Lunapads

The following is excerpted from today’s Vancouver Sun. Article and photo: Malcolm Parry.
THAT TIME OF THE DECADE: If ever a market were systemized and regularized, it’s the billion-dollar one for feminine hygiene products. Yet two Vancouver entrepreneurs, Madeleine Shaw and Suzanne Siemens, believe there’s more than room enough for their Lunapads firm to sell non-disposable products to women who would use them for some five days out of 28. In the U.S. alone, they calculate, the 73 million women who regularly use menstrual-period tampons will each flush 16,800 of them away. In 1998, the Franklin Associates waste consultancy calculated that 6.5 billion tampons and 13.5 billion sanitary pads were disposed of annually.

Those are big numbers for former fashion designer Shaw and chartered accountant Siemens’s six-person firm. Eighty per cent of their sales are via the Internet. “It’s a natural for our 100-per-cent-cotton products,” Shaw said. “A woman will say, ‘I’ve heard about cloth pads.’ So, she’ll Google it, and Lunapads will come up in the top five.”
“And there’s no shortage of people looking for green products,” said Siemens, who was controller at B.C. Gas before she met Shaw in 1999 as participants in the Vancouver Board of Trade and Volunteer Vancouver’s Leadership Vancouver program.

Shaw’s notion for Lunapads began in 1994. As a venture-capital student at the B.C. Institute of Technology, she won $1,000 for a business plan she wrote. “When women do shift to our products,” Shaw said, “we find their whole attitude to their period, their cycles and their bodies is greatly improved. I can show you hundreds of testimonials.” She can, too. Some of the many appear on the Lunapads website. They’re not prophets or proselytizers — just two young mothers who see society-wide ecological sensitivity bringing the market closer to what they offer. “I always thought Lunapads was a product ahead of its time,” Shaw said. “Then, two years ago, I realized our time had come.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 12:19 pm by Madeleine and is filed under Inside Lunapads. 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.