August is a U.S.-based lifestyle brand that offers hygiene, pads, and tampons in personalized subscription cartons. August is focused on making sustainable products accessible to women in every period and building an inclusive brand. A few days ago, t

August is a U.S.-based lifestyle brand that offers hygiene, pads, and tampons in personalized subscription cartons. August is focused on making sustainable products accessible to women in every period and building an inclusive brand. A few days ago, the brand's COO and co-founder Nick Jain revealed more about how the company expresses its values through its packaging.

Familiar product, sustainable packaging

For August, sustainability and traceability go hand in hand. The material used to wrap the brand's sanitary pads "is a biodegradable bioplastic". In this case, "biodegradability means that they degrade as fast as 216 hours when exposed to specific conditions."

However, according to Nick Jain, "there are no real-world landfill conditions or composting conditions that meet the conditions for accelerated time" to decompose the primary packaging of sanitary napkins. After researching "to figure out how exactly those 216 accelerated hours correspond to real-world conditions," Jain is confident that the wrappers "will definitely biodegrade within 12 months."

As for the disposal of wrapping paper, in the US and Canada, which are also currently the only regions where August products are available, the main waste stream "is a typical landfill." Jain points out that "technically there's nothing wrong with composting them, but they don't enrich the compostable value in any way," making the wrappers not considered fully compostable. This is what the company is trying to achieve: "Having a product certified as compostable is something we care a lot about".

Importantly, August is focused on providing customers with sustainable products that are not only transparent but accessible. In the menstrual care industry, sustainability narratives often revolve around reusable products like menstrual cups, but according to August research, “over 98% of women use tampons and pads during their periods”.

"Sustainability innovation is great, but if it's only applied to 2 percent of the population, it's obviously a much smaller impact than creating something more sustainable in terms of actually impacting the overall environment," Jain explain. However, single-use pads and tampons can carry unfair shame or guilt about their environmental impact, and the responsibility often rests with consumers rather than companies, even though for some menstruating people, alternatives are impossible of.

There are many reasons to choose certain period products over others during your period. Conditions such as endometriosis and vaginismus, for example, can make using products such as menstrual cups difficult or painful, which can also come with higher up-front costs and additional care requirements.

Incorporating sustainable elements into August's sanitary napkin packaging can help customers reduce their environmental impact without compromising functionality or changing their existing routines. By taking environmental responsibility, August aims to ensure that no woman is left out of sustainable period products due to unfamiliarity or uncertainty during their menstrual period – a factor that significantly affects the actual sustainability of products across industries .

Out-of-the-box period care products

Another important factor in August's prospects as a company is personalization, which relates to its secondary and tertiary packaging. The primary way August's pads, pads and tampons reach customers is through subscription cartons.

Jain explained that the main reason for this is customer research: "We hear people over and over again that I don't want to go to the store and buy 36 tampons and 36 pads because I probably only need 8 of them. For Gen Z, August's demographics primarily target that traveling for work or education before the pandemic meant people "don't necessarily know where they'll be next month and don't want to have to store hundreds of units. products.” They wanted a way to customize their period care to meet their needs without having to buy excessive quantities. "

On August's website, customers can "make a carton" with the type and amount of tampons, pads and pads they need, and then "every month or every three months there will be a Cardboard boxes delivered to their door."

August's products are packaged in cartons, with sanitary napkins, tampons and pads all available in different sizes, which can then be packed compactly within cartons and shipped in cartons without the need for other forms of void filling and allowing for resource-efficient transportation.

Speaking of cartons. Again, transparency is key, Jain warns that "not all of our packaging is post-consumer recycled", in part because "it's really hard to track when material is post-consumer recycled or just recycled", and that the The company did not want to make false claims. Still, "mostly recycled material".

"We try to source our packaging locally," adds Jain. The secondary packaging cartons used to package sanitary napkins, pads and tampons come from the countries in which they are produced: China for sanitary napkins and Germany for tampons. As for the tertiary packaging on the outside, it's made in New Jersey "about an hour from where we ship everything out" from the company's Pennsylvania warehouse. "Those cartons are standard corrugated packaging," Jain said, and are recyclable.

These cartons are an important part of August's overall sustainability strategy: "Our goal is to be carbon neutral, and we will not pass the cost on to our customers. The substantial expenditure on carbon is something we care deeply about and have actively worked to bring It’s incorporated into everything we do” — including considering where the packaging comes from and how far it travels with the product.

A brand built on experience

August's packaging design is also important in the care space. “We very intentionally made them look simple,” Jain said of the corrugated boxes used to ship August products. While the company places great emphasis on eliminating stigma and empowering menstrual periods, "a certain degree of caution is also required in this area."

"The outside of the corrugated box is completely brown," with no indication of what's inside when the product is in transit or when it arrives at someone's door. This is because some menstruating men "may not want everyone to know what it is, or in some cases, they will have their period". For Jain, it is important to ensure that August protects the privacy of its users.

Part of this protection also means considering the images and colors used for the packaging itself. "Products like this need to stop being gendered," Jain said. "When we look at our generation and the generations after us, we're starting to see that there's really a big demand."

The pad wrapper is simply emblazoned with the August brand's logo, the "A" in the company's signature font. The lack of gender imagery, such as the gold star symbol removed from Always's packaging in 2019, was intentional by August, but was an easy decision by Jain and his co-founder Naja Okamoto because "this is our value system and core part of the brand ethos".

As for color, the legacy product industry has a history of eschewing red. For example, the first commercial to use red rather than blue liquid when showing the absorbency of sanitary napkins only aired in the UK in 2017. This can take away from the actual function of period products and further stigmatize menstruation, something August is eager to avoid. August's logo is often seen in red, and some of its pads are packaged in burgundy.

According to Jain: “The red color in our packaging is not necessarily a reference to menstrual blood, but again, the idea is that no brands in this period product space are using red in their packaging, they haven’t used theirs The packaging is bold. We're going to be bold, we're going to be authentic, we're going to be honest about how we talk about periods."

"It also means that when it comes to our products, people feel like they can trust them more because we're not trying to hide anything, we're not trying to present in an unrealistic way. Product and our brand honesty.”

Rather than an afterthought or response to criticism, August has built inclusivity into its brand from the start, in part by carefully considering how its packaging makes consumers feel. As such, the brand is built around the experience of menstruation, which is both diverse and personal, rather than regulating or trying to define who menstruation is.

Jain concluded that August developed a product that “could be used comfortably by all menstruating men and would not inherently stigmatize the entire menstrual population by making a product about identity rather than menstruation.”

What's next?

"We're working on improving and changing our pad wrappers to make them more eco-friendly, and we have some exciting updates. Our tampon wrappers are not currently biodegradable, but that's what we're working on."

The company is also considering its locations and what those locations mean for sustainability. The current assumption is that Jain still offers some insight into the process: "If we could add different warehouses across the country. And we ship from different locations, instead of shipping X miles on average."

For now, the company will likely only be headquartered in the US and Canada. But in the future, Jain said, "We're definitely looking forward to the day we expand into Europe and Asia and beyond."