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Stayfree breaks the silence around
periods in Indian families

Stayfree – It's Just a Period

71% of girls start their periods with no knowledge of what’s happening to them and the first lesson they learn is hiding their periods from others, especially from men. With the intent of normalising periods, Stayfree discovered that it wasn’t the young girls that perpetuated period taboos, it was everyone around them – mothers who asked girls to hide, fathers who stayed passive and silent. Collectively, they labelled periods as a woman’s problem, making the period experience isolating and traumatic.

In our decade long partnership with Stayfree, we’ve slowly and steadily built a narrative that normalises the conversation around periods and ends the shame, stigma and taboo that comes with it. We’ve laid great emphasis on bringing men into menstruation even before it begins. When they participate in the first period conversation, a young girl will feel no need to hide and will believe that it’s just a period.

Normalising conversations had a direct impact on Stayfree’s mid-premium segment that’s affordable, accessible and targeted at young girls across India’s small towns. Young girls embraced Stayfree and, for the first time in a decade, Stayfree’s mid-premium variant exceeded the competition.

This Daughter’s Day, talk to your sons

What really pushes the period conversation into the shadows? Where do men learn that periods are a ‘woman’s problem only’? Why do young boys grow into fathers who choose to ignore menstruation entirely?It all starts when adults silence the curious questions of young boys – reinforcing archaic perceptions around menstruation, which turn into lifelong mental barriers. This film urged parents to not silence their sons and encourage them to learn about periods and celebrate daughter’s day in the true sense by saying ‘It’s just a period’.

Dads for Daughters

The fraught relationship with periods starts with the first period conversation when a girl sees only her mother talk about periods, while fathers look the other way. To truly establish that ‘It’s just a period’, we needed to get fathers to have the first period conversation and pass on the message. Since taking the first step to do anything new is always the most difficult, we didn’t convince fathers to talk about it. Rather we created a scenario where father-daughter duos could come and audition for an ad, not knowing it was an ad for Stayfree.

Her period is not hers alone

2 million girls were going to get their first period during the first two months of lockdown in 2020. While home was the safest space in a pandemic, it was isolating for young girls because hiding periods from men was difficult in a shared home with shared bathrooms, triggering anxiety and shame. Our idea reframed periods from a ‘woman’s problem’ to a shared experience of a family who can say ‘It’s just a period’ together.