Lunapads Blog

Organic Bikini Lunapanties

Welcome to our next installment of our International Women’s Month celebration! This time it’s for Moms-to-be.

Here’s lovely photo of one of our longest-term (pun intended!) collaborators, the lovely Emira Mears of Raised Eyebrow and The Boss of You, taken mere hours before the arrival of lovely little Lena at our recent Lunapanties photoshoot.

We have 3 sets of 2 Organic Mini Pantyliners, so anyone out there who is currently expecting, comment below to tell us where you are, how many weeks you’re at, and what your favorite thing about being pregnant to be entered. Winners will be announced in our April newsletter.

Organic Mini Pantyliner

While I’m here, check out the blog of one of my favorite pregnant gals: the one and only Chloe Jo Berman of the fabulously green Girlie Girl Army. If you’re expecting and wondering about eco positive diapering choices, I have just written a guest blog post for GGA about cloth diapering and more - check it out!

 Good luck, and don’t forget to smile at a pregnant gal today!

As you may be aware, we have declared March to be International Women’s Month here at Lunapads, and as part of that we are focusing on different groups of - (well, that part’s obvious!) Today, it’s time to send up a cheer for the future women out there: girls.

Where to start with the subject of girls? Our view is that girls are nothing less than the world’s greatest hope for healing, progress and peace. At Lunapads, we support them by supporting and spreading the word about a variety of organizations working with and for girls including Scarleteen, the Girl Effect (don’t miss their awesome video!), Camfed, Not For Sale and of course Pads4Girls. We also love progressive girls’ media like Shameless, New Moon and Teen Voices.

At Lunapads, 100% of the proceeds of the sale of Teen Booklets goes towards Pads4Girls. We also distribute free copies to organizations that are working with girls and teens.

What especially warms our hearts is when we get emails, phone calls and ‘live-chats’ from girls (or moms of girls and teens) asking great questions and telling us their stories. The day before yesterday we were visited by a Mom and her daughter who was on the second day of her first period - we felt really lucky to share some time with them, on International Women’s Day, no less!

Here’s a wonderful example of a girl’s self-expression about her first period - a bittersweet poem written by Lacy Hale. Lacy says: “The following is a poem that I wrote a couple years ago when I decided to make my change from commercial menstrual products to healthier, greener alternatives. When I was a teenager, I definitely thought of my period as a curse and dreaded it each month. Now that I’m older, I find that I actually enjoy my period, taking the time to reflect on my art, my life, and what it means to me to be a woman. “

My River

The summer that I started
Was desert-like and dry
Yet I awoke that morning shrouded in wet red rivers
Of which I had yet to learn the ebb
And flow.

Yelling for my mother,
It was no surprise to her
Because of the complaints
Concerning the belly
Of the 13 year old girl
The night before.

I suppose in some sort of celebration
She made a breakfast that morning
Of the likes I had rarely seen.

But my stomach was full
Of other things and pains
So new I barely touched
My biscuits
And gravy.

My father came home that evening
And without words or glance
Tossed my necessities on the counter.
A look of fear and anger in his eyes.

Or maybe I just misread it
Out of my own embarrassment.

This week we are giving away 3 Teen Kits: leave a comment here telling us about your favorite girl or teen (this includes you, if you happen to be one of these fabulous beings!) to be eligible for the giveaway. Be sure to include your age, location, relationship (ie sister, friend, daughter, Mom) and what you love about this person. Have fun and good luck! We’ll be announcing the winners in our April newsletter.

Just when you thought “hey, today is International Women’s Day!” we have decided just for fun to declare it to be International Women’s Month! This is Lunapads after all, and a month just seems more appropriate - a little more womanly, if you will. Plus, with so much to talk about and celebrate, why rush it?

The timing this year is truly extraordinary, with the recent Olympics here in Vancouver having shone a light on women’s superb athleticism, not to mention Kathryn Bigelow’s ceiling-busting Oscar wins just last night. As great as all of this is, though, it’s important to remember that comparable success is not necessarily being shared by our sisters in developing nations, and that we still need to keep working for change even as we celebrate, a theme I will be developing in upcoming posts this month.

Longtime Lunapads customers will be anticipating our annual International Women’s Day sale to take place right about now, but for various reasons this year it’s going to look a little different (and last longer!)

My advice to you right now is if you are not already a Lunapads.com Facebook fan or following us on Twitter, in order to be in the loop for the series of contests, giveaways and specials that we are brewing up, now would be the time to sign up or follow us. In case you are not on our e-newsletter list, I highly recommend signing up there as well to learn about other news that will happen before the month is out!

To start off, for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week (March 8-10) we will be donating 10% of sales to Pads4Girls, as well as MATCHING all Pads4Girls Kit and Birth Kit Maxi donations. Here’s a great opportunity to help girls in developing nations get the education they deserve and/or improve maternal health. You can learn about our current recipient groups here:

Sexual Rights Centre (Zimbabwe)
Lugari Community Resource Centre (Kenya)
Kibaale Community School (Uganda)
Imagine1Day (Ethiopia)
Pads for Prisons Project (Sudan)
Rafiki Africa (Kenya)
The Passion Foundation (Kenya)
Shanti Uganda (Uganda)
Afri-Pads (Uganda)

Please donate generously, and don’t forget to pick up something nice for yourself as well!

Have a great day, ladies, thanks for your support as always, and stay tuned!

Love from the Lunagals:
Madeleine, Suzanne, Lisa, Morgan, Sara, Goni and Sandra

Time for our promised followup to the “Pretty in Pink?” post a couple of weeks ago. I’ll start by saying that I can’t believe how much I have ended up thinking about this. What started as a basic rant has proven to be far more involved and nuanced than I could have predicted, and at the very least has stirred up some provocative conversation and interesting self-reflection.

First off, a big thank you to Ritz, founder of I Love My Muff products. I do not think that I could have handled Lunapads being under someone’s ideological microscope nearly as gracefully as she has. I placed an order for a “Maintenance Kit” to find out what I was missing and received a second kit on the house, a classy and generous gesture. I should also add that I think that Ritz has done a fine job with site design and the ecommerce shopping experience. Finally, I have it on excellent authority that she is a woman of considerable entrepreneurial moxy, personal style and good intentions.

So… how were the products?  I have tried them several times now, and am still feeling somewhat ambivalent. I’m not a big one for perfume or aromatherapy so I can’t really say if I liked the scents or not, but they didn’t bother me, and certainly lingered. Did I feel clean? Yes. Fresh? Sure. Soft? I guess. Pure? Still have issues there, but never mind.

The products “work” just fine (an informant claims that they take care of post-shaving little red bumps, so there’s that to consider as a potential benefit as well), and seem to have integrity as far as the ingredients and overall quality are concerned. Organic ingredients would be a great next step in product development, along with more eco-friendly packaging.

There do seem to be rather a lot of “steps” (I use fewer products on my face), but I can’t see the harm (if used prudently - more on this in a moment), and can further see how using these products could help some women get more in touch with or feel more loving towards themselves. If nothing else, actually trying the products gave me insight into my own biases, for which I am grateful.

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It’s not very often that a book dedicated to the subject of menstruation gets published. So when I heard about the impending release of FLOW; the cultural story of menstruation back in November, I was pretty excited to get my hands on a copy.

At first glance, FLOW is quite the aesthetically pleasing little book, filled with images of vintage pad and tampon adverts and other “feminine health products” dating as far back as the late 1800s. Due to its visually compelling nature, FLOW would make the ideal coffee table book. And hey, aside from rinsing your menstrual cup in a public washroom, what better way to get the conversation about menstruation flowing (couldn’t resist!) than to nonchalantly leave a book about its history lying about the house?

Few healthy bodily processes have had such an effed-up history as menstruation and this book covers a broad range of topics from the archaic “disease” Hysteria and the origins of the vibrator, to the medicalization of periods and the recent introduction of Menstrual Suppression drugs. I often hear women linking the origins of our collective shame surrounding menstruation to fem-care advertisers and the negative language used to hock their products. FLOW digs deeper into the sources of the menstrual taboo weaving a history that is biblical, medical, pre-historical, cultural, spiritual and political in scope. It’s pretty engaging if you aren’t already aware of the history of menstruation and even if you are, there are sure to be some surprising tidbits that leave you quietly scooping your jaw up off the floor.

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I feel a bit conflicted about this post, as I am typically a huge fan of women-owned businesses. So what happens when the businesses in question are marketing products that I don’t feel are necessarily in women’s best interests? Let’s talk!

The products in question are basically cosmetics for your vulva - one to make your girlparts “clean, pure, soft and fresh” with the help of a 4-step collection of soap, lotion, spray and wipes, and the other to lighten the color of the outer labia. Leaving questions around the safety and rationale for these products aside for the moment, what’s particularly troubling about these new takes on what the marketers of Lysol and Massengil have schilled in the past is that they have adopted (some might say co-opted) the language of empowerment and enlightenment in order to do so, presenting the case for vulval “freshening up” as a bold act of savvy self-love.

While the cheeky brand name “I Love My Muff” on its own is eerily reminiscent of a Lunapads standby: “I (heart) my period”, who can argue with its wisdom? Ideally women “love” (or are at least at peace with) our muffs, but do we need these products in order to get there? Of course not, and yet ILMM’s copy tells us that “informed” (if only I knew the “truth” about feminine hygiene!) “modern” women are literally clamoring to make this “savvy and empowered” choice.  And how’s this for courageously breaking the taboos that have kept the topic of “feminine care” locked away in the closet? “It’s no longer taboo and with it’s (sic) clean packaging and bold message these products are a statement of confidence and a must have for every woman.”

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Before we ring in some news about what’s new for 2010, we wanted to reflect upon 2009, and how it brought Lunapads some great new people, products and inspiration.  Here are a some of the highlights:

Pads4Girls expands:  During 2009, we expanded our Pads4Girls program by eagerly partnering with new groups that reached out to communities in Cuba, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia.  Thanks to customer support and the work of courageous individuals and NGOs, hundreds of girls and women are now able to stay at work or school while menstruating, and deal with their periods safely and with minimal environmental impact.

Recognizing there are practical solutions closer to home, we created our  “Make your own cloth menstrual pads” video series that has been viewed by thousands. These videos are regularly used by women in Africa (and here in North America) to make their own cloth pads. And in December 2009, Lunapads partnered with Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE) by donating 20% of holiday sales for 2 of our top-selling gift items to their program, which makes biodegradable disposable pads from agricultural waste in Rwanda.

Fabulous folks and adventures abroad: One of the perks of our work is choosing to take some strategic business trips and while doing so, connecting with some truly amazing people.  During 2009, we had the good fortune to meet some real treasures and leaders in our community: In March 2009, we attended the always mindboggling Expo West Natural Products Trade Show in Anaheim CA and reconnected with our friends Francine and Carinne Chamers, founders of the DivaCup and also met Sarah Kraft, founder of the online Mindful Mama community.

While walking the trade show, we spotted Mothering Magazine Founder, Editor and Publisher Peggy O’Mara and couldn’t miss the opportunity to stop and tell her how much we adored her.  This conversation led to the plans for a personal visit from Peggy right here at Lunapads the following month.  Leveraging off of Peggy’s rock star status as a natural parenting pioneer and leader, we brought together a group of friends and colleagues to hear Peggy speak at a warm and inspiring tea party benefiting Pads4Girls.

In September 2009, I took a first-time trip to the ABC kids expo in Las Vegas, where I also had an insightful visit to Zappos.com’s headquarters.  Meanwhile Suzanne had yet another transcendent experience at the Social Venture Institute (SVI) at Hollyhock, BC.  In November 2009, we both attended the Green America Business Conference and Green Festival in San Francisco.  While we were there, we had the great fortune to meet up with  SHE founder Elizabeth Scharpf and one of our business heroes, Reusablebags.com founder Vincent Cobb.

New products and fabrics: We expanded the Lunapads collection with several new products and fabrics: the P-style, Wysi-wipes, Cloth Wipes (which elicited one of our most discussed blog posts of the year) and our first-ever custom 100% organic cotton print, Magenta Mandala.

Lunapanties, our very own period underwear, made a long awaited comeback in November 2009, with the introduction of our new Hipster style and magenta colored organic cotton.

Staff changes: We bid a tearful and fond farewell to Sandra, one of our longest-term employees, as she moved on to continue her work as a bicycle safety educator. While it is hard to replicate Sandra’s incredible personal flair for customer service, Sara, the newest addition to the Lunapads team, is doing a fantastic job!

Media and accolades: In the summer of 2009, we learned that Lunapads and the DivaCup were featured in an entertaining and informative book by Canadian journalist Vanessa Farquharson called “Sleeping Naked is Green“.  At the end of 2009 Lunapads was profiled in our of our local papers, featuring a funny photo of Suzanne and I having a “tug-of-war” with a clothesline of Lunapads and Lunapanties.

By far the biggest highlight of the year was being voted into the top 10 of Green America’s People Choice Awards and so you can imagine our reaction when we found out that we had placed in the top 3 and received the newly-minted Shining Light award.

While Suzanne and I celebrated our award San Francisco, we never lost sight of the unsung heroes in the exercise: staffers Lisa and Morgan (whose idea it was in the first place), Facebook and Twitter (follow us! @Lunapads, @Luna_Diva (me) and @Luna_gal (Suzanne)) for providing the forums to drum up votes, and last but far from least, YOU, our awesome customers, for taking the time to cast your votes - it couldn’t have happened with you.

On that note, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all for a great 2009, and wish you all the best for 2010 from the Lunagals!

When I was much younger (and more foolish!), I used to think that business was a soulless activity that occupied itself exclusively with money, to the exclusion of all other forms of profit.  In many ways, Lunapads’ growth as a business is representative of my own journey in understanding that not only can be business be about way more than financial profit, but that business, like practically anything else, ultimately comes down to being about relationships.

While our recent trip to the Green Festival in San Francisco was planned primarily around attending to receive our Shining Light Award from Green America (thanks again to all our fans and customers who voted for us!), we extended our trip to attend the Green Business Conference.  The conference was a valuable reminder of the importance of establishing and building relationships.

At the conference, the first woman we heard speak was Margot Frasier, founder of Birkenstock USA .  After having met her several years ago, I was thrilled to see her still going strong.  Margo, along with another powerful woman entrepreneur Lisa Lorimer, she has just written Dealing With the Tough Stuff: Practical Wisdom for Running a Values-Driven Business.  Reminder to any friends who happen to read this: my birthday is coming up soon!

My choice of title for this blog post is a play on the name of a wonderful company: Life without Plastic, whose co-founder, Jay Sinha, we had the excellent fortune to meet at the Green Business Conference.  “Plastic-free” is an apt description for Jay on a metaphorical level as well - his authenticity and passion for a cleaner, healthier, more “plastic free” planet are indisputable and contagious.

Jay in turn led us to another anti-plastic superhero, blogger Beth Terry (aka Fake Plastic Fish).  Beth is one of those deceptively humble people who are in fact deeply powerful.  An accomplished activist, she single-handedly created the North American campaign to pressure Brita water filters to start taking back and recycling used filters.  Thank you, Beth, for being a living inspiration for how one person can make a massive difference. Here is a picture of Jay and Beth at the Green Festival.

I was also deeply impressed with Joshua Onysko, founder of Pangea Organics, who gave a rollicking presentation about his entrepreneurial journey: “7 lessons in 7 years.”  His all-organic line of skincare products is amazing, and his success as a leader in a crowded category is a credit to his chutzpah as much as his commitment to “eco-centric” skincare products.

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As many of you are already aware, Lunapads offers cost-priced Pads4Girls Kits that can be purchased by customers, which are then given to girls and birthing women in Africa.  The way it works is that we are approached by individuals or NGOs who work with girls and women in need (Imagine1Day Ethiopia and Shanti Uganda are two Vancouver-based examples) who we then add to the list of potential recipients for customer donations. Customers buy the kits, and we give them to the groups who then distribute them to the recipients - all good.

That said, like so many other things in life, Pads4Girls isn’t perfect.  First, the obvious problem that we can’t reach everyone who needs supplies.  Second, there are not always the necessary supporting resources available (education, water and stable living situations come to mind) in every community that make using cloth pads easy.  Finally, while Pads4Girls kits help thousands of girls and women, they are still being shipped half way around the world.  We are thrilled to tell you about a new initiative that takes this work several steps further, as well as how a little holiday gift-giving can help to support it.

Elizabeth Scharpf is as striking in person as her accomplishments and vision are on paper.  Tall, grounded, deeply compassionate and extremely smart were both my first and lasting impressions of her.  Elizabeth is the founder of Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE), a unique social profit that seeks to empower women and girls both physically and financially.

While working on economic policy (think World Bank and Clinton Foundation level) Elizabeth came to understand the impact that girls missing school and women missing work due to unmanaged menses was having.  She then asked herself what was going to make a bigger difference: the report that she was writing “that nobody was going to read anyway” (her words), or finding a way to help girls stay in school and women get back to work? Thus SHE was born.

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*EDIT: Due to the overwhelming response from the blog community expressing their outrage over the commercial, Method has since taken the “Shiny Suds” commercial down.*

Once again, we are pleased to feature a guest blog post from Rebekah Nathan!

I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to find eco-friendly cleaning products to use in my home. The chemicals that are used in most generic cleaners are a concern for a lot of us, and if you’re not up for making your own natural cleaners, then you’re left with the task of browsing the aisles trying to find the earth friendly products amongst the vast array of cleaning products vying for you attention.

Method Home Products is a company that claims to be both environmentally friendly and free of nasty chemicals. Perfect! However, when I saw the recent TV ad/PSA they have put out, I was left completely shocked and speechless. Treehugger called it ‘disturbingly funny’, but I’d argue that it is just flat out disturbing.

Melissa over at Shakesville has both the video and the transcript if you’d prefer to read it rather than watching, but please note that it comes with a trigger warning. Basically the ad shows a woman about to jump in the shower, when she finds a group of cartoon ‘Shiny Suds’ racing around her tub, left over from her previously usage of a generic and chemical filled cleaner. She is visibly shocked to see them there but they remind her that she had sprayed them there in the first place (read: it is her doing, her fault) and instruct her to get into the tub, one even calling out ‘Scrubsy-dubsy, baby’. The woman continues with her shower, all the while having to listen to the group of suds (which interestingly enough all have male voices) harass her with calls of ‘You know you want it!’, ‘Woo! Yeah!’, ‘Use the loofah!’, when they’re not staring with cartoon mouths agape and panting. Throughout the ad the woman looks frightened and worried, and is trying to clean herself while doing her best to cover her body from the eyes of the Shiny Suds. The ad finishes with the text ‘You deserve to know what chemicals are in your cleaners. Support the Household Product Labeling Acts.’

Obviously the point of this ad is that we need to be aware that chemicals left over from generic cleaners are nasty, nasty things. However, to reenact a scene of sexual harassment, and in a humorous way at that, is not only offensive and triggering, but also trivializes something that is very, very serious and real for a lot of women. Statistics show that in Canada, 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted, and that 87% of women report having experienced sexual harassment .

Not only is sexual harassment something that is real, but to show a woman being harassed and scared in a joking manner in order to sell a cleaning product, gives us a disturbing insight into how women are viewed and valued (or not) in society. Finally, by the Shiny Suds reminding her that she had left them there in the first place and effectively set herself up for the harassment, hints at rape apologism and the idea that women are often ‘asking for’ the unwanted attention they receive by the way they dress, walking alone at night or daring to be sexually independent. Whether this was intentional or not, this all paints a pretty disturbing and depressing picture.

If you want to express your outrage over this ad, you could do so by commenting on the Treehugger post here that celebrates the ad. Alternatively, you can contact Method directly via;

Method Public Relations + Events
Katie Molinari katie@methodhome.com
Rachel Goldberg rachel@methodhome.com

Method Advertising
Henry Yu henry@methodhome.com
Method Social Media
Twitter: http://twitter.com/methodtweet
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/method