From A Moonshot To Reality: The Story Of MoonPads

Midwife Revelations

Little did ferrigno know, she would continue to play an active hand in the sustainable development of the area, with the community requesting her support on a variety of projects.

“In Tibet, most women [spend time] together. In the region that I was living, in Eastern Tibet, women do certain types of work, men do certain types of work and you don't totally interact all that much. I was hanging out mainly with women. And when I would hear what they were going through, I was like, ‘Oh wow, American women don't have to deal with that kind of suffering as much.’”

At one point, a Lama from the region had a sister pass away from complications during childbirth, which, she says, “is quite common in Tibet.” In response to the tragedy, ferrigno’s friend and nonprofit board member wanted to create a program for rural Tibetan women to study with midwives, and hopefully lessen the risk of fatality from childbirth.

This led to ferrigno embarking on another endeavor through her Pureland Project, this time focusing on midwives in Tibet. “We had brought [in] American [midwives] because it's very hard for Tibetan women to be honest about their bodies with Tibetan doctors because women's bodies are almost always stigmatized,” she explained.

“Female bodies are thought to be dirty. And so women often do not bring up their issues with doctors no matter if they're Tibetan, Chinese, whoever. But bringing foreigners in, they're more willing to talk because we just…we're weird—we like talking about stuff! One day during a clinical open house with the American midwives our translator was unavailable and so I had to step in.”

Helping out the midwife turned out to be an incredibly eye-opening experience for ferrigno. “Patient after patient were complaining about completely preventable infections. I turned to the midwife and said, ‘is this what's been happening?’ She said, ‘yeah, of course.’” Without access to period products, these menstruators were using unclean wool, straw, stones and dirty rags. Without access to water, they ended up with preventable infections that were causing severe pain and serious health threats that they endured for years in silence due to stigma. These insights drove ferrigno and her team to take action—buying pads, panties, and other period products and distributing them to local women. However, she realized something still wasn’t quite right.

“It took me a couple months to catch on that I had broken my previous promise to not use single-use plastics. So I was making this huge mistake trying to solve one problem of period poverty by creating another problem of environmental degradation and waste,” ferrigno recounted.

Luckily, she learned from her mistakes, and immediately began iterating and ideating to find a sustainable solution that addressed both issues. “We started trying to figure out how to do better, and that meant making our own compostable pads. And that's where MoonPads came to be,” she explained.

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Period Poverty In The Pureland

About 95% of patients that ferrigno had seen when assisting the midwife had been suffering from entirely preventable infections. “My mind was blown because vaginal infections are horribly painful. To just live with it and be like, this is the fact of life—this discomfort just blew my mind and broke my heart,” she explained.

She immediately identified the situation as a case of period poverty—her female Tibetan friends simply couldn’t afford to purchase sanitary menstrual products and, as a result, were prone to higher rates of infection.

“A lot of the issue stems from stigma, right? So, period poverty isn't talked about because periods themselves are stigmatized and that causes an even larger issue when products aren't able to be bought or used by people who are menstruating,” ferrigno explained. “And that is the definition of period poverty—when you cannot either buy or access period products when you are menstruating to carry on with your normal day-to-day activities.”

According to ferrigno, period poverty isn’t unique to the faraway lands of Tibet. “It's very much present in the United States. In the richest countries, in the poorest countries, there is period poverty. I find that our bodies here in America are just as repressed and stigmatized as they are in different areas and cultures across the world,” ferrigno continued. “I have traveled and been part of families in many different cultures. And I find that people still hate talking about menstruation even though it is where we all come from.”

She raises an important—albeit little-discussed—point. While the term “period poverty” is still somewhat new, menstrual hygiene management has widened the gender gap in lower-income countries for generations.

^‍According to a 2014 report published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 1 out of every 10 menstruating youth misses school during their menstrual cycle due to lack of access to menstrual products and resources.^[2]

This phenomenon isn’t just limited to menstruators in developing nations—while period products may be more readily available in countries like our own, it doesn’t mean they’re any more affordable. In a national survey of 1,000 menstruating teens, 1 in 5 struggled to afford period products, and 4 in 5 missed class time, or knew someone who had missed class time due to a lack of access to menstrual products.^[3]

“While we have [more] products here on the shelves, that does not mean that they're accessible. [Some are] privileged enough to be able to buy them, but a lot of people are not able to actually purchase pads or tampons, and that impacts every layer of our society. Girls don't go to school because they're menstruating and don't have pads to not bleed through their pants onto the desks. They don't go to work because they don't have pads or tampons to keep them from bleeding through during a meeting,” she explained.

Having suffered from period poverty herself, ferrigno passionately believes that the issue affects everyone everywhere.

“Just because the pads and tampons are on the store shelves, just because our health ed class goes through and talks about menstruation for 15 minutes out of a 12 year long education, this does not mean that people know [about] or have access to period products.”

Inspired, ferrigno set out to destigmatize this systemic issue on an even bigger scale.

Profit With A Purpose

A lifelong learner and advocate, ferrigno earned a doctorate in sustainability and hopes to use her learnings to inspire change about overconsumption. The majority of people, according to her, “prioritize comfort in the present moment.” Not many people are thinking about the comfort of “the next generation or if there's even going to be another generation after that.”

Despite their best intentions, many social enterprises fail to balance the demands of the market with that of the demographic(s) or cause they’re aiming to help. For ferrigno, it’s not all about the money. Focused on implementing the famous triple bottom line concept, her goals are threefold—aiming not only to turn a profit, but also create a product that benefits people and the planet.

With over 1.8 billion menstruAnoators worldwide, who use an average of 8 pads per cycle, ferrigno’s potential market is, simply put, astronomically large. Not only does she want to create a more sustainable alternative to many of the products that are on the market, but she prioritizes working directly with the communities that inspired the company in order to create a product that fits their needs. “We actually designed the pads with the beneficiaries in mind,” ferrigno explained. Her design process featured close collaboration with the beneficiaries, the Tibetan nomadic women she works for, to design the optimal period product.

Originally, she had zeroed in on creating a zero-waste product. As someone who had regularly utilized the menstrual cups, ferrigno thought it was the perfect solution. Yet the feedback she received from her Tibetan community sent her ideations in a different direction. “They were like, you put that inside, first of all, no, no. And second of all, you need water to wash the menstrual cup. These people are carrying water on their backs all day long. They're not trying to wash a bloody cup. The other thing we tried were washable pads. That was also a no-no because they didn't have water and they didn't feel like hanging them outside to be seen.”

Based on her demographic’s critiques, this caused her to pivot towards a solution that offered the best of both worlds—a line of single-use pads, tampons, and pantyliners that were entirely compostable, eliminating the plastic waste problem that had continued to plague Tibet. “They said, no, no, no, this needs to be longer. No, we want it to be wider. We want it to feel like this. And we went with what they needed and wanted and remade our pads over and over until our beneficiaries were happy with them. So they're getting exactly what they want in terms of pads,” ferrigno said.

“This brand exists to help eradicate period poverty. So for every box that we sell, we give one away to somebody experiencing period poverty. We are priced competitively—we are still able, with our price point, to afford to give a box away,” she explained. “At this point, that's all in Tibet because then we don't have to pay for transport.”

MoonPads one-for-one business model, employed by companies like TOMS shoes and glasses retailer Warby Parker, addresses the social side of entrepreneurship that is so often forgotten. “We want to encourage people [to pay] it forward by still providing a product that's at the same price point as other organic products.”

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Striving For Sustainability And Smashing Stigma

Ultimately, ferrigno believes that cultivating a sustainable lifestyle is achievable for anyone regardless of income status or geographic location. “That's the biggest part about living sustainably is living a mindful life. Being a conscious consumer is hard and it's not always comfortable, to be quite honest.”

For consumers that have the means to adopt sustainable solutions, this means that they might experience an adjustment period.”While I am very proud of my product, some people might not find it as comfortable as a plastic product. These tampons have nothing but cotton, and I'm proud of that. But a lot of people are using plastic tampons, like they're actually sticking plastic up their body and wearing it for eight hours at a time, seven days out of the month. It's between six to nine years of our lives putting plastic up against our vagina or inside of our vagina,” ferrigno explained.

“A lot of us think when you put on a pad, like, oh, it's just going to be eight hours, then you replace it and it's another pad. You know, these things all add up. And I think that's the key to thinking about sustainability. It's not just a little thing when you buy a box of plastic tampons. That tampon will be here for a thousand years. You have to think that way.”

An attempt to minimize the effects of period poverty by offering a sustainable menstrual product is similarly multi-pronged. MoonPads is also “ trying to educate everybody. So when we distribute pads in Tibet, or in India, we do educational campaigns. We do a whole piece on anatomy and physiology—what is happening when blood comes out, and then what happens when you stop bleeding when menopause comes on. The whole process—what happens when you become pregnant and you don't bleed and then you start bleeding again?”

MoonPads has also designed a virtual menstrual education curriculum for customers by offering New Moon Red Tents. “Red tents are something that were used in ancient times to hold space for menstruators to share the energy that is menstruation. The cycles of our hormones give us things like creativity, insight, wisdom. Our new moon red tent is really that encouragement not just to sync up with our bodies, but with our minds, with our spirits… to educate, because a lot of people don't have [a] safe space to talk about menstruation.”

Through her products and assorted educational initiatives, ferrigno is trying to start a long-overdue conversation about menstrual health and equity, in Tibet, the United States, and everywhere in-between. “Talking more and creating these safe spaces is what shatters stigma, and that's what promotes health and wellbeing.”

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