Article: Strong Voice Interview #43: Laura Dittscheid
Strong Voice Interview #43: Laura Dittscheid
Laura Dittscheid spent years building some of Germany’s most successful consumer brands and reaching millions of people. After a successful career in marketing leadership, she made the conscious decision to start over - and founded noola.
With noola, she develops products designed for women whose energy is often taken for granted in everyday life. Her perspective combines the experience of building large-scale brands with the realities of entrepreneurship and a commitment to creating products together with women, not simply for them.
In this interview, she shares why she traded security for creative freedom, why so many women are constantly exhausted, and how her views on success, leadership, and self-determination have evolved over time.
You spent years building brands that reached millions of women. Then you left. What did that cost you - and what did it give you in return?
At first, it cost me security. The title, the salary, the feeling that people immediately understood who I was from the outside. You step away from a stage where you know you're good at what you do and suddenly find yourself back at the beginning. That's far more uncomfortable than it looks from the outside.
What it gave me in return is creative freedom. For the first time, I can build a brand, a team, and an entire marketing organization exactly the way I believe it should be built. From scratch, without compromises, without structures that existed long before I arrived. Every decision at noola is one I make myself and fully stand behind. That's an incredible privilege I never truly had before.
Women today achieve more than any generation before them - and yet they seem more exhausted than ever. What's really behind that?
Because most of what women do remains invisible. We talk about careers and equality, but in the end, there's usually one person carrying the mental load. Who remembers the doctor's appointment, the birthday gift, the empty fridge, the mood in the team, and everything happening at home at the same time? None of that may appear on a to-do list, but it consumes energy every single day.
On top of that, we've learned to accept exhaustion as normal. As if constantly functioning is simply the default state. And for years, the entire energy market was built for men - for gaming and extreme sports. No one really asked women what they actually needed. That's exactly where noola comes in today.
noola exists because you built something you wished you had yourself. What does that say about the brands that came before?
That they were never truly built for women. The entire energy category was designed around men, gaming, and the gym. Women were, at best, an audience that got included along the way. I'm approaching it differently.
I'm not only building noola for women - I'm building it with them. We have almost 600 women in our co-creation community who blind-test products against competitors, evaluate ingredients, and help decide on new flavors. They're also helping shape the heart of the brand: women cheering each other on while navigating busy lives and responsibilities that often go unnoticed.
That's the real difference. Before, decisions were made about women. At noola, women actively make those decisions themselves.
You're publicly sharing the process of building a brand, including all the uncertainty that comes with it. What has that taught you about leadership that no CMO role ever could?
That leadership isn't about having all the answers. As a CMO, my job was to appear confident. Have a plan, deliver the numbers, project certainty - even when things behind the scenes felt messy. Building a brand publicly works almost the opposite way. I share the things that aren't working. The days when I don't have a plan. And the surprising part is that this is exactly what creates trust. People don't follow you because you seem perfect. They follow you because you feel real. I understood that intellectually before, but I'd never actually lived it myself.
You're balancing company building, community, and private life. What helps you stay grounded and remain yourself?
My family and my friends. And especially my husband, who keeps me grounded and honestly couldn't care less how many followers noola has. Seeing how unconditionally he has supported me from the very beginning, in so many different ways, is incredibly valuable.
Maybe it's also my Bavarian roots that keep me from taking myself too seriously. And of course, our community.
Every time I speak with the women in it, I'm reminded why I'm doing this in the first place. That's what helps most: not pretending that I have everything under control. I'm allowed to feel overwhelmed sometimes. That doesn't make me a worse founder. It makes me an honest one. My mother taught me that I can achieve anything if I truly believe in myself. It's difficult to describe that sense of self-efficacy, but deep down, I simply know that things will work out.
If you had to explain what success means to you today, how would it sound compared to what you would have said ten years ago?
For me, success is still very much measured by growth. I don't want to downplay that. I'm ambitious, and I fully intend to build noola into a multi-million-dollar brand. Because I believe we can create meaningful change if we reach millions of women and develop products alongside them that fit seamlessly into their lives - making those lives a little easier, more energetic, and better.
Ten years ago, I would have stopped there. Back then, success meant the bigger title, the bigger budget, and, most importantly, something that other people validated for me.
Today, it looks completely different. Success also means waking up every morning and not being able to imagine working on anything other than this brand, alongside all these incredible women. When the time you're investing already feels like a reward, it's hard to imagine success looking much better than that.
