Written by: Anna Marešová
It is 2020. Covid is in full swing and we are just finishing our new product – the menstrual cup. Shear. Four years later. Covid is almost a forgotten word, although it is still very much present here and I feel that the events of these last few years have given us all a fair shake.
During that time I gave up several times, I mean business. When the war came and they stopped selling completely, I wanted to lock the vibrators I had in stock at the time and all the ones I like in the basement and somehow wait it all out. But you can't just wait it out, life is not a storm and you have to go through it all and live it. No one is going to make those decisions for you, or often the other things. Despite my personal and professional burnout and physical exhaustion, I decided to go through it all with my head as low as possible and not to worry. I felt like I was in a canner being shaken vigorously and constantly. There was always the question of what it would look like when it was placed back on the table and the contents began to settle. When something started to settle here and there, nothing was the same. The production was on the ruby, the mindset, by that time the workers had also changed, as well as the prices of everything. Over the past two years, I've had 15 people rotate through my company in five positions, which is all I have. So I started over three times. And even though I went full throttle, I "sort of" stood still. I knew that I would simply not give the fourth set any more.
So I tried it differently. I started by organizing the company's system. I had to, I was the only one handing in work there. Then I set up, for example, a set of warehouse management, cleaned all common disks and devoted myself to other similarly pleasant and time-consuming activities, the results of which are not visible, but after a long time they are very noticeable. For the "last submission", I approached the selection of people differently. More professionally, I let myself be guided and chose people for positions and not the other way around. This July, I finally got my whole team together and the new structure is slowly settling in. I moved to the first floor, where I have peace of mind for meetings and work, and I finally started to see ahead. It is true that some things do not go as easily as before, but on the contrary, I have learned to wave my hand over something and I do some things (for example, decisions) a thousand times faster and with unprecedented certainty. During those four years, I lost faith in myself and in what I do for a long time, luckily, I gradually found it again step by step and maybe it is even stronger.
Whoop·de·doo is sold, albeit with less recognition than during the covid era and all costs have multiplied, but this is exactly what will make you do things even better, even more sustainable. You optimize, you invent, and you keep digging. And you know what's the funniest part? I did everything with the first prototype cup, and the great thing is that it still looks the same, still works as well, and still works, and will for a few more years. That's why this year, when we started getting calls from more women who would also like one, but can't afford it for financial reasons, I thought about how to make it so that they could have it too. And so came such a great campaign with an even more wonderful limit and drawing by Lukáš Musil. For every piece of this limited edition sold, we donate another cup to a single woman, and this will save her up to 21,000 CZK in five years. And I am happy about that.
At the same time I realized that period poverty in the Czech Republic is also a consequence of this "shaking situation" and that it may be getting worse, and that it is more than clear that this problem is no longer a problem only in third world countries. And so we want to continue this awareness even after the end of the campaign, we want to support and we want to talk about it.
Thank you very much. Thank you for going with us.
Thank you for being with us all the time.
Anna
And thanks to Lukáš Bíb for these great photos!
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This way to the Donio campaign
