Miki aghawal was sick of worrying about her tampon leaking. As a soccer player "you can't say, 'Oh, ref, can you stop the game while I get a tampon?' "So she and her sister set out to create a new kind of women's underwear that would absorb two tampons' worth of menstrual fluid without feeling wet. After a few years of tinkering, they'd engineered a prototype that worked-and still looked stylish. They called it Thinx. One challenge remained: How to get investors on board? The vast majority of venture capitalists-90 percent, by one estimate-are men, and menstruation isn't typically high on their list of concerns. "It was incredibly challenging, because people didn't get it," Agrawal says. A decade ago that would have been the end of Thinx. But Agrawal had better options. She mounted a Kickstarter campaign that netted $65,000 and followed it up with an Indiegogo campaign that raised $20,000. In essence, she proved a market existed for Thinx-and investors jumped aboard. The product launched a year ago, and she has already sold hundreds of thousands. A fun success story! But it also heralds an interesting moment: Shifts in how tech is financed and, more crucially, how people talk about it, mean that we're about to see a much-needed boom in products aimed at the needs of women. After all, the appeal of Thinx ought to have been obvious, right? Feminine hygiene products are essential (even though most states don't subsidize them or exempt them from sales tax). American women spend $3 billion a year managing their peri- ods. It's a ginormous market. Yet it had been mostly ignored in the slurry of health tech: "We have a million step trackers and almost nothing for dealing with your period," says Tracey Lindeman, a fellow journalist and friend of mine. As my wired colleague Sarah Zhang has written, that's what happens when you have a disproportionately male VC world. They don't always notice the enormous unmet needs of folks outside their ambit.
展开▼
