Before starting a high school project, Aimee Marks hadn’t thought much about the tampons and pads she was using at that time of the month.
But the Year 12 graphic design assignment to reinvent a common supermarket product opened her eyes to what was going into tampons and inspired her to start her own organic tampon business.
On Mamamia’s Lady Startup podcast, Marks – the founder of The TOM Co – explained how her business idea came about.
Listen to Aimee Marks, Founder of The TOM Co, talk to Rachel Corbett about how she turned an idea she had in high school into 2017s Australian Organic Business of the Year. Post continues.
“We were told to go into our local supermarket, in our graphic design class, and find a product category that hadn’t been changed in over 10 years that we could innovate something miraculous within,” she told host Rachel Corbett.
“Of course I found myself standing in front of the tampon aisle thinking, ‘there’s a lot of sameness here’.”
Aimee said that at first, she wasn’t trying to reinvent the product itself, just the packaging.
“That was really from a superficial packaging perspective, where it was all just pink and blue at that time.”
“I was inspired by creating something that was beautiful and empowering and would really just break down that taboo around periods and menstruation.”
However, through this design process, something startling caught Aimee’s eye: the ingredients list.
“I was reading ingredients like polypropylene, synthetics. I had no idea that most tampons were actually made from everything but cotton.”
