March 8, 2011 marks the hundredth anniversary of International Women’s Day (IWD). In keeping with our annual tradition, we are celebrating at Lunapads by offering 20% off everything on the site for 3 days as a thank you to all of our fabulous customers. While we’re at it, we are also going to be donating 1% of total sales to Pads4Girls during the sale.
Today is an exciting day at Lunapads: we’re sending out our largest Pads4Girls shipment ever!
Pads4Girls is an in-house project where we sell cost-priced daily hygiene kits to customers and non-profit groups to give to women and girls in developing countries. It can be hard to imagine, but lacking something as everyday as panties, pads or tampons is preventing girls in many parts of the world from going to school. Girls can miss up to 20% of their education, which can spiral into earlier dropout, marriage and childbirth, increased chances of maternal mortality, reduced career choices and wages, and a less empowered life overall.
Many of you have probably already heard of Chris Guillebeau and his wonderful book, the Art of Non-conformity: Set your own rules, Live the life you want and Change the world. For those of you who know of him and are also Lunapads and DivaCup fans, it will come as no surprise that I find Chris’s work to be singularly validating and inspiring: it also reminds me a lot of you, our amazing customers and community.
His message is essentially this: “Psst – you don’t actually have to do things the “right” way, or even necessarily do them at all: there are ways to imagine and live your life in a unique way, in accordance with what really matters to you, that will provide a rich and rewarding legacy if you are up for it.” Basically, it’s a heart-centered crash course in big picture creative thinking: I devoured it.
I don’t normally like to indulge in schadenfreude, but I need to admit to a teeny-tiny bit of gloating as we watch the saga of the missing o.b. tampons unfold.
I was just surfing the o.b. Facebook “fan” (not so much these days) page and found this comment to be representative of the trend: “I ordered my Divacup after learning about it from other women on this and other sites. Hopefully I won’t have to buy tampons anymore. I am sooo disappointed with J&J about how they handled this situation. No more Ultras? bye bye o.b.s!”
The good (no, make that excellent) news is that we are getting a ton of traffic and new customers as a result: so much so, that we made this little video to say hello! Welcome, new Lunagals! We think that you will find both our products as well as our customer service to be a welcome change. Let us know if you have any questions, and be sure to let us know how your new DivaCups and Lunapads work out. Oh, and for those of you who are still on the fence, use promo code “obwtf” to receive $5 off a DivaCup!
We often get asked about the health and safety concerns around disposable pads and tampons: after all, it was my own tampon allergy (that resulted in years’ worth of painful monthly bladder infections) that originally led me to start making Lunapads and Lunapanties way back when. It will come as no surprise that we often hear all manner of similar stories from customers about how disposables have disagreed with them: rashes, painful dryness and of course yeast and bladder infections chief among them.
So why don’t we make a bigger deal about it? Part of the reason is that we don’t want to base our marketing messages on fear, choosing rather to emphasize benefits such as personal empowerment, financial savings, superior comfort and of course environmental responsibility. That said, a sad truth is that there has been precious little research done to document whatever correlation might exist between the above-named conditions (not to mention endometriosis, vulvodynia, infertility and many others) and disposable pad and tampon use.
And then ob tampons mysteriously began to disappear from retail shelves, prompting us to reconsider our stance. Why would Johnson & Johnson interrupt or discontinue supplies, unless women were experiencing problems, and what evidence does exist of connections between disposable pads and tampons and health problems for women?
Some of you may have noticed all the hullabaloo about the shortage of o.b. tampons in drugstores across North America. It seems that in addition to discontinuing their highest absorbency tampon, the applicator-less brand is undergoing a mysterious “manufacturing update”, meaning that the entire line of o.b. tampons is out of stock until an undetermined date in 2011. I guess o.b. forgot that people who have periods tend to have them once a month!
Before I became a devout DivaCup and cloth pad user, o.b. was my tampon of choice and I know I would have been seriously bummed if I couldn’t get a hold of any. Ladies are so desperate that o.b.s are being sold on Ebay for upwards of $100 a box! Sheesh, and people complain that reusables are too expensive?!?
There has been a distinct lack of explanation from Johnson & Johnson, the makers of o.b. tampons. As usual, whenever a company fails to tell their story themselves, folks are left to do their own research to figure out what’s going on. A number of wild theories are being thrown around about the reason for the tampon shortage, including possible manufacturing contamination or FDA complaints regarding the safety of the products.
December 6th is a painful day for any Canadian old enough to remember the horrific events that took place 21 years ago on this date. The murder of 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique (an additional 14 men and women were also shot, but survived) by a lone gunman shocked and devastated the nation, and engendered a disturbing debate about the state of violence against women overall.
Whether one looks back on the incident as the work of a random lunatic or as an extreme point on a continuum of violence against women that continues to permeate our culture, to me the point is to honor the memory of these innocent young women whose lives were so tragically cut short. Please take a moment to read their names, and consider that we have not only lost them as sisters, daughters, friends, and partners, but in the case of the 12 who were engineering students, as women who bravely sought to create their careers in a traditionally male-dominated profession.
December 6th is now Canada’s National Day for Remembrance and Action Against Violence Against Women.
When do the new TSA “security” scanners and searches go too far?
Many of you will by now have heard about a recent incident with a woman who was wearing a GladRags cloth pantyliner and was subjected to an invasive and highly traumatic groin search as a result of the “unusual” appearance of the pantyliner in the scanner. I very much appreciated GladRags’ response which was; rather than warn women not to wear their GladRags on flights, to instead encourage them to do so, as a means to educate TSA personnel that menstruating women wearing cloth pads is in fact perfectly normal, and not “unusual” at all.
For Pete’s sake, what are women supposed to do? Not use anything when they’re having their period and traveling by plane? Makes you wonder how disposable menstrual products show up on these scans, or what response a DivaCup would elicit for TSA security folks? Think about it… what percentage of women are bleeding at any given time and could be affected by this?
Of the many excellent people Suzanne and I met on a recent trip to Las Vegas for the ABC Kids Expo trade show, Karen Wells, co-host (along with the fabulous Erica Matteson) of Pregnancy Place Radio, was a standout. Karen and Erica are doulas with a thriving practice and a keen interest in women’s health and natural products that they have charismatically taken to the airwaves. They thoughtfully interviewed a ton of the many manufacturers represented at the show, ourselves included (click here to hear it!)
The title of this post is a little dig at U by Kotex, whose name implies that “U” (ie you) are authored by someone else – in this case, Kotex. (I may be reasonably accused of reading too much into it, though!) I’ll have more thoughts on that idea in a moment, but where I’m going right now is that we have recently been inspired by an article about stereotypes of cloth diapering Moms/parents, and there has been some discussion about what (if any) stereotypes of cloth menstrual pad users might be out there – let’s check it out.
So what kind of woman uses cloth pads? (I simply love this collage of actual Lunapads customers that Lisa created!) My personal view is first that there are so (relatively) few of us natural menstrual product users that we would be hard pressed to come up with more than one or two bona fide stereotypes. My second thought is that in all my years of selling Lunapads, the DivaCup, etc – while I have noticed certain consistent characteristics (for example age, political awareness, environmental consciousness, being closely connected to other women, and yes indeed as we shall soon see, cloth diapering) I would not feel confident identifying types of women who choose to wash their pads and cups. As an example, I have seen “mainstream” women wearing suits and high heels be totally open to the idea, while their Birkenstock-wearing, ostensibly “crunchy” sisters have said “ewwww” and turned aside: in other words, you just never can tell.
