HelloFlo Launches a Tampon Subscription Service

My wife's mind boggles that so much money is spent on this stuff when you can buy a menstrual cup every year or two and face almost none of the cons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstrual_cup .. I wonder if this is one of those "the industry doesn't want this to happen" dealies. (Disclaimer: I do not have a vagina so don't have direct experience, but she raves about it.)

And a big HN welcome to the Pets.com of the second internet bubble!

I'm skeptical about the real usefulness of this service, simply because I just don't think it could match the timeliness or efficiency of the current distributions model. Right now you can buy these products in literally every convenience store, gas-station, drug store, supermarket and warehouse store in the country (ordered roughly by decreasing unit cost & decreasing convenience).

With a 'tailored' delivery service, you're always going to end up with too many at the end a month - in which case you might as well have bought a big box from a supermarket or Costco/Amazon at a fraction of the unit cost, or you'll end up with too few - in which case you will have to urgently overpay at the convenience store or gas station anyway.

The margin on this business must be very thin. I assume they are just buying the tampons wholesale and then reselling them on a subscription basis. At the same time the barrier to entry for this type of business seems very small which ultimately means that the margin gets squeezed even more.

It would be interesting to know what value added services they can provide to increase their margin.

Small shout-out to my friends at Juniper [1] who run the same business and did not get techcrunched. As the article says, a little competition probably isn't bad in a large market like this.

[1] http://www.getjuniper.com/

Definitely need this in the UK. I can't understand why, but my partner HATES buying tampons in the supermarket, the amount of times I've had to pick them up on my way home is countless. It's a normal part of being a woman, there is no prejudice women.

Any women here who don't mind sharing why this is so embarrassing for the alike?

This has a male equivalent as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUG9qYTJMsI

It can only be a matter of time until tons of these subscription services are consolidated in a single place. You can already subscribe to products on Amazon, although often the minimum quantity is still so high that a quarterly rather than monthly subscription makes sense. I'm kind of waiting for a subscription-box-as-a-service company to come along, tell you that you can create the custom subscription box of your choice and one you hit X number of subscribers they'll fulfill it for you and you'll get a cut.

The other way I could see this going is towards a content play, where they start out with a tampons subscription but really it is a play to gain mindshare from women about feminine issues and create a media/brand company. Given the interview with the founder I don't think this is her vision right now, but it is definitely a direction she could go.

I have a vagina, but as a West Coast woman surrounded by liberal-minded people and no period in over 5 years (tell your wives and girlfriends about Mirena) I might just be too disconnected from the "pain" of the customer in this case.

I just showed this to my girlfriend and she was like "wtf would I need that for?". Seeing that in our basement we have like a pallet of tampons and pads I understand her. Buying this stuff in mass just seems cheaper and smarter.

Why would you use this service instead of subscribing on Amazon?

I'd bet that men would also purchase this for their girlfriends/wives, so they don't ever have to go to the store :)

File this under ideas I wished I would have thought of....

Lynn Tao, here, CEO of Juniper (www.getjuniper.com). I figure I’ll chime in and address some of the questions and comments here:

1. Yes, the majority of the women I’ve talked to have thought that we have a brilliant idea.

2. Why not just buy from Amazon subscribe and save? Of the women we talked to, many have little insight into how much they use. This is not because they’re dumb — if I were to ask you how many bottles of shampoo you use in any given month or year, you can probably estimate, but you may be off. That’s something you use on a daily basis. A box of tampons is something you use every 28 days — estimating how and when to tell Amazon to deliver that seems trivial, but in practice, one ends up with either a shortage or more likely, backlog. Inconvenient.

3. This leads me to my next point: why is this a tech culture vs a culture culture issue? Because tampons are needed by different women on different cycles. You can use paypal or shopify or maybe even an esty store to deliver this type of thing once a box. To actually get it to the set-it-and-forget-it state, and scale it up, you’d need to invest in infrastructure that’s a bit more involved than an internal wiki. Tampon delivery and Late should never be in the same sentence together. We comp all the Juniper boxes that are delivered even one day late.

4. Why not just buy a huge box? Like someone already said – there’s a space issue. Some women, my self included, like to switch between different products during the course of a period, which means they have to buy different bulky boxes that has to take up a lot of space. Again, inconvenient. Juniper eliminates that need.

5. While some women are embarrassed to buy it, that’s not the biggest pain point. My customers are not timid girls, they’re women. However, being busy women, it’s inconvenient to not have them when you need them the most, and convenient stores only carry a limited number of brands, Walgreens and big-box stores will carry more brands but consumer still have to go to them. In Manhattan, there’s a drug store on every corner, in other cities and towns it’s not the case.

6. re: Gourmet snacks and Tampons being a weird combination to ship: Our customers love that they get to savor high quality treats around the time of the month when it feels extra stressful. Our treats rotate every month to feature something new, so there’s a surprise element to it as well. A good surprise.

7. Washable tampons? Unlike pads, tampons go into a sensitive ph-balanced body cavity. Washing it and reinserting it may introduce bacteria into that cavity and cause infections and even TSS. Diva cups are wash-and-reuseable, and some women love them. However, other women are used to pads or tampons and simply do not prefer them, even if they like the concept.

Bottom line: Yes, chuckle worthy subject. But this is far from trivial. Half of the population has to deal with a monthly period, and everyone complains about it. If we can have pizza and books delivered to us, why not tampons? I could go into a fem-empowerment rant on why we didn’t have this service earlier, but it’s 9am on the west coast and I have to go run a company now.

I thought of doing something similar in the UK. I was also looking at the use of Jersey as they let you send (or used to) packages under £15 vat free.

I think the only way you could make money would be to create your own brand, but I'm guessing (as a man) that this would be an area susceptible to brand loyalty, or at least to not using unknown brands.