Lunapads Blog

I am so excited to be here writing to all you wonderful women who do us the honor of being curious about who we are and what we do. A few brief biographical details about me before we move on to more interesting topics: I was born and raised here in Vancouver, and love the city of my birth passionately. I attended University in Ontario prior to doing a lot of traveling and working abroad. I am an enraptured parent to Genevieve (or Miss Milk, as she is commonly known), who was born on April 10, 2005. I am married to her Dad, a very sweet man called Tim, who is an incredible source of love and support to me. Some other random personal tidbits: I am a left-handed Capricorn with a wicked sweet tooth who is also a proud reformed smoker, tennis enthusiast (although I refuse to keep score), novel-reader, armchair fashionista and sewing fiend.

I started experimenting with making washable menstrual pads in 1993 and wrote the first business plan for Lunapads in 1994. I was 25, and until the early 90s was actually fairly ambivalent around my period. Although I definitely considered myself to be a feminist, I had not yet considered the feminine hygiene products industry from a politicized perspective (at one point in fact, my University Women’s Center was considering looking onto purchasing tampons on a wholesale basis, which I never thought to question at the time), and had yet to really start to get it about environmental issues.

Using washable pads changed all that, not to mention bringing me to a place where I felt more truly and deeply connected with my body than I could previously have imagined. For me, the shift in consciousness was profound and life-changing. The feeling of consciously experiencing my cycle from start to finish for the first time in my life was incredibly powerful. Until that point I had been using tampons and taking birth control pills, so when I say that it was like re-living menarche, I’m not kidding. I felt humbled, grounded, connected, actualized, complete. When I was a girl, I looked forward with such anticipation to starting my cycle - I could hardly wait. For me, it symbolized being initiated into that mysterious state that so intrigued me: being a woman. The reality was quite a letdown, however - very painful, and there was certainly no ceremony or fanfare.

A customer once told us that “the whole Lunapads experience has been like a second, healed version of menarche”, which is still one of my favorite testimonials. I wonder if there is a similar feeling in many girls as they anticipate their approaching womanhood, an intuitive knowing that something gorgeous and amazing is upon them. That anticipation is so rarely validated, though, and in a way Lunapads is about trying to meet that knowing or desire.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 11:31 am by Madeleine and is filed under Meet the Lunapads Gals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.