Lunapads Blog

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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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!

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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We are delighted to announce our deepened partnership with two amazing organizations (Shanti Uganda, Imagine1Day) who are doing groundbreaking work for girls and birthing women in Africa, and have an exciting update about another organization (Afripads) inspired by Lunapads.

Shanti Uganda
Last month, Madeleine represented Lunapads at the Shanti Uganda art auction fundraising dinner event which raised over $15,000 in support of the construction of a birth clinic, as well as supplies for birthing women.  The image below is of Ugandan Midwives with donated Lunapads that will be included in the birth kits.

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Whether you’re planning on going camping, attending summer music festivals, doing some long-distance adventure travel, or just heading to the beach this summer, personal hygiene is always a consideration.  Here are some ideas on how to manage menstruation and elimination while enjoying summer adventures.

An aspect of travel that can often be a source of frustration is simply staying clean.  While it may be a stretch to imagine for the first time, being able to urinate while standing up (like a man!) can actually make things a lot easier.  Imagine rather than having to squat in scratchy underbrush, or hover above a toilet, simply being able to relieve oneself without having to completely remove one’s pants, shorts or undergarment.  The pStyle is a small, durable plastic funnel that enables this process with a minimum of fuss or hassle – just point and shoot, as it were.

Most of us will also need to think about how to manage our menses while away from home.  Depending on the length of the trip, heaviness of flow, and availability of supplies at the destination, it can be tricky, not to mention taking up valuable luggage real estate.  Supplies may not be available locally, and can be easily damaged and rendered useless if not packed carefully.

And then there’s the question of disposal – where does one put used pads and tampons in the wilderness?  Given today’s “leave only footprints” camping credo, one could well be faced with the dilemma of packing along used supplies versus burying or burning them, hardly eco-friendly alternatives.

Reusable silicone menstrual cups such as the DivaCup obviate these dilemmas, and are becoming increasingly popular with female travelers as a result.  Add the bonuses of not having to change a cup for up to 12 hours, financial savings and reusable eco-friendliness to boot, and you’ve found your new best travel buddy.  They’re also ideal for sports and swimming.

Caring for these products properly is of course an important consideration, which brings me to yet another travel wonder-product: Wysi-Wipes. Wysi-Wipes are compressed, biodegradable personal wipes that require only some water and a bit of soap to become a “wet wipe”, perfect for cleaning cups, pStyles, or even you ;-). For a complete travel kit, team up all of these products, plus a peri bottle to hold some water or a cleansing solution, and put them in one of our new travel pouches.  And to top it off, it’s all on sale this month, plus ALL orders this month get 2 FREE Wysi-Wipes (while quantities last.)  Happy trails from all of us at Lunapads!

A friend sent me a link to this article by feminist author Katie Roiphe a couple of weeks ago, entitled “Get your kid off your Facebook page” and as a feminist, Mom and Facebook user it caught my attention. When I first glanced at it I thought that it was going to be about the risks of posting photos of your kids on the internet in general, for fear of pedophiles viewing them. Was I ever wrong.

Roiphe’s premise is essentially that the phenomena of women posting images of their children as their personal profile photos, rather than being a simple, benign, loving act, is in fact indicative of a far larger problem of women choosing to “hide” behind their children, intentionally abnegating their pre-Motherhood accomplishments and independent identities. And to think that I have been interpreting this as “hey, look how cute my kid is”, or “I just had a baby”, when in fact these women are actually opting out of the effort of “the whole excruciating business of being yourself” - whoa!

I should admit in fairness that Facebook has long intrigued me from a sociological  perspective - how is it redefining the meaning of friendship, and what does how we use it say about our identities and how we choose to express them to others?  The friend issue has interested me in particular, as prior to Facebook I would not have thought of people that I have never met or even had much contact with as capital-F Friends, in the way one does about those with whom we have shared major life experiences, or even just a regular cup of coffee and pleasant chat.  And yet here I am, and grateful for it, appreciating the insights into wider lives than just the typically professional connection that we had previously shared.  I have a lot more friends out there than I realized, awesome!

Friends (at least those who become Moms) in Roiphe’s world, however, become almost unbearably tedious in their maternal transformation, with their endless discussions of infantile bodily fluids and obsession with keeping up an incessant flow of attention towards their irritating offspring. Heck, even women who once had interesting and meaningful things to talk about like their careers and current events are now reduced to pandering, unkempt bores whose company is shunned by men at dinner parties.  The shame, the shame!

I have several friends, including men, on Facebook who have chosen a multitude of images of things and people other than themselves (including, but not limited to: Harvey Milk, a Sri Lankan beach, an assortment of superheroes, movie stars, household pets, random objects, and yes, their kids) to represent them on Facebook and elsewhere.  These images can be humorous, or indicating a milestone, such as the cover of a recently published book - not them, and yet clearly part of their message or one of their accomplishments.  How many readers out there “donated” their profile picture space or status updates to show their support for Barack Obama in the last US election? I myself am guilty, having posted images of myself with both my daughter and husband. Is this all I am? Not so much. Does it convey a crucial aspect of who I am in the world of which I am extremely proud? You bet.

I think that’s what saddened me the most about the article - an unwillingness to honor, or encourage being proud of something about ourselves other than what our resumes say.  It always wounds me a bit when feminists take aim at other women in this way, particularly using such gross exaggerations (Roiphe apparently doesn’t know any men who do the kid Facebook thing, or attend dinner parties where parents may happen to discuss something other than their kids.)  Why is it such a bad thing in Roiphe’s eyes to be proud to be a Mom in this way?

And last but not least, rather than remaining cognizant that hey, after all it’s just internet social networking (what your Mom would say, am I right?) she makes it sound like some rampant social pandemic.  Drivers licenses and passports might be next, so don’t go playing around with your Facebook image too much, or you might wake up one of these days not even knowing who you are anymore.

Good news continues to come our way about initiatives bringing cloth pads to women and girls in Africa.  As discussed in this earlier post, millions of girls and women in Africa do not have access to adequate menstrual supplies.  Sadly, girls stay home and miss important school days because they have no means to deal with their period while at school.  While Proctor and Gamble have their “protecting futures” campaign (donating disposable pads to girls, thus creating a long-term waste problem), partners in our Pads4Girls initiative provide girls in rural areas of Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya with a sustainable alternative: Lunapads!

While we recognize supplying cloth pads to girls and women is an important step, there are many others in Africa helping to take this initiative one step further.  Several colleagues of ours are building programs to train women to make the pads in their own community, thus creating employment and income for women.  Here are a few examples:

Sapna Dayal of Imagine1Day will be bringing Lunapads with her to Ethiopia in May with hopes to build skills and employment for local women to make and sell cloth pads.  When Carrie Jane Williams travelled to Uganda last fall to bring Lunapads to Uganda, she helped orchestrate the production of “AfriPads” right there on the spot.  While she was there, she met a young couple who became so excited by what they saw, that they are now completely devoted to getting AfriPads off the ground.   Pauls Grinvalds and Sonia Klumpp have plans to launch a six-month pilot project to determine the feasiblity of manufacturing and distributing cloth pads to the girls in Kitengeesa, in the Masaka District.  Paul and Sonia’s plans were featured in one of Uganda’s national newspapers: the Daily Mirror.  Hopefully this press will stimulate greater awareness of the problem and some funding for their project.  Please pass on the word on their behalf.

Recently we learned of an even larger cloth pad manufacturing program that was inspired by Lunapads.  Last week, I attended the annual Ethiopian dinner of Partners in the Horn of Africa. This Canadian charity works in Ethiopia and directs 100% of the donations directly to projects that involve building schools, bridges, wells, and providing group homes and centres for HIV orphans.

A niece of one of the board members showed her aunt a Lunapad, and from there, the idea of replicating our cloth pads in Ethiopia took off.  In 2008, a Partners-funded pilot project manufactured and distributed 20,000 modified Lunapads and 2,500 Lunapanties for girls in a rural school district near Addis Ababa.  For every $5,000 they invested in this project, over 7,000 more school days for girls were added.  We had no idea this was happening and are so happy to hear about the trickle effect Lunapads has already made in Ethiopia.

Partners also provides microfinancing for women entrepreneurs, and a result of this pilot project they will be expanding the program to set up a manufacturing facility to make 200,000 pads and employ local women.   It was inspiring to hear John Baigent, the Executive Director of Partners, talk about the cloth pad program so passionately to a group of 200 supporters at the dinner.  I was amused to hear that John has achieved “rock star status” among the women and girls because of the profound impact the cloth pads have brought to their community.  Hmm, I’m imagining John channelling Annie Lennox and leading the girls and women in a chorus of ”Sisters are doing it for themselves!”

The Partners cloth pad pilot project was made possible by the generous donation from a group of mothers in West Vancouver called Mom and Me.  Each Mother’s Day this group holds a family dance and in 2008 they raised almost $25,000 for the Partners cloth pad initiative.  I hope to attend the event this year with my family and would love to see this fundraising model replicated everywhere.  Because Partners covers all the administrative costs, 100% of the donations go directly towards the projects they fund.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if more groups replicated this idea and supported this initiative?

Lunapads and our generous customers have donated hundreds of pads to women and girls in developing nations in recent years, and we are now offering more ways than ever to help in our new Donate section.

Pads4Girls seeks to address the problem of girls in developing nations missing school due to a lack of adequate menstrual supplies.  Paying homage to Deanna Duke’s original Goods4Girls project (sadly now defunct), we decided to keep the name simple as well as make it easy for anyone already aware of Goods4Girls to know that we are up to pretty much exactly the same thing.  Here’s a quickie fact sheet on the drastic difference that missing school can have on girls’ lives.  In comparison to the Always “protecting futures” campaign, Pads4Girls seeks to offer a more sustainable, environmentally responsible solution.

We had the recent pleasure of connecting with Sapna Dayal, Executive Director of Imagine1Day, a Vancouver based NGO (started by the founders of lululemon athletica) whose mission is to provide primary education for children in Ethiopia.  Watch our short video interview with Sapna to learn what Imagine1Day is doing, why this work is so personal to to Sapna and how you can fill her suitcase with Pads4Girls when she returns to Ethiopia in May.





We are so encouraged by the growing public interest in helping girls in Africa. This week alone, we added 2 new organizations and are collecting Pads4Girls for communities in Uganda, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Ethiopia.  You can learn about each organization in the Donate section of our site, and we will continue to update our list of recipients as we connect with them.  The synergies of our common mission ~ to help keep girls in school and provide a more sustainable solution is incredibly exciting.  But this is just the beginning!  We are currently in the midst of bigger plans which include providing resources and training to allow the women in Africa make the pads themselves and create a source of income for their families.  We’ll tell you more about this in a future blog post as this project develops.

You can also choose to donate Maxi Pads for inclusion in Birth Kits being distributed by Shanti Uganda, a Vancouver based NGO helping women in rural Uganda .  And of course, cash donations can be made to support the purchase of  pads.

To watch more videos about our Pads4Girls campaign, go to our YouTube channel here.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts!

My daughter Gigi was in the office yesterday and it inspired a brief fantasy about what her reality might be like as an adult woman.  Will we finally be done with the need for feminism?  For the time being, we can only dream and keep working on it.

Speaking of people working for a better future for tomorrow’s women, I have long been a fan of New Moon Magazine and its associated blogs.  New Moon’s mission (in their own words) is “to help girls, ages 8 to 15, discover their unique voices and express them in the world in ways that matter.  We fulfill our mission by keeping girls at our center. Through active girl involvement and participation in all our business decisions, we provide respectful, creative, energetic and safe communities where girls explore, discover, create, grow and share their voices to make a positive difference in their lives and in the world.”  Yay to that.

2 New Moon tidbits for you today: sorry for the late notice (contest closes January 19th), but it’s not too late to nominate your favorite (Inner) Beautiful Girl to be featured in the magazine.  Here’s how.

Respect a girl today!