Two Rags
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Founding Story
Phaemie
Ng
Two Rags Clothing
, NSW, Sydney
, XX
Less than a year
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I woke up one day and found out my period had started during the night. Reaching out for a sanitary pad, I suddenly asked myself what I'd do if I didn't have any. Like many other girls in the developed world, I had taken my access to sanitary pads and tampons for granted and never stopped to think about how crippling life could be without them. I did some research online and found out that lacking safe sanitary supplies and menstrual education was a real issue for many girls and women worldwide. Schoolgirls would skip school or drop out for fear that they'd stain their uniforms and have nowhere to wash, except in an outhouse in front of their male classmates. So Two Rags was born out of a desire to help girls and women in need.
Sanitation and Hygiene, Supply Chain Micro-entrepreneurs.
Our customers will be youth/Gen Y people like us who are interested in making the world a better place. Through our commerce-funded giving program, we will provide a way for young people to make a tangible change through purchasing underwear they'd buy anyway. We are bringing a way for the everyday person to be philanthropic.
As for the recipients of our sanitary kits, we will identify schools, rural villages and charities to partner with us to distribute kits.
To date, we've confirmed that there is a need and desire for cloth sanitary pads. We are selling trendy women's underwear online and for every underwear sold, we give a sanitary kit to someone in need. Therefore, at this stage we are building our online underwear store in order to start accumulating sanitary kits for distribution. There will be no limit to the number of kits we distribute - the more underwear we sell, the more kits we get to give.
We've also begun identifying ethical partner organisations to work with in order to provide employment to disadvantaged groups.
The fact that we are a for-profit social enterprise will give us some room to scale our activities. We will use part of our sales proceeds to fund our giving, and another part to develop the business.
We strongly believe in supporting local enterprise and want to have our products made by locals, for locals. This means that our underwear and sanitary kits will be produced by ethical Indian workshops for the benefit of fellow Indian citizens.
We want to expand this modem to other countries to help women there by identifying artisan workshops/cooperatives/ethical organisations that can produce something saleable in the developed world, and we will channel proceeds to that country in terms of employment and sanitary kits.
Our business model is a lean for-profit social enterprise. We do not rely on donations or fundraising for our viability. We are online-based, and so have low overheads. Being for-profit, the commerce and philanthropic components of our business are self-sustaining - we only commit to giving a sanitary kit when we make a sale. We can also release new underwear styles at a pace suitable for our growth.
I am also the author of a food blog Raging Cravings. I also ran a US-based online clothing store (now closed) a few years back.