Lunapads Blog

I had an awesome summer working at Lunapads as a Marketing and Info Tech Intern this summer. Last year I was very lucky to work for Lunapads on the “Ditch the Disposables” and “Pads4Girls” videos.  Getting to come back for a second summer was an unexpected treat that was made possible by Industry Canada’s Small Business Internship Program.  The program provides small business enterprises with grants to hire post-secondary students to assist them in adopting e-business strategies.

This summer has been very eventful at Lunapads. To start, I got to do a lot more than just making videos! Working in a smaller business allowed me to take on larger and more diverse projects than what a large corporation would have allowed. Rather than your stereotypical Intern tasks, I got to tap into many different parts of the business, from Customer Service to IT to Marketing.

I was able to really sharpen my Marketing and IT skills under the supervision of Lunapads Webmaster Lisa. Seeing how the company operates from its backend, using my skills in social media as well as creating a video marketing campaign has been such an invaluable learning experience.  Seeing the actual results of my efforts in the form of more YouTube Subscribers, more YouTube video views, blog responses and number of contest participants has also been very rewarding.

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Lunapads was so proud to host this year’s LunaRevolution Video Festival and Contest! The contest was a highlight of our summer and we hope you all enjoyed it just as much as we did.

Since the voting period ended, we have been busy in the office watching (and re-watching!) all the videos and trying to pick out the winners. We felt every video was superb in its own way and deserved recognition. You all did an amazing job, and made it extremely difficult for us to choose the winning submissions – more on that in our next post!

Alas, winners had to be selected – and so without further ado *drum roll please*

To be clear about how the winners were chosen: the People’s Choice awards were based solely on the number of votes through Wildfire. The Most Creative, Staff Pick and Honorable Mentions were chosen based on lengthy conversation and general consensus between the Lunagals. That said, as the song goes, “Everyone’s a winner, Baby” (didn’t take 1 of the top 8 prize-winning spots? keep reading!) – please check out all of the entries, and share your favorites with your friends!

The fact that Ashley’s video got so many votes speaks for itself – she was the hands down People’s Choice winner. Our Staff Pick went to Carla. We loved her funky editing style, amazing facial expressions and irresistible enthusiasm and charisma. Top it off with a wonderful musical choice at the end, and you’ve got a winner. DIVA!!! We chose Nicole’s video as Most Creative due to her choice of a multiple interview style, great music, and totally authentic girlfriend conversation about all the stuff us Lunagals dislike about disposables. A little something awesome for everyone!

Aside from announcing the top winners, we would really like to give a shout out to our People’s Choice runners-up. In fact, the top 3 contenders were so close in votes we couldn’t believe it! Coming in with the 2nd most votes was long-time Lunapads fan Holly Pluchinski, followed very closely behind by Kendra Gabert. Excellent work, ladies!

Stay tuned for Madeleine’s follow-up blog post naming our 5 honorable mention prize winners, as well as special mentions for everyone else who participated! For those who did not win, keep an eye on your mailboxes for a thank you treat from all of us here at Lunapads! Please send your mailing address tous at info@lunapads.com (use the subject “Lunapads Video Contest: My Address!”)

Everyone give a final round applause for these lovely ladies and their video creations – and don’t forget to share your favorites with your friends.

Want more video fun? We got you covered. Subscribe to our Lunapads YouTube Channel today for videos on reusable menstrual products, women in business and how-to’s. Thanks again so much from all of us at Lunapads!

I’ve recently returned from spending two weeks on a small island a few hours’ journey from Vancouver and am feeling shocked yet inspired by what a couple of weeks off the grid has done for me.

I am at heart an urban creature – it’s how I grew up and simply how things have turned out for me, and for the most part it suits me fine. That said, from the first moment I laid eyes on “our” little slice of west coast paradise I was smitten, in part because it brought back memories of my parents hauling my brother and I off to a very similar situation for several summers when we were kids.

Not being well equipped for camping, we have finagled a shoulder-season rental of a modest beachfront cabin (we enjoyed the “luxury” this year of a new outdoor hot water shower – woo!) that is accessible by boat only. There are a few “cars” on the island – a motley assortment of vintage Range Rovers, golf carts and ATVs used to transport supplies to cabins from the dock, no stores or services of any kind, lots of trees and beaches, and that’s about it.

At the outset I was amazed at how tired I felt and how much I (and my husband and 6 year old daughter) slept – often we would go to bed at 10pm and not get up until 9am. There were a couple of nights where I went to such a deep level of sleep that I felt like I was coming out of a coma when I woke up. Incredible how so often we accept our state of being as “normal” without realizing that we are actually burnt out.

I loved the lack of electricity and how much more aware it made me of the changing light and time of day. Basically our routine went like this: wake up whenever, breakfast, walk/hike, lunch, beach, dinner, sleep, repeat. Eat when hungry, sleep when tired – such a simple concept, and yet one that I regularly override.

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Any sales-oriented Lunagals out there in the Greater Vancouver area? Please read on, and if you feel like you’d like to bring your passion and experience to our team send your resume and cover letter to emily@progressivecareers.ca (no phone calls, please!)

Lunapads is a mission-based business that specializes in natural feminine hygiene products. For almost two decades Lunapads has built an enthusiastic following of modern women seeking greener and healthier personal care choices. In addition to a highly successful web-based consumer sales channel, we also have a growing wholesale and distributor network in Canada and the United States as well as Internationally. We are seeking a motivated and experienced salesperson whose passion for our mission and products will drive impressive growth in these B2B channels.

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One of the most exciting new directions for Pads4Girls these days is that we are creating relationships to facilitate learning about how to make pads, in addition to sending them over from Canada. There is much more news to come on this front, but in the meantime here is a wonderful example that is particularly poignant because of the involvement of a group of girls in Vancouver rallying to support girls in Kenya, via the US Peace Corps.

A dear and longtime girlfriend of mine has been working as a Girl Guides and Pathfinder Leader for the past decade. She brought her troup of ten 12-14 year old girls, the #4 Vancouver Pathfinder Unit, to visit Lunapads recently. The girls were particularly taken with Pads4Girls (I had shown them our video about it when I attended one of their meetings last year), and they surprised me with a wonderful donation of $140 that they had earned via babysitting.

Fate had it that a few days later we received a request from Helen McGuirk, a US Peace Corps volunteer, requesting help with finding donations to help her teach a group of girls in Kenya how to make their own pads. They needed $344 to complete the funding, and so we took the $140 the Pathfinders had raised and made up the difference ourselves. Please read Helen’s email below about the project to see what can happen when girls and women come together for a common cause.

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One of Suzanne and my favorite things about working at Lunapads is being involved in a vibrant community of women entrepreneurs.

One of the most remarkable ones to have have crossed out path recently is Natalie Sisson of Womanzworld, founder of the Suitcase Entrepreneur movement. Natalie’s gig is finding online tools to help people run their businesses from pretty much anywhere in the world, and she does a fine job in setting the example herself. An uber social media savvy consultant, she has been a great help in taking the Lunapads social media practice to the proverbial next level. We have also enjoyed hearing about her current experience of life in Buenos Aires via Facebook, and looking forward to meeting her in person at the upcoming World Domination Summit in Portland OR.

When Natalie approached us about doing an interview about our journey as entrepreneurs, she sent us some great questions:

Check out the video to find out the answers!

Lunapads is growing, and we need more Lunagals to help us out!

Office Assistant

Lunapads requires an office assistant to help out with some or all of the following:

- Customer Service support, including telephone, email and live chat communication
- Order printing, packing and shipping
- Quality assurance, including monitoring product consistency and performance
- Assembly of promotional donations and other marketing administration

If you have a passion for our social mission and want to be a part of a rapidly growing business, we want to hear from you. A demonstrated ability to pay attention to detail and multi task is essential. Lunpads supports a flexible working arrangement and we are looking for someone with talent who wants to make a difference and grow with us. Start date: immediate.

For any of you in the Greater Vancouver area interested in joining our dynamic team, please send a cover letter and resume  and availability, to jobs@lunapads.com.

Thank you!

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!

As someone who has dabbled in Twitter for almost two years, a person I started following early on was @unmarketing (aka Scott Stratten). I was particularly attracted to his Twitter name, as it implied someone who was unconventional and forward thinking. His posts did not disappoint me. After meeting Scott in person at a trade show in Las Vegas last October, Madeleine and I quickly realized why Scott is a such a highly regarded social media expert and sought after keynote speaker.

Knowing that Scott was going to be speaking in Vancouver to promote his new book “UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging” (a national best-seller and must read book that we are giving away below!) we invited him to Lunapads HQ to consult with us about our website & conduct an “un-audit”. (As a former auditor of the accounting variety, I was rather nervous but excited to be sitting on the other side of the table and learn what the expert thought about our efforts.)

So, what did he think? Well, this autographed copy of his book sums it up.

Please also check out the impromptu interview I did with Scott and hear what he has to say about social media and some of the new tools and apps he finds interesting. Bonus info: find out what Scott and Justin Beiber have in common!

Scott, thanks for your stamp of approval. We love your motto: “Be Awesome”. (And Scott, I thought you’d appreciate this quote from Jack Black’s Kung Fu Panda character that I over heard while my boys were watching TV… “There is no charge for awesomeness or attractiveness!”)

Our social media endeavors are definitely a team effort here at Lunapads. Morgan and Lisa deserve most of the credit being the voices of Twitter and Facebook on a daily basis. Madeleine and I (aka Luna_gal) tweet about Lunapads and our personal accounts. Our YouTube channel has several thousand views.

Social media is work, for sure — but it’s really never been a chore for us. In fact, we consider ourselves lucky because we get to talk to tons of interesting people who genuinely inspire and challenge us. And, as a way of thanks, we’re giving away an autographed copy of Scott’s book to one of our readers. To enter, simply comment below about where and/or why you enjoy engaging in conversations online (ie: social media!)

PS: A big shout out of thanks to Marc Smith of Amuse Consulting and his team for bringing Scott to Vancouver in December 2010!

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.

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