Kristin Kagetsu • Making Sanitary Pads Accessible to All

(Co-Founder and CEO, Saathi Pads || Ahmedabad, India)

“Sometimes simple designs are the most impactful. It’s more about understanding what is really needed in a particular environment to address a need. In India only 16% of women have access to sanitary pads. I joined forces with my friends Amrita, Tarun and Grace and started an eco-sanitary pads company in Ahmedabad, India. Upcycling and recycling are great, but we need to go deeper and start thinking about what materials get manufactured and used in the first place! We wanted our design to be biodegradable — we use banana fibers. In the beginning, we spent a lot of time on product development and testing before we could design the relevant machines and set up a factory. Now we have production under control, and we can focus much more on marketing and sales and growing our business. We are already selling hundreds of thousands of pads across India via our website, but we think this can go a lot farther.

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I think it’s important to have more women in product development. We love that we have men on our team who are comfortable with sanitary pads and talking to women and girls about them. But, when you’re making a product like sanitary pads and there’s a lack of female engineers, the team cannot fully relate how the product is used. We joke that our new rule is: if you mess up, you have to wear the pad for a week.”