They make zero-waste pads. Period.
Saathi makes biodegradable sanitary pads using banana fibre and has partnered with an NGO to distribute its compostable product to rural women in India. Saathi's co-founder Amrita Saigal tells Fibre2Fashion what inspired her and her partners.
What inspired you to make biodegradable sanitary napkins for Indian women?
It started when I was working for Procter & Gamble, specifically with Whisper and Always pads in the feminine hygiene division in the summer of 2009. I started looking at the Indian sanitary pads market and realised that only 12 per cent of Indian women use sanitary pads. Now, it has gone up to about 16 per cent.
I remember talking to my grandmother and she mentioned that in the 1940s, when she was growing up, they did not have sanitary pads. Every girl would miss a few days of school each month because of the lack of adequate sanitary protection. When I started digging into this more, I realised that this is actually the leading reason for higher dropout rate for school-age girls compared to boys.
At MIT, we started prototyping to see if we could make a sanitary pad for women in India. This was around 2010 when there was a lot of excitement with Arunachalam Muruganantham, the sanitary pad man of India, and a number of other people trying low-cost sanitary pads.
Between 2010 and 2014, a lot of good work was done to create awareness. At the same time we realised that there was a huge issue about disposal even if you took sanitary pads to women in rural India from start-ups. We talked to many rural women. They wanted to use sanitary pads, but they had nowhere to dispose them. Traditional pads are made from more than 90 per cent plastic. They also use wood pulp, which means cutting down trees. We wanted pads that were easy to dispose.
We realised that all of us care about creating products that do not have an environmental impact. We decided to design a fully biodegradable and compostable sanitary pad and look at naturally available, absorbent fibres. We tested a number of them and found that banana fibres are very absorbent. The fibre is waste material because the plant produces bananas only for a year after which you cut the plant down. Banana fibre is a by-product and there is no use for the stem of a banana tree. So, we decided to use that as the core of our pads.
What are your plans for commercially launching Saathi Pads?
We are now launching in the urban Indian market. We did our first urban launch recently at the India Environmental Festival in Ahmedabad. We are selling in rural India every month. Over the course of the next year, we are going to continue selling at trade shows and expos. And almost all of the 100,000 pads that we manufacture every month goes to rural India. Towards the end of this year, we are going to sell directly from our website. Hopefully, by early next year, we will scale up our manufacturing to two to three million pads a month. We will also look at resellers in probably a year from now.
How much will they cost?
We do not know yet. They will be sold as a premium product in the urban market. That will be our business model to allow us to subsidise the pads in rural India.
Please share your background and the background of your partners.
There are four co-founders: Kristin Kagetsu, Grace Kane, Tarun Bothra and me. Kristin, Grace and I are from MIT where we studied mechanical engineering together. When we decided to move to India and set up our company in early 2016, we met Tarun, a graduate from Nirma University. The four of us started this company together.
What is your objective behind setting up this company?
Growing up abroad, Kristin, Grace and I felt that our period was always a pain. But for a lot of these women in India, getting their periods is more than that. It means missing a week of school every month. They fall so far behind that many of them drop out by class 8. We are giving every woman access to basic necessities so that they can achieve their core potential. Your period should not affect you from getting full education and doing the best you can. I was fortunate that this was not an issue in my life, and I do not want it to be an issue for any other woman.
How will you market your product?
We want to be in all the eco-friendly channels. We will start selling them directly from our website by later this year as well as on all the eco-friendly channels online. We will get into retail. We have been fortunate to have a lot of decent press. So, we have a pretty long waiting list of people who want to buy our products. We will also figure this out before we launch early next year in the urban market.
What measures are you taking to encourage women from rural areas to use them?
Our NGO partner has a female community healthcare worker in each village they work in. Every month, these workers come together and we and the NGO educate them on various topics on proper feminine hygiene and health. We give them the pads to be distributed in the villages. As outsiders, it will be a challenge for us to go into the villages. So we take help from the female community healthcare workers from specific villages and have them spread the message that these pads will allow you to be able to attend school, and you will not miss work, they do not produce any waste and you will also be healthier because a lot of them get infections like UTI as they use unhygienic cloth.
This has to come from within the community and the hope is that as more people in the villages start using them, they will tell their friends. The best way to spread the message is by word of mouth.
How are Saathi pads different from commercially available sanitary napkins?
The biodegradable aspect of Saathi pads is the only difference. All raw material is sourced from India. The pads are manufactured in India. So they are India's first biodegradable and compostable sanitary pads. We want them to look and feel the same as other popular non-biodegradabale brands and so we spent a lot of time on R&D to make that happen.
How are Saathi pads manufactured? What is your manufacturing capacity?
We designed all our own equipment and set up our manufacturing unit in Ahmedabad. We can manufacture about a 100,000 pads a month. We are planning to increase that by 20-30 times. We are only selling and distributing pads in rural India through our NGO partner, Ekal Vidyalaya. They run 50,000 schools in rural villages in India, so we are selling the pads to the NGO. They distribute them in the villages.
We are giving banana farmers additional income, because they can now sell the by-products of the stem to us, instead of disposing it as waste. We also provide employment to eight women.
What kind of reaction or feedback did you get from rural women?
The feedback has been very positive. The absorbency is slightly higher than that of traditional pads, mainly because banana fibre is more absorbent. They have also said that the product is very comfortable. Surprisingly, a lot of people care that it is fully natural and there are no chemicals. The feedback is that it looks and feels like a very popular brand and there is the additional benefit that it is more absorbent and they are not creating waste. You can burn them, you can bury them or you can compost them.
How do you plan to compete against commercially available sanitary napkins?
There is a lot of data that says that India is ranked number one in terms of countries trying to go green and trying to become biodegradable and reduce waste. With efforts like Swachh Bharat, the Indian government has vowed to reduce waste.
The feedback has been extremely positive and the number of people reaching out to buy our products has been overwhelmingly positive. The Indian market is more than 40 billion pads a year. So, if you are trying to provide sanitary napkins to every menstruating woman in India, you will need 40 billion pads a year. Last year, seven to eight billion pads were sold. The market is huge and no one player is going to be able to win the entire market.
We want to do two to three million pads a month to start with. That means, even in a year we will only produce 30-40 million pads, so there is room for multiple players. We hope to be the leader in the biodegradable eco-friendly space.
How environment-friendly are these pads?
Our pads do not create any waste since they are fully biodegradable. If you bury them, they completely disintegrate within six months. You can actually compost them and use them for fertiliser in farms.
How sustainable is your manufacturing unit?
We do not have any waste because we use up all the raw material. Any raw material that is not used is recycled.
Will this be your core and only product? Any R&D on any other women's hygiene products?
We are only doing sanitary pads now. In future, there are two things we want to do. We want to look at using other naturally available fibre. In India, banana fibre is common and there is no shortage, but what if we want to expand beyond India and take it to Africa, South East Asia and South America? Banana fibre may not be available everywhere. We want to be able to use locally available fibre like coconut, bamboo and sugarcane. Secondly, we want to expand our product line to diapers, maternal pads and incontinence pads. We want to expand our materials as well as the product line.
What was the initial seed money? Where did that come from?
It was all through grants. A part of it came from a number of small business plan competitions and we won the Harvard Business School new venture competition, which was US$ 50,000. We also won the MIT D-lab fellowship for US$ 20,000 and a number of other smaller grants. We used the initial US$ 100,000 to start.
What challenges did you face while establishing your startup in India?
What we did itself was a challenge. I speak Hindi, as I am an Indian American, but Grace and Kristin do not. Hiring, setting up a supply chain, setting up manufacturing was more a question of what challenges we did not face. There were a lot of challenges in setting up a supply chain. How were we to make sure that we get consistent high quality raw material? How could we ensure that our product is of high quality? How do we do road distribution because it would be too hard for us to go to the end customer? So, finding the right NGO partner, hiring capable people and designing the product were also challenges. We actually designed a fully biodegradable and compostable pad that we are proud of and that we want people to use. We are the biggest critics of our own products, so getting to a point where we were happy and had a product that I would want to use took nearly two years of R&D.
How many people are employed in your office?
We have a factory manager, eight factory workers and seven employees at Saathi.
What is it like to manage a set-up with more women than men?
All the women are hard working. We have never had any issues. They appreciate the products and they have been great workers.
How do you think International Women's Day will help the cause of women?
It is that one day of the year when every woman ought to pause and think. What are the different things that have helped women to get where they are? What are the things still lacking for other women who are not as privileged? What can we do to give them access to all those products and services that can help them? It is a day when everyone should pause and reflect on how we can make sure every woman has every opportunity to succeed.
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