Bamboo-based period products for all womxn who bleed
Our main story today is about Katie Diasti and her company, Viv, which makes bamboo-based and plastic-free feminine care products and empowers all womxn to live healthier and more sustainable lives.
What we love about Viv is that it’s innovating in an industry that hasn’t really seen any innovation for the past decades, and it’s opening up conversations around periods that have been a taboo for a long time in our society and many parts of the world.
Katie, take us from here!
🚊 Why I started Viv
In my senior year at Boston College, I took an entrepreneurship class and got to learn about products that made an impact on our society. I knew I wanted to create products for women and found that menstrual hygiene products had not seen much innovation for the past few decades.
As I did more research, I was horrified by the amount of plastic waste regular period products created. For example, it costs the Earth 48 plastic bags, or 603 plastic straws per period cycle!
I saw a big gap in the market, and that’s why I started Viv.
💡 How Viv challenges the status quo
First of all, our pads are 95% biodegradable! Most traditional pads contain as much plastic as 4 plastic bags. The wrappers on our pads are also compostable.
While traditional period care products use cotton, which uses a ton of water and land to grow, we use bamboo and corn fiber. Bamboo fiber is softer and more absorbent, and it saves more water and more land since bamboos grow vertically rather than horizontally.
There are some “bougie” period care products in the market, and we want to make sure that we price our products at a price point that is accessible by ALL womxn who bleed.
👀 What we are working on next
Our goal is to build an educational brand that empowers all womxn to live healthier and more sustainable lives and to remove all stigma and shame in talking about periods.
Next up, we are launching tampons with organic cotton & a plant-based applicator in late Fall.
It has taken us many months to develop the product line we currently have (liners and pads), and we want to make sure our products are truly sustainable before providing them to customers who trust our brand.