The Challenge
How might we channel the feminist ethos of Geek Girl culture to tackle period shame for young girls?
The Outcome
Monthly delivery service for period products and manga comic books
What It Is
Mighty Moon is a subscription-based tampon and comic delivery service for geek girls. It combats period shame among young girls, and encourage them to embrace menstruation from a young age. Mighty Moon’s tampons, carriers, and comics empower the users by turning their experience of menstruation from something they dread to something they look forward to, from something they hide to something they show, and from something that disgusts them to something that delights them.
How It Works
Every four weeks, Mighty Moon delivers a box containing a customized assortment of light-to-heavy flow tampons, a tampon carrier, panty liners, and a new issue of the Mighty Moon comic. The comic book features the adventures of the protagonist Mika—a high-school student who transforms herself into a superhero to combat villains who terrorize her city. The villains are personifications of patriarchal forces that women face daily, and the issues are entitled: “Attack of Mansplainer,” “Bropriation of the City,” and “The Revenge of Manterrupter.”
Just as one would eagerly await the next issue of a comic book, users of this service will actually look forward to having their periods so that they can receive both a box of tampons along with Mighty Moon’s original monthly comic series.
Conspicuous Design
The feminist ethos of the comic runs throughout the product experience of Mighty Moon. The unboxing experience for all its products—delivery box, tampon packaging, panty liner packaging—emulates a powerful "ripping gesture" that Mika uses when transforming into a superhero. The tampon carrier is shaped like the weapon that Mika uses to fight villains, and the conspicuousness of both the carrier and the box transforms the user's relationship with their periods from something they hide to one that they show.
Designing for Delight
Mighty Moon’s products are designed to make the experience of using tampons delightful. The engravings on the applicators turn viewing menstrual blood into a magical experience as the engraved areas absorb blood and reveal the brand pattern. The applicator overturns the perception of menstrual blood from something that is annoying, gross or even dirty, to something that the user is delighted to see and experience.
Also, a select few of the applicators have an engraving of a heart instead of the pattern—randomly mixed in with the regular tampons—which users receive only once in a blue moon. When the user receives the "heart" applicator, she is encouraged to post the picture of it with the hashtag, #luckymoon.
Together, Mighty Moon’s product lineup of tampons, carriers, and comics empower the users by turning the experience of menstruation from something they dread to something they look forward to; from something they hide to something they show; and from something that disgusts them to something that delights them.
User Research
Part1. Market Research
Researching information about the geek girl demographic revealed many surprising statistics. My teammates and I were curious to know what attracted geek girls to the subculture.
50% of attendees at comic cons under 30 are women (NYCC 2016)
70% of attendees named shopping as topic motivation. Most fans spend $100-$500 per event
67% of female attendees come in costumes; 30% of those women claim cosplay is primary interest while 55% of male attendees never cosplay.
Part 2. Interviewing Geek Girls
Conversations with geek girls led us to an unexpected insight that many geek girls were drawn to manga and anime for their untraditional gender roles. The female characters in these media were not princesses who needed to be rescued, but strong and complicated personalities who grew as they fought their ways through their journeys. Furthermore, as another geek girl noted, femininity is sometimes portrayed as power in manga, so power does not have to be that of stereotypical gender-bending one, and even “strawberry colored products can kick ass.” These insights informed the aforementioned feminist ethos of Mighty Moon as well as the choice to use colors more traditionally associated with girls such as pink.
Part 3. User Journey - Sanitary Products
The second round of user research took the form of co-creation. The team members created a set of cards illustrating each step in using a sanitary product, and asked users to line them up in order that they use the products. This exercise showed that there was much variety to the ways in which users preferred to use the products, like that some prefer to dispose of the used products first while others waited until they prepared the new ones. Despite this variety, the stories that the users shared revealed two common insights: many users reported that they like to use the packaging from the new product to wrap the used products to throw away, and many more identified taking the sanitary product to the bathroom as the point in the user journey that is most stigmatized. For so many users, walking around with a sanitary product in their hand was an embarrassing one where they felt that they would need to hide it up their sleeve or in a special pouch.
“I would hide a tampon up my sleeve when going to the bathroom, so no one sees.”
