This post is a part of Periodपाठ, a campaign by Youth Ki Awaaz in collaboration with WSSCC to highlight the need for better menstrual hygiene management in India. Click here to find out more.
This post is a part of Periodपाठ, a campaign by Youth Ki Awaaz in collaboration with WSSCC to highlight the need for better menstrual hygiene management in India. Click here to find out more.
The objective of this written piece is that you send it to someone who is pregnant, the idea of a menstrual cup,
and that it helps them.
Obviously, not everyone takes 9 whole months but ya get what I mean. It’s a process, and it’s fun. To read my favourite (and hilarious!) accounts of using the cup, see Lavanya Mohan’s and Rhea Mukerjee’s blogs.
Within two months of using the cup in 2015, I started a ‘100 Women Project‘ where I ‘cupverted’ 100 women (I spoke to 200+, duh) in 100 days (3.5 months approximately). I was obsessed with the cup, so much so that my then-boyfriend suggested I write a blog about it to save time and not spend time saying the same thing over-and-over, and I did. You can read it here (I published this on a youth blog in India where it garnered close to half a million reads). I also spoke at length about my unfortunate friendship with menstrual health disorders that played a key role in my life that I was constantly fighting.
Some women I spoke to wanted to try the cup but couldn’t afford it. The whole ‘build/think-for-masses and inclusivity‘ got me researching why cups cost as much as they did, what the profit-margin was that the companies making these ‘noble’ products required. This lead to looking to start an enterprise that would bridge the affordability gap.
During the process of looking to source silicone and understanding the manufacturing process, I met an acquaintance (she was couch-surfing with me at my house in Pondicherry) who put me in touch with a lady who had a vision similar to mine. She was ready with a prototype and had sent me a sample. We connected further and decided to explore working together. That was May of 2016 and fast forward, Boondh today has thousands of users in India and a few hundred spread across the globe in countries like Sri Lanka, Nepal, Mexico, USA, UK, and the Netherlands.
It sells at ₹ 590 (plus tax, ugh) when most cups are sold in the range of ₹ 1000 and above, and Boondh uses zero-waste packaging (comes in a drawstring pouch. That’s all, yes). There’s the Together Cup Program where for every cup bought at ₹ 1180, Boondh donates a cup to an economically less privileged menstruator. The focus is on menstrual literacy and dissolving stigma in communities where cultural beliefs encourage oppressing practices.
It’s a fun challenge every day, convincing people in the government and corporate offices to work with us on long-term social-change projects and dealing with struggles of packaging, sealing, couriers, taxes, regulations in India. At the end of the day, I am a happy person who sees value in how she spent 10 of her 24 hours that the earth took to complete one rotation.
I often challenge my lady friends to do the 100 Women Project too—could be for cups, to break stereotypes or to overcome a socially-constructed oppressive practice! My favourite person who is doing the 100 Women Cupvert Challenge now is this traveller from Sri Lanka that I met in Himachal last year. Watch her story here.
I hope you enjoyed reading this piece of my Cup Chronicles as much I enjoyed living it. I also hope you are not as lazy as I am. I wrote the above thoughts in November of 2018. Connect with me at sonal@boondh.co
Note: The above blog is a personal account of Sonal Jain who works at Boondh and is based on their personal experience of talking to people about menstrual cups. In no way does it summarize or generalize the experience of using menstrual cups.