A vision for feminine hygiene

Gauri Singal, the 26-year-old entrepreneur from New Delhi, has taken the mantle of imparting knowledge and importance of feminine hygiene in the society.

She started her company ‘Visionaari’, a portmanteau of Vision and naari (women), and started making FLOH Tampons, to ensure that women stay hassle free during the menstruation periods. The home-grown brand was started by Gauri to foray into convenient and innovative solution in the Indian feminine hygiene market.

Gauri, who did her Masters at London Business School, says, “After completing my Masters I came back to India and joined my family business, which deals in food. However, my interest inclined towards Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) and then I decided to start my own venture. I attended a retail conference, where there was a panel discussion on feminine hygiene, where the senior people in the industry were only talking about the sanitary pads for an hour. And at that moment I realised that there are no other products in the feminine hygiene market.”

“After that, I started researching about it and my company got incorporated in November 2017, and we named it ‘Visionaari’ which is for the visionary women. We wanted the international products to be available to the Indian women.”

Gauri informs that they saw a huge gap in the market, and no one was addressing it. “We wanted to create awareness about tampons. Internationally, the tampon market has the potential to grow upto 60 per cent than the sanitary pads and in India, the market share of tampons is less than one per cent. That’s when we realised that the gap was huge and started working towards it,” she said.

Talking about the challenges she faced in the business she shares, “It’s been a rollercoaster ride and the challenges have been very interesting. Firstly, we had to get our product right as no was manufacturing tampons in India. And hence it took a while for us It took time for us to start the manufacturing process. My family was supportive about this business; initially, it was difficult as it was about menstruation.”

After the doing the research and analysis they made the product available in the market in May 2018 and Gauri informs that they received a good response on the e-commerce platforms.

“The tampons are available on all the e-commerce sites and are also conveniently priced. Costing less than sanitary napkins, a pack of 10 tampons is ranged around 115-120 rupees. When we were launching this product, we thought that only urban consumers would be interested in this, however, we are getting orders from small towns and villages too and that was possible because of the power of e-commerce and logistics that we have in our country today.”

About the future of FLOH, she says, “Till now we are on the digital platform and we are soon planning to expand our business in offline markets too and making the product available across the country. We are also planning to start a new product called ‘Cramp Free’, a period pain relief patch.”