Introduction
It took Candace Oxley six years to get from her first conversation with a GP about her period pain to an actual procedure, and when the procedure was over, her symptoms were worse than before. She describes herself first as a storyteller, a connector and an advocate, titles that trace a genuine line through twenty years of dance, a media platform built to amplify Black British success, and now a health business built from her own unanswered questions. This is a conversation about what happens when someone stops waiting for a system to fix itself and builds the missing piece instead.
Twenty Years of Dance and the Making of a Storyteller
Oxley danced from the age of five to twenty five, describing dance as a visual representation of music and, in effect, her first language for telling a story before she ever wrote one down. As a child she also wrote stories on car journeys and co-authored a diary project with a school friend about their relationships with their fathers. An only child raised in a culturally rich, music-influenced family, she credits her parents' insistence on exposing her to everything, swimming, piano, athletics, clarinet, as the root of a curiosity that has driven every career pivot since.
A year at university in Atlanta at twenty gave her an early, sharp lesson in how little the rest of the world understands about Black Britain specifically, including roommates who assumed all of Britain would attend the royal wedding and that American television was somehow re-dubbed with British accents for UK audiences. At twenty five, facing the physical toll and financial inconsistency common to a performing career, she made a deliberate choice to explore other paths while she still had options, moving into corporate and creative industry roles while continuing to train.
From Soho House to Cannes: Turning Side Hustles Into a Career
Oxley's route through Sky, Soho House, Selfridges, the Cannes Lions advertising awards and McCann London reads less like a conventional CV and more like a study in seeking out the work you actually want before anyone offers it to you. At Soho House, she built a relationship with the woman running the company's internal magazine simply by chatting in the kitchen every morning, then offered to help with commissioned writing once she'd built enough rapport, drawing on experience from a food blog, Word of Mouth London, she'd run years earlier with a friend for fun.
That internal opportunity, taken on top of her main role for no extra pay, became real, published writing experience that helped her land her next position. At Cannes Lions, she worked inside the health and pharmaceutical judging room during the week Brewdog, sorry, Grenfell Tower collapsed in London, remembering the room of international judges struggling to process news breaking thousands of miles from home. Each move built on the last, but only because she was willing to ask for unpaid, extra work before anyone offered her the paid version.
Why She Started In Other News and Why She Ended It
In 2017, at a time she describes as thick with negative media coverage of Black communities, Oxley looked at the sheer number of Black British businesses and thought leaders achieving real things with almost no press coverage, and started interviewing them herself, on her phone, in cars and living rooms, transcribing everything by hand because the AI transcription tools of the time were unusable. In Other News grew from a blog into a podcast, eventually recorded from a professional studio at the advertising agency Havas after an internal advocate simply offered the space, and ran for seven years covering Black British achievement that, in her words, was consistently filtered through an American lens or left uncovered entirely.
Ending it, she says plainly, was treacherous. She felt guilty, felt like she was letting people down, even a stranger at a night out challenged her decision mid-conversation. What moved her past that guilt was a friend's blunt question: if The Gynie Project sounded fantastic, why keep running something else purely because she'd already been doing it a long time? Longevity, he pointed out, isn't a reason on its own. She closed In Other News to give her full attention to what she felt increasingly, repeatedly pulled toward, describing it less as a decision and more as something she kept being nudged into by strangers who, unprompted, kept telling her about their own gynaecological health.
A Six-Year Diagnosis Journey and the Birth of The Gynie Project
The Gynie Project exists because Oxley spent six years trying to get a straight answer about why her own periods had become crippling, moving through scans, medication changes and test after test, only for a procedure at the end of that process to leave her worse off than before. The frustration wasn't only personal. It was structural: she points out that a toothache gets a dentist appointment within two weeks, an eye concern gets a same-day optician visit, yet gynaecological concerns routinely involve years of uncertainty.
An early Gynie Project survey found that over 70% of respondents couldn't name a local gynaecological practice, compared with 100% who could name a local optician. For Oxley, that gap is the whole problem in one statistic: not that women's health issues are rare or minor, but that the infrastructure for addressing them barely exists compared with far less urgent categories of care.
Redesigning What Health Content Looks Like
Oxley's account of her own recovery centres on four controllable factors, movement rather than strictly gym-based exercise, nutrition built around eating a wide range of colours, genuine restorative sleep rather than simply time spent in bed, and active stress management. Tracking and adjusting those four areas, she says, changed how her own cycle showed up in her body far more than the medical interventions had.
She's equally deliberate about presentation. The Gynie Project's launch event was a spin class paired with menstrual health conversation, a choice she explains through a broader observation: wellness has become sexy and cute, while health remains clinical, clunky and difficult to approach. Her stated project is to sit in the middle, keeping the facts and statistics of health while borrowing the accessibility of wellness, and she deliberately keeps events small and intimate because most women, she's found, still aren't comfortable discussing periods with strangers, regardless of how normalised the topic claims to be.
Building a Bridge Between Head Knowledge and Heart Knowledge
Oxley is careful to separate her own lived experience from clinical expertise. She works closely with Dr Isra, a doctor with more than fifteen years of experience in obstetrics and gynaecology, to co-lead sessions covering conditions like endometriosis, adenomyosis, PCOS, fibroids, polyps and cysts, conditions she describes as needing a specialist voice alongside her own everyday-woman perspective. The combination, she says, is what actually builds trust and safety in the room, expertise paired with someone who has sat exactly where the audience is sitting.
Her longer-term vision extends the model further: a physical Women's Wellness Centre where a gynaecologist, nutritionist, physical health specialist, sleep specialist and therapist would all be available in one place, addressing the same four lifestyle pillars her own recovery was built on, without the clinical coldness she associates with conventional healthcare settings.
What Men and Workplaces Can Actually Do
Asked what men specifically can do, Oxley's answer starts small and personal: initiate the conversation rather than waiting to be taught, ask the women in your life what would actually help, and show up practically when invited, even in a supporting role. At The Gynie Project's launch, a male friend who wasn't part of the women-only session still helped with setup and logistics, a contribution Oxley points to as exactly the kind of low-friction support that matters.
At an organisational level, she's less optimistic that goodwill alone will close the gap, arguing that genuine change will require policy shifts and internal systems that make it normal for a woman to tell a manager she's struggling with her period the same way she might mention a migraine, without the current weight of embarrassment attached. In the meantime, she says the most useful thing anyone can do is simply share the work, and the data, that organisations like hers are still building from scratch.
