How one menstrual care brand keeps the business profitable yet sustainable

Conferences come and go, but the lessons we learn at them (sometimes) stay with us.

At the Porte conference that we told you all about a few weeks ago, for instance, Nadya Okamoto, co-founder of sustainable menstrual care brand August, had many such lessons to impart, including on how she scales the business while keeping sustainability in mind.

Previously, Okamoto told us about how she thinks about sustainability and creating products while communicating with the brand’s community. This time, we have compiled more from the Gen Z founder on keeping the business profitable and environmentally responsible.

On competing with other businesses

There are more sustainable products—whether that be menstrual cups or menstrual discs—that are coming out. But in order to be a profitable business, we have to grow at scale. We raised quite a bit of VC money. We have expectations for growth. At the end of the day, I have worked with other reusable period care brands that introduced a great product, but it wasn’t adopted because nobody knows how to use it. And we still are dealing with so much stigma on using reusables. So I think from the very beginning, it was like, ‘How do we make products that people will actually use? And how do we communicate the sustainability component so that it’s understandable?’

On doing its due diligence and scaling the business

One of the things that really came up for us as we were building the company was that we do so much work around inspection, third-party due diligence on supply chain or otherwise, talking about the difference of synthetic versus not talking about organic cotton production. Those are things we do because it’s aligned with our values to be more sustainable. The majority of the efforts that we take to be more sustainable, we don’t communicate, because it’s really fucking confusing.

I think that a huge part of our goal is we have a team on product development; we have our own fundraising plan for that product development. In order to sustain as a business, we have to grow at scale. The way that we do that is introducing products that even if someone doesn’t understand why they’re more sustainable, they’re just a better product, and they’re cuter. They’re more exciting to have. There’s more of a community around it. I am a Gen Z consumer. I care about sustainability. I hate cardboard straws. I think that’s what we think about a lot: “Let’s actually make sustainable products that people use and people understand.”

On communicating its goals around sustainability to Gen Z

I do think that Gen Z consumers are very concerned about the climate crisis, but they are very impatient about taking the time to understand what that actually means and how what you’re consuming kind of ladders up to that. We also have to recognize that we live in an attention economy, where the average Gen Z attention span is shorter than a fucking goldfish. That doesn’t mean that you can’t capture their prolonged attention. But you have a few seconds to convince them to just stay and binge-watch your content. In those first seconds, I’m talking about like, I don’t even know, like some terms that I don’t understand. A lot of it is just about how do you make it entertaining, the first little bit entertaining and interesting, and use that as a Trojan horse to do that education.

For us, a very small product change we made was that the pad wrappers are compostable. But people don’t actually hang on to that word “compostable.” Instead, we just show that if you put it in hot water, it immediately melts. We talked about how it gets millions of views and then we keep people in, by just really…I don’t wanna say “dumbing down,” but making the language more accessible, but also making it fun and exciting to look at. So, one of the things I think we’ve done really well is engaged user-generated content, where we have fan pages; 14-year-old girls who we’ve never met before who have an account that says “August fanpage.” And they’re just doing all their unboxings. And they love the brand. When they talk about and promote the brand, they don’t go into sustainability. All they say is, “This is actually sustainable.” I don’t think that they’re curious to really understand what that even means. But I think that shows the value of brand trust, like we really show up and follow through with our actions.