Flo: the startup selling organic tampons in ice cream tubs

Next generation feminine hygiene products are an increasingly crowded industry, with Forbes declaring 2016 ‘the year of the women-led period startup’

Founder Tara Chandra wanted the design of Flo to be fun and speak to women like a friend (Flo)

It’s a big day for Tara Chandra. The 29-year-old company founder is about to ship the first 2,000 units of organic tampons to small retailers in Hackney after her brand, Flo, crowdfunded £14,198 on Kickstarter in April 2017.

When Chandra first approached Turkish owners of health food stores in East London to stock Flo, many didn’t realise what she was selling. “They thought it was ice cream!” she says. A reasonable assumption, since Flo tampons come in a round ice cream tub emblazoned with bright pink and orange lava writing.

Chandra wanted Flo to stand out in a tampon market crowded with dull, dated packaging. Organic tampons, most easily available to UK women online, are especially drab, veering between white cardboard minimalism and dated, flowery designs. Chandra says: “These days you don’t have to put leaves all over your packaging for people to know it’s green.”

Standing out is crucial for Chandra and Flo. Next generation feminine hygiene products are an increasingly crowded industry, with Forbes declaring 2016 “the year of the women-led period startup”.

Many of these are high-tech alternatives to the standard cotton tampon in a cardboard tube. The Flex Company, which raised over $4m (£3.06m) in 2016, is a disposable disc that sits at the base of the cervix, collecting rather than absorbing blood. Lola is a subscription service for organic tampons and pads in the US that raised $7m (£5.3m) in funding last December. There’s even a tampon monitor called My.Flow that tells you when it’s time to change your tampon.

In some ways what Flo is trying to achieve is far simpler: bringing organic period products to the mass market in the UK, ten years after these products became commonplace in the US. The first batch of Flo tampons on sale come in a box of 14, including eight regular size and six super size. “I wanted to make it simple so women would just need one pack,” Chandra says. The pack comes with a recommended price of £3.69, which Chandra says is less than 20 per cent higher than non-organic brands.

Chandra took an unconventional route to starting her own business.

The Hackney resident grew up in San Francisco, studied economics at Columbia in New York and forged a successful career as an R‘n’B singer in Los Angeles, where an encounter on the set of a photoshoot changed the course of her life.

Chandra discovered she had her period halfway through the shoot and asked the photographer if he knew where she could get some tampons. Instead of being fazed, the photographer said: “We only have Tampax and you don’t want to use that.” He went on to tell her that Tampax uses bleach and chemicals in their products. The Independent has contacted Tampax for comment.

“I was like, of course they are,” she remembers. “Why would a corporation not use synthetic cheap fibres?”

The average woman uses 11,000 disposable sanitary products in her lifetime, according to the Women’s Environmental Network. Non-organic tampons are often bleached white. This process creates dioxin, a chemical linked to a weakened immune system, reproductive issues and cancer.

Tampons have also be shown to leave small fibres in the vagina, which can create a breeding ground for bacteria resulting in Toxic Shock Syndrome, a condition that can be fatal.

After Chandra discovered all this, she switched to organic cotton tampons from Whole Foods. And that should be the end of the story. Except her next move was to London to study for the executive global masters in management at the London School of Economics Department of Management, where Whole Foods stores are less plentiful. One day she was telling Susan Allen, her best friend on the course, about the struggle in the LSE bathrooms and a lightbulb went on.

“Susan couldn’t understand why we needed cotton tampons,” Chandra says, “But when I explained it to her, she got it immediately because her roommate’s sister almost died from toxic shock syndrome (TSS). I told her about the medical research that showed there was a zero per cent chance of TSS with organic cotton.”

The two women wanted to start a social enterprise and realised that the opportunity was right there, in the bathroom. Chandra switched from doing her dissertation on touts, or the resale market for gig tickets, to tampons.

“The idea was not to invent the organic tampon but to ask why hasn’t someone invented an organic product for the mass market?” Chandra says. “Why can’t I find these products every month that are going to make a big difference for my health and that I’m going to wear for eight hours at a time?”

Fast forward four years and a stint at a coffee startup, and Chandra is in the market for investors for her own company. “I think it would be fabulous to find an investor who is committed to the empowerment of women and helping the health of women and our planet,” she says.

All the investors she has spoken to so far are men. “On the one hand it’s frustrating to be like, ‘Where my girls at?’ in the investment world, but most men are not intimidated at all, they never change the subject. That’s the world that I want to live in.”

Chandra wants Flo tubs to be on sale in supermarkets and big pharmacies just as soon as they have funding to produce more tubs. A line of sanitary towels and panty liners made from bamboo is already in the pipeline. She also wants to switch to biodegradable applicators in Flo tampons. Rather than scaring people with the truth about non-organic tampons, Chandra wants Flo to inform people that there are better options: “It’s supposed to be fun and speak to you like a friend,” she says. The Flo mission, she adds, is “to create a product that is affordable, accessible and adorable”.