Pantys goes from bootstrap business to market leader in reusable absorbent underwear and beyond.
By Emily Ewell
I worked for 15 years in health care starting in strategy consulting. It’s a multi-trillion-dollar business, but it’s also a human right, so it’s an area where you see a lot of technology, innovation, and disruption. At the same time, you have this side of equity and access. And it’s a very complex market. After completing my MBA and master’s in public health at the University of California, Berkeley, I moved to Switzerland and worked with a pharma company there that brought me to Brazil for a project. Brazil has amazing talent and a huge population and is perfect for startups to test, innovate, and create new solutions. I saw it as a special opportunity to leave the corporate space and start something that I really believed in.
As a chemical engineer, I was excited about product innovation. Underwear had other brands in other markets, but at that time, most of the value proposition was focused on leak-proof products — markets where tampons were predominantly the main or preferred use for customers, and menstrual underwear was used in conjunction to help prevent leaks. In Brazil, Latin America, and a lot of other parts of the world — Asia and Southern Europe, for example — 90% of the markets use external menstrual pads, which are the most wasteful and the least comfortable. They can take over 500 years to decompose. The standard ones are usually not made of 100% cotton, so they’re bad for the environment. They’re also expensive as a monthly purchase. I saw an opportunity to design highly absorptive, reusable menstrual underwear that could replace disposable menstrual pads.
Breaking Barriers
We were a bootstrap business. My co-founder, Maria Eduarda Camargo, and I started the company in 2017 in a lean way and said let’s get it to the market and see what happens. We’ve been thankful for our journey, that we’ve been able to grow and scale with the cash flow of the business coming in for the past nearly seven years. We were lucky. We had a strong launch, and there was such an appetite and readiness in the market for this product that it helped quickly validate that the product and timing were good. Fortunately, we continue to grow. We’re the leader in the market here today.
Our product is patented in a number of countries, including the U.S., Brazil, China, and South Africa. As the first brand of its kind in Latin America and beyond being a functional product, we also had to build a movement around it — educate and mobilize the community, create a desirable brand, and do a lot of storytelling. We had to break the taboo — not just around menstruation, because it’s not a topic that many people feel comfortable talking about — but also around trying to build a new product category in a nascent market. We’ve focused a lot on building community and creating that welcoming space where women can have that two-way dialogue versus one way with the brand communicating outward to people.
There is a big psychological barrier in this space specifically around reuse. Women spend decades using the same products — basically whatever their mom gives them, whether it’s a tampon or pad or otherwise — without questioning it. We don’t want to eco-shame, to be like, “You’re doing something bad and you need to change.” It doesn’t work. We focus on the aspirational side, inviting people to make this behavior change in their lives.
Putting Health and Safety First
Because I came from the health care industry, I’ve always viewed the business as a health care business disguised as a lingerie or apparel business. On the outside, our products look like they’re apparel products, but people don’t buy them because they’re underwear or fitness clothes or swimwear. They buy them because they’re functional for a specific health purpose and need. We believe we are the only clinically approved menstrual underwear brand in the world. It was an important process in making sure that we’re not creating harm to consumers. I felt that it was a strong responsibility for us as a brand to design and go through clinical studies to show that we have the same level of safety and efficacy as any menstrual product in the market or better.
We also did quality-of-life studies with our product showing that, for example, three out of four women who use our product forget that they’re menstruating or that they’re on their period, creating a sense of liberty as if it’s a normal day for them — and that’s the ultimate goal. We found a 100% reduction in sleep disturbance, which has a huge impact in terms of productivity and quality of life, and over double a sense of feeling hygienic or clean using Pantys compared to traditional menstrual products. We’ve done a lot of tests on our products around safety and the chemical side. For example, our liner technology doesn’t use silver because many women, especially dermatologically, are allergic to silver. That’s a different view of the business than what we see in the market today.
Disrupting Markets
We’ve focused on a lot of innovations, looking for those gaps in terms of what needs aren’t being met today and how we can disrupt different segments of the market. Now, we have a swim line, a fitness line, a line for first menstruation, a line for trans men who menstruate, and a maternity line. We believe we were the first in the world to launch absorbency-proven nursing bras, which came from a consumer suggestion on Instagram. We have a strong co-creation mindset around innovation with our community. Johnson & Johnson reached out to us to partner on a pharmacy line, helping us to reach more people and have an even greater environmental and social impact.
We started as a digital brand and eventually opened our own physical retail locations in Brazil. Then, we looked at how we can disrupt segments in other markets. We’ve been taking one step at a time with our global expansion, which also is a huge opportunity, because there are so many markets asking for this product, and we already have a robust portfolio. We launched in Selfridges in the UK and Galleries Lafayette in France.
I like to push the envelope on impact. I think about what people are not doing yet that they should be doing and how our brand can create movements to inspire other brands. For example, we were the first known fashion brand in Brazil to launch carbon labels in 2020. They bring more transparency to the consumer and communicate that the product is more sustainable. We hired globally certified carbon assessor WayCarbon and worked with them to define a methodology around creating carbon labeling for apparel in Brazil. It was an amazing self-awareness journey. One thing that surprised me is that a lot of our emissions came from consumer use, specifically chemical-based laundry detergent, which is horrible for the environment. So on our carbon label, we included use and disposal/end of life as well. We did a 360-degree compensation analysis of the product. It inspired us to design a biodegradable, coconut-based laundry detergent with enzymes that break down any natural fluid proteins that absorbed into our liners. That is now one of our bigger product categories after apparel, and it reduces our impact.
I’m hopeful that within a decade, every woman in the world will have a pair of menstrual underwear in her drawer. That’s what we’re focused on making happen.
