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

In case anyone’s been wondering where we have gone lately, the answer is that we are busily gestating our new website (!!!)

Stay tuned, because not only will she be beautiful, but stronger and faster than ever (can you tell that we just had the Olympics here in Vancouver?), featuring all-new Lunapanties portraits, product reviews, and great new filtered shopping capability. It’s all hands on deck at this point, so blogging has fallen temporarily to the wayside - but we’ll be back soon.  In case you’re no already signed up for our newsletter, doing so now will bring great rewards, and soon, promise!

So hang in there, it won’t be much longer (we can tell you right now that it’s a girl, though)!

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 feels good to start a new year with new things, and we have some fun ones lined up for you!

First off, we have just introduced new snaps for Lunapads. Closure is always a big issue with cloth pads, and we’ve chosen sew-on plastic snaps until now due to their durability.  We’ve finally invested in our very own snap machine, and feel that our new metal (plastic and nickel-free) snaps do just as good a job at keeping everything together with even less bulk. We anticipate that the complete switchover to all Pad and Pantyliner styles will take several weeks.

Our first product that will feature the new snaps is our brand-new Thong Pantyliner. Thong Pantyliners are 6” (15cm) long, and 2.5” (5cm) wide, tapering to 1” (2.5cm) wide at the end. Featuring the same construction as our popular Mini and Teeny Pantyliners (2 layers of 100% flannel topped with 2 layers of 100% cotton fleece), Thong Pantyliners are tapered to work exclusively with thong-style underwear. Watch for them in new 7 Day Thong Pantyliner Kit, DivaCup Kit with Thong Pantyliners  and Deluxe DivaCup Kit with Thong Pantyliners, too!

Last but not least, they’re on special for 10% off for the month of January.

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!

If you had told me 16 years ago when I first started developing Lunapanties that one day they would take me halfway around the world and almost drive me crazy, I would never have believed you. How could underwear possibly do this?

Lunapanties, as their legions of fans will be happy to tell you (ladies, you can stop calling and emailing about when they’re going to be in stock now!) are no ordinary underwear.  The basic idea behind Lunapanties is a hybrid between Lunapads and underwear, where the pad is permanently sewn into the gusset of the panty, with added bands at either end to hold Liners in place like pad-style Lunapads do.

Lunapanties are highly functional underwear that happily accommodate what we have come to affectionately call everyday “random leakiness” to full on menstrual flow. Think: everyday whatnot issues associated with sneezing, laughing, having stayed up late for some (ahem) fun, being pregnant, postpartum, or heck, even your plain old period. Just add liners as necessary, to accommodate your needs.

Knowing we had a fantastic product on our hands, we set out 2 years ago to find new production partners to improve the overall quality and meet customer demand for new styles and colors (cue the Gilligan’s Island theme song)! I’m going to pause for a moment of gratitude for all of you who have waited so patiently while our “3 hour tour” turned into an international odyssey. What took so long? Allow me to explain..

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Seeing the video below was the final push in getting around to writing a post that we have been talking about for ages.  For all that we’re about putting a “happier” face on menstruation, there has been some concern expressed that perhaps we make the picture seem a little too rosy, to the exclusion of the reality for many of us (myself included) that sometimes periods aren’t such a party after all.  “The Period Fairy” is a funny-in-a-painful-kind-of-way take on how unpredictable, inconvenient and painful menstruation can be.

To be clear, our slogan “Happier periods, naturally”, is intended as an affirmative counter response to a social climate where menstruation and menstrual products aren’t traditionally on the top of everyone’s “woo hoo - let’s talk!” list. The notion of negativity around menstruation reminds me of sexism in general - some people insist that it’s over, others that it’s dwindling in a glass-half-full sort of way, and still others are hopping mad at its current manifestations (see my previous post about menstrual activism!) In the sixteen years that I have been doing this I have seen everything from polite curiosity, to overwhelming joy, to abject rudeness as people’s reaction to learning about our work.

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We have been doing some new product development projects in the past few (well, several is actually more like it) months, and the first big project is now complete: our very own, first-ever, totally fabulous print organic fabric! Suzanne christened it “Magenta Mandala” after seeing my daughter’s Mandala coloring book on a recent visit to our home. Before I get into the rest of the story, a huge thank you is in order to all of you who have asked for print/color organic Lunapads over the years - thank you so much for your patience and encouragement.

We are extremely picky about our fabric choices, and finding the right fabric at the right price from the right people and place has taken some doing. We are very fortunate to have partnered with an extremely talented fabric print designer: Harmony Susalla from Harmony Arts, whose print “Eyes of the World” was adapted with custom colors for Lunapads.  Harmony’s inspiration for the print was “the centers of flowers, which can be so intricate. If you stop to take a close look.. a whole world often opens up.” A perfect fit for Lunapads, particularly if one reads flowers as “flow-ers”

Choosing the colors was a group effort, and in the end was a close call between magenta and a deep shade of lavender. I like to think of the colors as symbolic: magenta for female power, and green for our beautiful planet.  As for the color that got away, know that this is just the first of many of these wonderful fabrics: our long-term goal is to switch completely to organic cotton, so stay tuned.  Here’s a link to Harmony’s take on the project, just to round things out in the mutual admiration department.  All our organic Pads, Pantyliners, Kits and 3-Packs are on sale this month, so don’t wait to stock up and enjoy!

They say that there are no coincidences, but we still find it pretty incredible that Suzanne and I have ended up “starring” in 2 different recently released video projects at almost exactly the same time.

Suzanne is the subject of this video by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of BC, and the plot is basically that you can be a razor-sharp, bean-counting CA (or CPA in the United States) and still do all kinds of progressive, groovy things like be a key Board member of a local environmental not-for-profit organization and make it all happen here at Lunapads.  Thanks to knowing Suzanne, I have come to think of CAs as the Jedi Knights of business: trained experts in this powerful aspect of the Force that can be used for either good or evil purposes.  Watch the video to learn how you too can apply your obsession with balanced books towards saving Earth!

As for me, while it’s been far too long since I actually showed up live and in-person, I make a guest appearance in this video about the Social Venture Institute (SVI) at Hollyhock.  To be fair, I have attended it half a dozen times in the past (and bravely presented Lunapads case studies twice - aak!) and plan to again in 2010, so it’s not like I’m making it up.  In case any of you progressive entrepreneurial types out there need any further encouragement to attend, do yourselves a favor and just go.  Suzanne went last year and will be attending again this year, along with a slew of other notables in the green/progressive business scene here on the west coast. 

The stylish video, created by photographer Jaime Kowal, also co-stars David Van Seters of SPUD! organic delivery, Lauren Bacon of Raised Eyebrow web studio (one of our longest-term collaborators) and Michael Ziff of Hip Baby - enjoy!

Well, it’s actually a $75 gift certificate for Lunapads.com - here’s the deal:

As dearly beloved as our current website has been, she could use a tuneup.  We are starting with you, our fabulous customers, to learn about where to take her next.  To that end, we have engaged a fine group of usability testers and now need some real, live gals for them to observe using the site.

Participants must be:

- female, age 20 to 49
- Canadian or American (this study is not open to International participants)
- comfortable talking about menstrual products
- available between July 17th and July 24th for 45 minutes
- be at a computer with microphone and Internet access
- willing to be recorded

If you are interested (or know someone who might be - fence-sitters welcome!) in participating and are available between July 17th and 24th, complete this short, three minute survey to apply: http://tinyurl.com/ln6hm8

Good luck, and thank you!  (Please note that there are only 12 spots available, so hurry if you want to be considered.)