A New Period.
When you first start a company, there’s a well beaten pathway - investment, make product, hire advertising agency, get bigger, investment, get bigger, more investment.
Five years ago, we got a little money, we made a product that we loved, then we looked down this well beaten path and wondered, do we really want to go down there?
We decided to do something else.
We wouldn’t make a company that existed in this world - we’d make a company that existed in a different world, an imaginary world, where community and planet comes before making money, where the story of periods is shame-free and full of understanding and respect, and where we might not be heading for apocalypse, but through agency, optimism and a lot of dynamism, can turn this story around.
No matter what, we decided, we’d operate our real company according to the standards of this imaginary world.
Why? Because unless you can imagine something you can’t get there. Imagination, as far out as it sounds, is the first step in making something real.
We talked a lot about what a company like ours would do in this imaginary world.
Would we spend lots of money on advertising? Maybe instead we’d use those budgets to make our products affordable to people whose lives would be transformed by them.
Would we be answerable to shareholders? Would we even have them? Or would we serve the needs of our communities first?
Then we wondered what periods would look like in this imaginary world. Well, they’d still be a monthly blood-flow, involve some cramps, often show up when least wanted - even a ton of imagination couldn’t change that! But would everybody who has a period in this imaginary world, have access to safe sustainable period products that meant that they were never held back from living their lives, going to school and pursuing their dreams?
HELL YEAH!!!
Okay we thought - this imaginary world sounds incredible, how do we a real company make any of this stuff happen in this, a real world?
Well, as of today, we’re giving it our best shot. As of right now - we’ve lowered the price of most of our Period. Underwear styles to $9 a pair. That’s a $3 decrease.
We’ve known from the beginning that the biggest barrier to people trying what we know is the safest, sustainable, way to period is the price so we’ve not consulted with our shareholders (because we don’t have any) and scrapped our huge advertising budgets (which we don’t have) and put it back in our community - which we do have and cherish - in the hope that that community will grow.
Scan the headlines today and the unspoken headline of all those headlines is that this world isn’t good enough. But here’s the silver lining. We made this world. We did. Somebody imagined all of these systems that are failing, that hurt people and the planet. Now it’s time to imagine a better world, because that’s how we make it real.
And we will.
