know. How much of these bad materials are being absorbed Your vagina, which is a mucosal membrane. Would you put that right in your mouth? And some doctors are like, well, you get lead and arsenic and rice. That's going through your digestive system, right? And it's not being manufactured. It's just, it's a little different. So I think people are waking up to this idea that tampons actually can be very unhealthy. They could potentially be worse for us than we even know. We just don't have enough information. And at the same time, people are looking around and saying, I don't want to run in a super Mac CPA.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A couple of different things, one, we have made some changes in our ad creative that have really paid off for us. And at the same time, a big study came out from the University of Berkeley over the summer. I don't know if you saw it, but 14 major Tampon brands, including organic tampons, tested positive for toxic metalloids like lead and mercury and arsenic. And so The American Zeitgeist for the last nine years, people have been suspecting tampons might not be that good for us. Maybe they've switched to pads, but aren't completely unaware that a disc exists. And so all of a sudden, people's worst fears were confirmed. And what was doubly insulting is this is the first time a test like this has ever come out.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My secretary doesn't want to use either. Well, we don't use that word anymore, sir, but okay, no, I think it just seemed too innovative. And I think people underestimate women.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they would say that it's niche or that it's too innovative or that, you know, they talk to their wife and their wife doesn't want to eat it. I'm like, your wife isn't respectfully your wife is not my target demo.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The right business decision to tell you the truth. I think fear mongering works really well, but it's just how I've chosen to run the business. And I think, you know, nine years in, we see that the brand is really resonating with people. I think it's working. And I think prior to us launching in Walmart in 2022, investors would say to me, you know, that's really cute that you. That's great that CVS is going well. You're never going to be mainstream America. Like the average American woman, there's no way she's going to buy a period disc. There's just no way.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was really important for me to create a brand that was not fear-mongering to women. Even though I started the company because I was getting infections from tampons for 15 years, I didn't want to go out and bash tampons to the world because I didn't want any person to feel badly like I was bashing her. I believe that people should have more choices, that they should have more options, that there should be better research and funding for women's health. But I don't want to tell anyone that their personal health decision is wrong. Something that you put inside of your body, especially inside of your vagina, is extremely personal. So it was really, really important for me from day one that all of our benefits and all of the good parts about our product were what was communicated versus taking the approach or just bashing the competition, which I don't know if that's.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guarantee you what so that was a non starter for me We eventually found a non traditional lender that Lentis Money helped us get over the hump, but that wasn't for another year after I was able to demonstrate retail success.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I didn't have enough cash to be able to produce their orders. And there weren't any lenders for a company like mine at the time. And I went out and hired a really experienced controller from CPG that was a referral from a friend. And so he and I went and talked to a number of banks and they all wanted personal guarantees. And I had a super release and an apartment in Venice. Like, what are you going to take my dog? I didn't even have a 401k anymore.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we launch into a major retailer in 2018 and there was a new person on the desk who put an order in that was three times larger for our initial set order was three times larger than we thought that it was going to be. And at the time, we had this tool on our manufacturing line that kept breaking. So we were having production issues that we were trying to parallel path and fix at the same time we got an order that was three times larger than we thought but the fines if you don't make the order and we had tried pushing back but we're an early company you don't want to push back on like a really big retailer”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let me tell you. Learning how to line up your cash flows when you're a direct to consumer business is extraordinarily easy. A customer orders the product you get paid right away. With retail, they'll order the product and sometimes you don't get paid for 90 days. And then your payment terms with your manufacturer, your other suppliers might be different. So learning how to basically run two totally different business models at the same time was very, very challenging. Yeah.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It comes every 20 days. I'm always surprised. I run a period product company, I don't know where my period is. So I kept hearing from customers over and over, no matter how quickly we could kind of figure out the shipping, that they didn't want to wait, that they wanted to just go and buy their period product at the store like they normally did. I want to go do my target run. I want to get my Starbucks. I want to buy all my other stuff and get my Flex disc. So, trying to figure out how to break into retail was extraordinarily challenging. And now it's far more common for startups to work with Target or Walmart or CVS. But in 2016, I didn't know anyone else. There were only legacy brands there.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was like an ATM But it's really hard to hire people that know how to do that. They're all in demand. And I didn't know any of them. And I was still trying to figure out all the other things about running a business. So it took us a little while to get our actual marketing engine running. We did end up hitting a pretty significant like multi-million dollar revenue number in our first year, which was really exciting. But we didn't have like a repeatable scalable marketing engine at the time. So that was kind of the initial roadblock that we had. The next roadblock that we had was we kept hearing from women that they don't want to wait for their order to come. One of the things that I've learned that I still learn every single month is we don't know when our period's coming.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So originally, we launched Direct to Consumer, as one did in 2016. And Facebook had just been doing their marketing for a few years, but there was still this kind of arbitrage online to do online ads.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know, maybe a little bit of both. But I would imagine being a demo day, especially if you're an investor, and this is summer 2016, that you've gone a demo day for the last 10 years and all of a sudden there's someone on stage talking about vaginas, like you're probably a little bit shocked. And YC has since done a lot of things for women's health. And we weren't the very first either. It was just a little bit more unusual at the time. Yeah.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gina of the female reproductive system. And the doors to this hall, it's like a Imagine like a big conference hall, right? And there's like 50 companies in there. The doors open. This herd of investors literally runs in and they rush over to our table, and I'm absolutely mobbed. Like people are elbowing each other to come and talk to us. I have this guy walk by go, I'll give you 200k and walk away. And someone was like, that's Steve Cohen. I was like, no way. And then someone else goes, I mean, these are all big PCs. What else is like? Did you plant? Do you know? I'm like, I've never met him in my life. But I'm just trying to talk to all these gas from me.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put me on stage second Of just under 100 companies, and I loved that. I was so excited And I wasn't sure how investors would react. There were a lot of gasps in the audience. And we get off stage and they kind of usher you into a hall. And, you know, if you have any kind of a physical product, you have a little table set up and so we had a table and I had my little Gina. I call her my anatomical model of not.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, absolutely not. And the mailboxes were not big enough. So we went to, I think, seven different cities and maybe eight days because we were in the middle of YC. We had to go back to YC. But it was enough to be able to demonstrate the traction that we needed to by the time we got to Demo Day.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what I was telling customs that I was shipping friendship bracelets. Amazing. I literally could not think of anything else. And I didn't remember that you had to fill something out on the form. And so I'm like right in front of the postal worker. And he's like looking at me, filling out this form. It's like, he's like, what are you mailing? And the people that worked in the postal office were not happy to see us. I mean, we would have duffel bags that are about five foot nine, more than half the size of my body full of these different packages coming in and each postage is a very small amount because friendship bracelets are quite light, it turns out. So it was a lot of work for them without a lot of money and it was quite awkward.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was like wow air had really cheap flights. And so we bought a flight to Iceland for, I think, 200 bucks, three of us. We had suitcases and suitcases full of menstrual discs. And we flew from city to city on budget airlines, got an Airbnb, hand packed samples, and then schlefts these giant bags to the local post offices, mailed them out, and then hopped on the flight to the next one. We're traveling with like 20 or 30,000 discs, which are about this big, right?”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think the best example I have of doing something that didn't scale, we had a limited production run of product and we did not yet have our FDA clearance. We knew that the product was going to be FDA cleared in the US, but we didn't have it, but we had it in Europe. And I had this waitlist that I had created for the product where people just gave me their email address and their home address and then I said I would send them, you know, two menstrual discs, two flex discs. So I had this massive list of all these consumers that one of the product, but I couldn't mail them anywhere. So speaking of doing things that don't scale, what we decided to do at the time.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got the NRV and I interviewed with Sam Altman. And I remember Sam was like, I don't know a lot about periods, but it seems like a really big space. And it seems like there's not been any innovation. And I think you're going to be the person to do this. And that vote of confidence from Sam was just, it was incredible.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And she was just like, You're going to pay more than half of this in taxes. I'm like, I don't have a choice. Like, I have a product designer. I have to pay. I have things I have to do.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feels so unfair. This is your first challenge, and I know it feels like the hardest one, but if you can't solve this problem, you're not prepared to be an entrepreneur. So I went through a lot of different machinations to solve that problem. And in the meantime, I moved in with my boyfriend. I put my apartment in San Francisco illegally on Airbnb. I got caught and almost evicted. And at that point, I was very close to running out of money. So since I had been working at IBM since I was 19, I called Vanguard to cash out my 401k. And the woman I will never forget the woman on the line was begging me, please don't do this. It's such a big mistake. And I said, I don't have any choice. I'm out of money.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, if you're making a physical product and our product, our first product, the disc required a custom manufacturing line and space in someone's manufacturing facility and labor and all of these other things, right? And so even if you have a product design, you still need the raw materials and you need the actual machine. In our case, because it's all patented, needed machinery to be able to build it. So we're talking over a million dollars. But when I would go to talk to investors and show them my financial model, how do you know that people are actually going to buy this thing? And it was this chicken or the egg problem. How do I demonstrate demand before I can even make the product? And that was a whole problem to solve. And I've had so many entrepreneurs ask me that question. And I said, this is your, I always say.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were up to 12 hours. We also make a reusable version that you only have to take it out once a day. So it's a set it and forget it. You feel like you're not on your period. The reason we went viral to begin with is because you can have mess free oral or penetrative fun while on your period.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said the period disk is not a cup, it's not a tampon. It sits in a different place in the body. So a menstrual cup in a tampon sit inside the vaginal canal where there's a lot of nerve endings and you can feel it. The menstrual disc, or period disc sits for their back around the cervix. So in a place where a diaphragm would sit. And what's great about the disc is you can wear it for up to 12 hours. It holds five super tampons worth of fluid, which is more than any other period product format on the market. But my favorite part is when you go to P, it's self-empties. You don't have to take it out a menstrual cup when it gets full. You have to take it unempty. When a tampon gets full and you have to change tampons very frequently or a pad, you have to carry multiple products around. With the disc, you only use two disposable discs per day.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't feel that I was giving it a fair shake. I felt like the risk in me not trying to create a period company would be worse than the risk of me trying to do it and failing. And by that, I meant I felt deeply pulled from a moral imperative that I need to do this to serve others. And I grew up in an evangelical household this probably has something to do with it that I always thought I was going to be a missionary when I grew up. And I'm no longer an evangelical, but I think that foundation for me Into what I want to do for society or what I believe is my place in this world is to help other people. And so I really. Didn't feel like I was doing right by society, doing right by women to work on this as a side hustle and try to play it safe. I felt like I had to go all in. Otherwise, I wasn't giving it a fair shot.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should go work for a very small startup first, try to get a CMO job, and then you'll get to see what it's really like to work at a super small startup, which in hindsight is fair advice, I think, for a lot of different people. But I was absolutely gutted when separately they had told me this. And they since have come back and like apologized. But I understood that they were coming from a really good place. So I had self-doubt. I had the people that I trusted the most professionally reflecting back to me my own self-doubt. So I asked two separate men who were each running a billion dollar plus multi-billion dollar company. If they would be CEO of my company.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Number one, I didn't think that I could. Number two, when I quit my tech job, I had the two people who I still love to this day were very close who were both in C-level positions pull me aside and say, you're making a huge mistake. You have never even been CMO. How do you think you're going to be CEO?”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I did, and then everyone that I met, I would tell about my idea. But the most important thing I'm not telling you right now is I didn't want to be the CEO”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I found one of the biggest hacks, which was people can be flattered that you ask for their help. And especially if the ask is very specific and especially if the ask is very time bound. I would love to talk to you for 10 minutes about supply chain manufacturing because I'm building a financial model. I was just very clear and specific. And that turned into him saying You know what? If you can come to Portland, I'll meet with you for a weekend.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time Evernote was a thing, I had basically a digital notebook where I categorized it by all the different things I didn't know how to do, product development, FDA regulatory, finance, basically everything other than marketing, manufacturing supply chain, you name it. And then I created a second list of all the smart people I'd ever interacted with in my professional life. And I started working at IBM when I was 19. So I'd collected like a long list of people through the years. And then I made a third list of email addresses. And I typed up, you know, I have this idea. I want to make a new period product and I'm really looking for and I would have a very specific ask someone with expertise in supply chain. I know nothing about it. I need to make my first financial model. I need to know about Cox, right?”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who is a stage actress? It took until the 2010s for people to even hear about menstrual cups, honestly. First of all, there's not a lot of money in menstrual cups because it's a reusable product. And I think we didn't have internet advertising. We didn't have social media. Most fundamentally, periods are still stigmatized. And if you don't talk about something, you can't identify when there are problems. I think that stigma is why there has been very little research and funding for women's health.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm just a very curious person, and I started by wondering, well, why are tampons giving me infections? Certainly there has to be a study out there. And I talk to different doctors and they all said you're crazy. It was just that one nurse practitioner. Tampons are perfectly safe. You know, this is something wrong with your body. And my doctors from Georgia had told me that for years. I mean, this is 15 years. I tried really hard to solve this problem. But I couldn't find any research on the internet other than some old studies about toxic shock syndrome, which is something that you can die from, but you don't only get from tampons. And there was no other, you know, information about why I'd be getting other types of infections. And the more that I studied it and the more that I researched it, the more I realized there has not been any meaningful innovation in this space. In nearly 100 years, in fact, the menstrual cup was patented by a woman in the 1930s.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maxi pads. I'm like, I can't run seven miles with a super plus maxi pad. So I kept using tampons, kept getting infections. Fast forward to 2013. I'm at a dinner with eight women, and one of the women starts talking about this product called the Cup. There is a woman that was a nurse and she had just gotten back from Nepal, and she was working on a program there where she was basically giving menstrual cups to women in Nepal and teaching them how to use it. And it just sparked this curiosity for me. All of the women at the table had switched to the cup. I'd never heard of a cup. I was a menstrual cup. What are you talking about? But they're talking about 12 hours and they were talking about the fact that it's sustainable and this and that. And I was very intrigued. That experience in my life sparked curiosity about the space that turned into this fanaticism that turned into this hobby that ate up all my time on the weekends.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, one week with my period and another week with an infection. Having an infection was extremely disruptive to my life. But I didn't really know that it was being caused by my tampons until my nurse practitioner in San Francisco said, I'm not writing another prescription for you for yeast infection medication until you promise to stop using tampons.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I moved to San Francisco when I was 25 years old and I worked in tech and I worked in nonprofit and through those two networks I started meeting some really big entrepreneurs in the valley. And I'm from a small town in Georgia and really never ever wanted to be an entrepreneur. My family was food insecure at certain points in my life. I'm the oldest of five kids, the first to go to college. And in retrospect, it always seemed so obvious to everyone else in the room. Like, of course you thought of this. Like, it seems so obvious, but no one else was paying attention to this space. And I had this one really obvious problem in my life, which was I was getting infections from tampons every single month for 15 years of my life.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He said, you know, I'm starting a company, as you know, and I really want a female CEO and I would love for you to throw your hat in the rain. I'm dead serious. And it was that moment, I literally stopped dead in my tracks and I looked at him and I said, you know what, Dan, I'm going to do this. And he's like, do what? I was like, the period thing. He's like, you're going to do it. Yeah. If you think that I'm good enough that you would hire me, I'm going to do it.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was on this journey telling everyone that I met about my idea and asking for help and saying I was looking for a CEO. And I would be CMO.”
2024-12-05 · Masters of Scale · How The Flex Company founder Lauren Wang disrupted menstrual care · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT