We’ve grown a lot as a company. But you won’t see us showing you our “factory” or “warehouse” to demonstrate our success (spoiler: we don’t have those!). What we can show you are the families that we support and the flexible working lifestyles we provide them.
The start of our cloth pad and period underwear business was very modest. It was sewing pads in the living room in our Winnipeg home while watching our baby. When our kids needed me, it was time for a break. As the kids (there are now 2 kids) got older, their needs changed and our work schedules changed with them. Even now that I write this and our kids are 15 and 19 years old, we still take the opportunity to spend time with them when we can and work around their schedules.
Photo above: Crystal working with her sewing machine in our living room over a decade ago.
As our business experienced growth and we needed to find people to work with us, we wanted to maintain this same balance for them. We’ve walked through factories ourselves and, while we understand and appreciate the opportunities that work provides them (and don’t want to discount that), we had the goal to provide a more cheerful and flexible work environment where they could make money and take care of their families at the same time (just like we had).
The sewing of our cloth menstrual pads and period underwear are done at these lovely people’s homes. They can work day or night, weekday or weekend, be interrupted by kids, or whatever happens and they don’t have to worry about tracking time (they are paid by the piece). They can prepare their work environment at home as they wish. Listen to music, watch TV, sit by a window, or set it up however it works for them. We send them bins full of the pieces of material to sew together and they send them back as completed products! All of our products are locally sewn in Winnipeg Manitoba Canada by appreciative working families!
We also brought in help with the fulfilling and shipping of your orders. You might have heard that many companies these days hire Amazon (or similar companies) to fulfill their orders with all their warehouses and robots. In our case, we have a lovely helper in their own home who stores our website’s inventory in her home. She receives your orders electronically and ships your orders within our shipping deadlines and around her family’s schedule. We restock her shelves when inventory gets low (luckily she lives close to us!). Once again, it’s keeping work out of a warehouse and in with a local family!
Everyone who works with us are non-smokers and maintain clean work environments. We all work together to provide high quality products.
Our customer service emails are also handled by our shipping helper who regularly checks your questions and gets back to you. This is particularly good since she knows intimately the status of the orders being sent out.
Your decision to buy cloth pads and period underwear from us supports local working Canadian families rather than paying for call centers, factories, and infrastructure (overseas or domestic).
We thank you for your support! And all of our families thank you too!