For the second time Roslyn Campbell is using alternative finance to advance her business.
I've never asked myself whether I need a vagina costume until this week when I came across Roslyn Campbell's crowdfunding campaign for her business Tsuno.
The initiative is to raise money for a new line of bamboo-fibre tampons that are more environmentally friendly than regular ones.
For just $300 you, too, can own one of the incredible outfits pictured in today's story. At the other end of the scale you could simply make a $5 pledge because you believe in the project. In between these amounts you can make a pledge in exchange for a tampon delivery – as long as Campbell reaches her $45,000 target.
If she gets there she will have enough money to order a shipping container full of bamboo-fibre tampons. If she doesn't reach the target she gets nothing.
The crowdfunding model has worked before for Campbell and she thinks it will this time too. In 2014 she raised an initial $40,000 through a crowdfunding campaign to order a shipping container of bamboo-fibre sanitary pads that was the start of the business.
"I was just out of university and I had this idea but no money. I contacted manufacturers and found out a minimum order is $40,000 for the pads. I had nothing to lose, so I decided to run a crowdfunding campaign and pre-sell them. That was a success and from that I've got a beautiful community of customers.
Tsuno is run as a social enterprise and 50 per cent of its profits go to charities that support women. One of these charities is One Girl, which helps educate women in Sierra Leone. Campbell heard a story that girls would not come to school when they had their period, subsequently fall behind and sometimes leave school entirely because they could not afford sanitary products. It was a wake-up call and one of the reasons Campbell set up Tsuno.
But it's been a hard slog since her first successful crowdfunding campaign. Campbell survived on her savings for the first year. When that ran out she started paying herself a wage of about $400 a week to cover living expenses. She still largely runs the business by herself. "Sometimes I can afford to pay other people to help me. I recently started paying a bookkeeper," she says.
Since the initial crowdfunding campaign Campbell has been able to buy another shipping container and has expanded into Britain. Production of the pads is outsourced to a manufacturer in China, but the tampons will be made in Australia.
Chinese manufacturing has many upsides and Campbell says she has few concerns about being able to scale up her business. "It took me eight months' preparation to make my first order, and then two months to run the crowdfunding campaign. Then after they received my order they took just two hours to make it."
In Australia, Campbell works with a Victorian distributor and has plans for national distribution. She's stocked in independent and organic grocery stores.
Campbell acknowledges she will likely need external investment to grow the business. "I've proven there's demand for the products and it has potential but it needs investment to scale."
She credits the support of her customer base as the reason she's so passionate about her business.
"They believe in the concept and support me. Crowdfunding is an alternative business model. If you don't have the funds to make it happen, it's definitely a really good way to test an idea to see if it's a product people want. But it has to be a quality product people need. If it's no good they're going to buy it once because of the concept; they're not going to buy it again if it doesn't work. Building a community of people who believe in the idea is essential to keep a social enterprise going, but that's the same as any business."
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