Egal, a Somerville startup, is putting free pads in bathroom stalls inside dispensers that resemble those used for toilet paper in Cambridge Public Schools and elsewhere.
The startup says this solution makes the use of period products more convenient and private.
Today, Egal announced that it has received $1 million in angel funding to launch its products. Besides the Cambridge schools, it’s rolling out its products in the Mother Caroline Academy and Education Center in Boston, as well as some schools in Rhode Island.
The product was invented by Tom Devlin, an MIT engineer who has been working in product development and invention for 30 years. He has applied to patent his product. A few years ago, Devlin’s wife Stephanie Ebbert, a reporter at The Boston Globe, was writing a story about period parity.
“At the time, I was working with absorbent materials and roll form, of all things, on another project,” Devlin said.
One of the comments that came up through the story was that pads should be as accessible as products like toilet paper. Devlin thought, why not design pads to be distributed just like toilet paper? It turns out, he said, no one had done this before.
The products Devlin designed include an in-stall dispenser that resembles a toilet paper dispenser and a roll of 40 pads. The pads are in roll form, have a perforated edge for pulling off individual pads and are wrapped individually.
Once he figured out the design, Devlin asked former coworker Penelope Finnie to lead the company. Finnie and Devlin worked together at Boston-based Sensory Cloud. Before that, Finnie was the chief creative officer for ask.com and started Bittersweet, a chain of chocolate cafes in the Bay Area.
Finnie said she sees a huge need for Egal’s products as more cities, states and countries mandate the availability of free period products. More than a dozen states have passed legislation to ensure free access to period products in schools. Ann Arbor, Michigan, requires free menstrual products in all public restrooms.
“All bodily functions should be treated equally,” Finnie said.
Massachusetts is not one of the states that requires free access to menstrual products, but Finnie said there is proposed legislation in this area.
“There’s a huge push right now to get it. People are pretty confident it’s going to pass,” she said.
While some might think access to menstrual products is largely an issue outside the U.S., Finnie said it is also a problem here.
The Free the Tampon Foundation found that 62% of women were unprepared for their period and needed to make an unplanned trip to the store because they lacked products. The State of the Period study by Thinx and PERIOD found that 25% of U.S. teens surveyed missed class because they had no access to tampons or pads.
One of the “old-school solutions” to this problem is pad and tampon vending machines in bathrooms. Devlin said there are several issues with this solution, including the cost of installing the machine and its location outside of the bathroom stall.
Plus, Finnie said, “I’ve never found one that works.”
Egal provides its dispensers for free and charges for the rolls of pads. Finnie said they sell their products to distributors who then sell the products to schools. The costs usually come out of a janitorial supply budget.
“Really, your startup costs are very little. We were hoping that some schools don’t have to request a budget change. They could just sneak it into their existing budget,” Devlin said.
Egal is conducting pilot programs at the University of New Hampshire, the University of Vermont and Williams College. The company also has its products in use at a private school in the United Kingdom and two schools in Rwanda.
The startup is also looking beyond the education system to sell its products. For example, Finnie said a large auto manufacturer is interested in installing Egal’s dispensers.
“They don’t want their women having to leave the lines to go out to CVS or whatever,” Finnie said.
In schools where their products are already installed, Finnie said they’ve received positive feedback. The school nurse at a pilot school in Rwanda texted her to say that having menstrual products available reduced students’ anxiety about coming to school because they knew the menstrual products would always be there.
“And that’s the bottom line. Imagine if you didn’t have toilet paper? That’s kind of the thing to equate it to,” Finnie said. “What if there wasn’t toilet paper and you had to worry about that every day?”
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A previous version of this story misstated the status of Egal's patent application.
