Tampon Tribe is an online monthly subscription service for 100% certified organic, cotton tampons. They're toxic free, plastic free and completely compostable. We came into being to fill the very big void in the market that currently exists in terms of organic feminine hygiene. I started looking for organic products myself and realized that they're really hard to find and are extremely expensive.

Our mission is to disrupt the market and provide affordable access to organic feminine hygiene for women everywhere. In southern California, we can go to Whole Foods if we have the money and buy a couple of the options they have there, though they are limited. Many people don’t live near a Whole Foods or have $15 to $20 a month to spend on an organic product.

Our product is 100% organic cotton. It has a woven core so it doesn’t contain glues. No dyes. No toxins. No plastics. In addition to our mission of having women's bodies be as healthy and as toxic-free as possible, we're also concerned about the environment. Most women use plastic applicators on a tampon. They’ll use about 9,600 tampons in their lifetime. Multiply it by the millions of women in the U.S. that use regular tampons and that's a lot of plastic going into our waterways and our landfills. Plastic has a huge environmental impact.

We use a smooth, thin, cardboard applicator that is completely compostable. Our packaging is made with recycled paper. We don't use boxes in our packaging. When you subscribe to Tampon Tribe, your first order arrives in a burlap bag, designed to look nice and fit inside your bathroom cabinet, or on the shelf. Then, every month, you get a refill pack, in a recycled paper bag. You can select your combination online depending on what size tampon you need and what your flow is. You let us know ahead of time what you need for that month's delivery will be and that's what we send out for you. It's completely customizable and affordable. Our monthly subscription is $8, including shipping and includes 16 tampons. If you're going to a CVS, a comparable (but non-organic) product would be about the same price, $6.99 to $8.99.

I came across the idea from both a personal health and a convenient business point of view. First of all, every woman in the world runs out of tampons every month, even if you've had your period since you were 12. It just happens. You run out and you're always rushing to the store or you're getting your partner to rush to the store to buy you tampons.

My first idea was to create the Dollar Shave Club of tampons. Tampons are an essential item for 70% of women in the U.S. I thought “Wouldn't it be great if you just arrived at my front door every month?”

The more reading I did, the more I realized and came to find out about toxic shock syndrome, and about the environmental impact. Our search changed a little bit and segued over to the organic and the certified organic cotton. I thought, "Wouldn't it be great if we could do this with organic products and still keep the price low?" We're still looking at a 55% profit margin on our costs and that's only at low purchasing levels.

Secondly, health reasons came into it. From a personal level, I went through a health situation myself. As I started to speak to more and more of my friends who had been touched in some way by, normally, cancer, which does actually hit one in two people in this world, we start, then, looking more toward organic products and being a lot more conscious about what we put into our body or touches our skin. Those two things combined to move forward with the business.

Then I thought, "How can we create a business that is more inclusive?" A business that creates this great ecosphere of people, people who want to get involved with our charitable aspects and get involved with our giving back and create this great tribe. We're quite different from anyone else on the market, in that aspect as well. People want to get on board and just be part of Tampon Tribe. They want to wear the t-shirt. They want people to talk about tampons. They don't want this to be a taboo anymore. It's a product that pretty much everyone either buys or buys for someone else or knows someone who needs it. It's something we should have out a bit more in the open.

Our product resonates with different consumers. Some people just want the convenience. Some people are really keen on the organic aspect and some people want the toxic free, environmental aspect of it. We find it also resonates really well with men, anyone who is a dad. As soon as you talk about the toxins, they want to sign up their daughters and their wives and their sisters and everything.

We’re talking about a $16 billion global expected to grow to $42 billion in less than ten years. Most women spend between $6 to $10 a month on their feminine hygiene products, some more when you look at the average. A cheap bag of tampax is still about $5 or $6. Then, you buy some pads to go with it or something like that. For organic, you go to Whole Foods, there are a couple of options, but limited in terms of their size and they don't have applicators, they can range from $8.99 up.

Online, there are about four companies who are our competitors. The main competitor is a company called My Lola. They do cotton tampons and they've got plastic applicators and plastic packaging. They don't have that tribe mentality. It's just a product. They’re a little more expensive, as well.

There are a couple of other organic cotton products but they're very expensive and they don't deliver monthly. Ours is a $8 price point. Theirs is about $15, $12, $20 and then, they're very heavily packaged. They're targeting the executive market, which, of course, is our market as well but we want to target everybody. We don't need someone that needs to spend $20 a month on their feminine hygiene. We come in at an affordable level and we tick all the boxes when it comes to organic, toxic free, and, of course, we want people to feel like they want to be part of Tampon Tribe. It's like Dollar Shave Club, people want to be part of a club.

We're coming into the market with a wider range of product. We don't just do tampons. We're also doing pads. As I found out, a lot of people don't use tampons, so we're also coming up with a range of feminine hygiene, which will be really exciting because there are no subscription feminine hygiene pads on the market whatsoever.

We’re all about protecting our bodies and the environment and being convenient, as well. Like Dollar Shave Club, you get your little razors in a small bag and you use them. Ours is the same. You get a refill each month rather than getting brand new packaging every month and you get to use your original packaging. That's a differentiator.

We also come under other subscription prices. My Lola is $9 a month for their basic product which is not organic. Kali Box is about $14.99.

A lot of tampons are made with a range of different materials, like a synthetic rayon. They contain chlorine bleach. Chlorine has dioxin, which has been directly linked to cervical cancer. They have perfumes and dyes in them and the cotton has not been grown in an organic way, which means that the GMO's or any of the fertilizers in the soil come into your body. Toxic shock is a real thing.

We like to do a little test. If you put the tampons inside water, ours is cotton so it just absorbs the liquid and you can squeeze it out, not that you would do this with a tampon! None of the fibers come off. With a more generic tampon, the fibers actually break off. They stay in the woman's body. If they have a toxin in it, they may cause toxic shock. I've met a few people that have reached out to me over the course of the last few months asking or letting me know their story where they had gotten toxic shock from tampons. One of them is a model from Venice and she lost her leg. People have had hysterectomies at 13. We don't like to market the scary side to much because we don't want to scare into purchasing. At the same token, there's a very real health risk in putting products in or on your body that has chemicals and toxins.

The subscription model has been proven with Dollar Shave Club and the one billion dollar buyout very recently. Unilever just bought Seventh Generation. That's showing a shift and a recognition of organic cleaning products and household products. It's a big recognition that larger companies are starting to acquire these more grassroots, organic, green companies.

We've received a lot of positive feedback about the fact that our product is organic, compostable, and without plastic. A lot of people don't know about the other subscription services yet. It's all too new. We're going to come in with a better product, with better prices, and with a better strategy to be able to dominate that sector.

We're producing out of Europe. Our manufacturing partner is ICEA-certified, which means ethically produced and organic, every single part of the production process has to meet really strict European standards. The standards in Europe are a lot higher that the standards in America. In terms of ethics, it means that they can't overuse water in the process. They can't put any chemicals or fertilizers on the product. They have a quick turnaround, as well.

At the moment, we're in pre-launch. We've managed to build up all of our mailing lists and all of our followers by, mainly, social media. This is where you find the people who are passionate about health, fitness, organics, the environment. We’ve reached out to the influencers in the health and fitness industry, the women's business industry, the women's empowerment groups. We've got quite a few of them on board that are very happy to support us. People are very keen to get behind us because of all the different aspects and the boxes that we tick.

In terms of a breakdown of customer acquisition we're relying more on viral marketing, influencers, and social media. Most of our customers are online and using social media. They're very active on Facebook and Instagram.

We've also been approached by quite a few of these gift box services. We can partner with them by putting our products in their monthly gift boxes.

At the moment, we're working with a 56% margin but we know we can get that higher into the 60%, 65% as soon as our units go up past 10,000.

The other market we're going to tackle are large, corporate health organizations. For example, Equinox is a gym. They have tampons in all of their bathrooms across America. And we have just partnered with Yoga Works. This not only increases our sales but increases our marketing outreach because people will see Tampon Tribe everywhere and associate that with yoga, with the Equinox, with 24-hour fitness, with anything to do with health.

Then, you've got the corporate market. Most companies now are starting to put feminine hygiene in the bathroom for women. We want to make sure that Tampon Tribe is there. I think that's another area in term of business that we're going into that our competitors don't look at.

First and foremost, we're creating a little bit more than just a business. We keep people involved at every level. A lot of people want to support the green, individual, smaller business. They don't want to support Proctor and Gamble. That's our market. We're looking at one to five percent of the entire market who have already converted to the organic sphere.

We also have a social outreach side. We've just partnered with Girls Inc as our first charitable partner. We want to be able to help change people's lives by partnering with charities who change young girls and boys lives for the better. We’ve also been working these past few months on our Period Pack Project where we get feminine hygiene products to women on our streets.

In terms of our employment strategy, we are looking at partnering with organizations in LA., such as Chrysalis, who do retraining programs. We’re also focusing on hiring veterans who are often under-utilized. Special needs adults will also help make our team complete.

We have a holistic view of everything we do. We're completely transparent and when it comes to people who are buying and purchasing in this sector, that's important to them. They buy ethically.

My biggest concern is having enough inventory, and that's why we're looking for funding. We know the demand can grow quickly. We know that once it's out there and in the sorority with young women, we can explode. But we don’t want to have 50,000 orders and no inventory to fulfill them. We’re going to use this fundraise to bolster our production and scale.