Our brief was ambitious and multi-faceted – to accelerate brand growth in a category where period conversations themselves were taboo. To challenge this, we needed to shine a spotlight on conversations around women’s issues and menstruation, creating tangible change in the process. Our approach was bold – unlocking the opportunity in one taboo to break the shackles of the other - to draw attention to women’s potential and possibilities. We created Project Free Period – an initiative to help women in the sex trade reclaim their agency by turning period days into days of learning. We partnered with leading Mumbai-based anti-trafficking NGOs (Prerana and Aastha Parivaar) and numerous other professionals to craft and deliver a unique curriculum comprising skills that could generate alternative sources of income. These skills, such as embroidery, candle-making, soap-making, threading, and waxing were easy-to-learn and required minimal raw material and storage. It was capsule community learning, with a difference.

We conducted workshops to impart vocational skills that could become alternative sources of income and in turn, helped ignite our students’ confidence in their ability to choose to learn and grow.

Keenly aware of sex workers’ challenges, we developed low-resolution video training modules and distributed free toolkits through partner NGOs to ensure that time, expenses and physical access were never constraints to learning. We wanted to ensure that we could reach out to potential students across the country, wherever they were, even if all they had at their disposal was a feature phone.

With a view to creating conversations, building brand love, and also building a support network for our initiative, we used our social platforms to invite and recruit volunteer trainers, sending out content with provocative calls to action.

We received hundreds of messages with requests to volunteer from across the country. Shortlisted volunteers participated in the workshops & taught with the help of expert professionals

We also put out a word on our social media channels, asking our audience to help us reach out to organizations who would be interested in hosting our classes. This could be done simply by sharing our videos and sending us the name/address of the relevant NGOs - we would send out toolkits, free-of-cost, to the same.

The creative idea challenged every convention around how brand communication should be done and how awareness should be built. Our budgets were not just focused on promotions but actually running the workshops. Putting a marginalized group of women at the heart of our communication was a test of our brand purpose and resolve but also the provocation needed to spark period conversations. Creating tangible change for women in the sex trade was a challenge, and we did it in ways that respected their agency and context, while also adhering to our brand ethos. This reflected in our results – we not only triggered meaningful conversations at scale but also impacted the brand’s sales metrics without relying on a single sales message.