The Boss of You

Yes­ter­day I posted about one of the fab­u­lous women we fea­tured in our book, and today I want to talk about two more: Madeleine and Suzanne from Luna­pads, mak­ers of alter­na­tive men­strual prod­ucts, wildly inspir­ing busi­ness­women, and dear friends of ours. Their most recent ven­ture is pro­duc­ing a book­let for teens about men­stru­a­tion, called “Hap­pier Peri­ods, Nat­u­rally!” — it’s a very cool lit­tle pub­li­ca­tion that they’ve put out in print and PDF for­mats, dis­cussing peri­ods from an edu­ca­tional, relaxed, friendly, and environmentally-conscious standpoint.

I can’t think of any­one bet­ter equipped to intro­duce young women to their men­strual cycles in a down-to-earth, approach­able way than these two, and the all-star cast of con­trib­u­tors (Emira among them) who helped cre­ate the booklet.

Of course, there’s a business-savvy aspect to the book­let — it does talk about Luna­pads prod­ucts, but not in a gacky way where it’s one prod­uct place­ment after another. They make sure to keep it mostly branding-free and focused on edu­ca­tion and (overused word alert!) empow­er­ment; but the bot­tom line is that the bet­ter informed women are about their options, the more likely they are to be open to the idea of alter­na­tive men­strual prod­ucts. After all, it’s hard not to give them some seri­ous thought once you learn that over 12 bil­lion pads and 7 mil­lion tam­pons are being dumped in land­fills every year.

The Luna­pads teen book­let is a great exam­ple of shar­ing your knowl­edge with your prospec­tive cus­tomers to bring them into the fold with an ultra-soft sell. They’re tak­ing the oppo­site tac­tic to what the big tam­pon & pad man­u­fac­tur­ers have done in the past, prey­ing on teen girls’ inse­cu­rity and men­strual taboos to con­vince them that bleached equals “san­i­tary” and so on. I hope they’re able to dis­trib­ute the book­let far and wide; wouldn’t it be great to see this kind of thing in high school health classes?