Mooncup Turns Ten!
April 2012 Mooncup turns TEN! Founder and Director Su Hardy looks back on how far we've come...
Here we are in 2012, and we will be celebrating Mooncup’s 10th birthday this very year! Looking back across the decade it is amazing how much has changed since the days when I carried lovingly packed envelopes containing Mooncups from my house down to the local Post Office in my homemade wicker basket, accompanied by my small daughter.Way back then I never dreamt that the Mooncup would become so popular, or that I would end up managing a ‘proper’ business! I certainly don’t get time for basket-making these days, and my daughter is a grown-up and very wise …..teenager!
Today, the Mooncups are lovingly packed by Amy, and the Post Office collects them in sacks each afternoon from the bright and cheery Mooncup office, located just one block from the beach in Brighton. But these are not the only changes...
The Mooncup is no longer associated exclusively with the pioneering environmentalist, but has become much more widely accepted as a serious and preferable replacement for disposable towels and tampons, not just for it's eco-credentials, but also for the health and financial benefits it brings. The team here have definitely seen a change in the responses of visitors to our stands and stalls at the shows and festivals we attend. In the early years our attempts to talk to women about the Mooncup were almost always met with shock or disbelief, (sometimes horror!), but more recently many women have a friend or relative who uses one; the concept is generally much less alien. Mooncups are becoming ‘normal’, and luckily we are not the only ones who have noticed! The discovery of a Mooncup mention in the Euromonitor International Report on Sanitary Protection for 2011 was accompanied by much excitement in the office. Euromonitor collect and analyse consumer sales data and produce detailed reports on current and future trends. These are used by businesses to feed into future product design and marketing campaigns. Figures given in the 2011 report relate only to throwaway sanitary products, however in the ‘Prospects’ section it states:
‘ A potential threat to forecast growth(of the disposable industry)could be the increasing attention that products such as Mooncup are attracting; this is an ultra eco-friendly alterative to unsustainable tampons and towels. As green concerns continue to increase, launching more sustainable products should be the next step for many sanitary protection companies’.
Reading this was a particularly glowing moment for me personally because the environmental impact of disposables was what drove me to produce the Mooncup in the first place, and this little paragraph suggests that that message is finally getting through! But of course this could never have happened without all of you evangelical Mooncup users out there who listened, believed, trusted, invested, persevered, were delighted by and spread the word about… the Mooncup! Thank you all! Here’s to another ten years!!
Su Hardy - Mooncup Founder and Director
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