“Talking about periods can be very empowering,” says Paranjothy. “Women make up nearly half of the world’s population and we are the only ones who are able to bear children. Whether you’re religious or not, I think this is a miracle, just the fact that we’re able to make life. And it all stems from periods. Periods are a complete necessity to a healthy body, but we don’t frame it that way. The framing now is how to keep periods as discreet as possible.”

With much already achieved, Paranjothy says her focus from here is to scale the business and its social impact further. In addition to widening its global network of NGO partners to reach more underprivileged people who menstruate, Freedom Cups is also looking into ways to enable communities to be self-sufficient in addressing their period issues. 

In her own words, Paranjothy shares more about the impact and growth of Freedom Cups and what’s next for the startup.

The period problem is a Goliath, age-old, multifaceted and universal one. It ranges from inadequate education about periods to unnecessary taxes on and lack of access to period products, to managing sanitary product waste. And it impacts women at some level in most places around the world.

Periods in a place like Singapore are a hassle. We may skip out on a beach outing or have to postpone that bikini wax. But by and large, we have access to affordable period care products. What we don’t have is sufficient education around the topic—many who we have worked with have admitted to knowing too little about our bodies and periods.

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We’ve worked with women in over nine countries across Asia and Africa. In the Philippines, we work with sugarcane plantation workers, who often miss at least five to seven days of work during the course of their monthly bleeds because there are no toilets out in the fields where they can change themselves out or clean themselves up.

In the US, we are working with marginalised women in Atlanta, Georgia who have lost their jobs due to the Covid-19 pandemic and are struggling to afford period products. 

In Nepal, we worked with girls from a boarding school who had an additional financial burden of purchasing disposable sanitary products because they were too embarrassed to hang the cloths they usually use for their monthly bleeds in the open where it’s a co-ed environment.

In India, we are working with a village whose women are able to purchase subsidised disposable sanitary products, but whose only proper means of disposal is to throw their used pads into a small lake at the back of their village. They have reported that the lake is hard to go near because of the stench.

We want to help communities not yet supported by NGOs or local social organisations. In order to find out about them, we talk to a lot of different people. We’ve asked domestic helpers in Singapore to tell us about their villages back home and connect us with people over there. One of our very first projects came about thanks to a Filipino woman we met in Singapore, who told us that her village didn’t even have running water or electricity.

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Cultivating relationships with the communities we work with is important to us. We have the choice of opting in and out of their lives; we get to opt into a zero-electricity situation and we get to opt out of it and come back to our country. So I think it's important to treat those we help with the dignity and respect that they deserve, as opposed to entering into their lives and thinking that we are some kind of saviour. We prefer to not see them as beneficiaries, but as people we can learn from.

When Freedom Cups first started, we were very ambitious about our mission and we couldn’t understand when women didn’t want to use our product. But as we experienced more and matured over time, we realised that change takes time. With menstrual cups, it’s a personal choice to use them or not, and while it might make sense on paper, not everyone might be keen on them—and we know now that that’s okay.

We are piloting a hub-and-spoke model in Uganda to see if we can make individual countries self-sufficient in handling their period problems. How it works is that we get women who can afford menstrual cups to buy them in order to subsidise free period products for others in their country who can't afford them.

We’ve been bootstrapping Freedom Cups since the beginning because we see this as an experiment to test if women would warm up to period cups. This way, we know we wouldn’t be wasting anybody else’s time and resources. Now, we’re at the stage where we want to scale up, but how do we do it responsibly? 

We’re already profitable and comfortable where we’re at, and anyone we bring on board has to have the right mentality and network to help us grow, as opposed to simply coming to us with money. Money is cheap. What I think is more important are the people behind the money, people who understand our vision, because where our hearts really lie is the social impact that we have.

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