Start Ups & Downs: Reflecting on MOONS' First Year!

Starting a company is hard. It’s hard in ways you can expect (raising capital as a female founder, navigating the FDA, learning patent law). And it’s hard in ways you can’t possibly fathom (the sheer number of emails, the frequency of Post Office runs, the deep emotional labor that comes with a company thesis all about Feelings and Experiences and Taboos.)

When you start a company, you understand (at least intellectually) that, to change anything of significance and to build anything of value is to make yourself uncomfortable, to dig deep into your personal philosophy, and to be chronically exhausted. 

And so you celebrate the wins, like launching during a pandemic, partnering with other female-founded companies to increase product accessibility, being accepted into a cool-ass accelerator program, and getting on Amazon. You thank the universe daily for the brilliant, inspiring, hustling dreamers you now get to meet every single day. You marvel over how much you’re learning. You build a real cute Instagram presence. 

But in between all that—when your website crashes and you send a vital email to the WRONG JULIE and your 2-year-old is sick and you haven’t slept in…a year?...and you’ve bought all the COVID tests at Walgreens and watched your parents age and your friends struggle (to date, to parent, to get pregnant, to get jobs, to get out of bed in the morning…) and a shipment from your manufacturer shows up at your home instead of at your fulfillment partner—you really actually UNDERSTAND what it means when people say “start ups and downs.” 

Because LIVING is hard enough, but starting a company on top of that is…insane. 

Maybe this is a vulnerable and oversharey way to start what should be an end-of-year wrap-up about accomplishments, traction, and sparkling dreams for the future. But our dream for MOONS has always been to both build a brand that inspires and supports and impacts, and to build a company that does those things, too. That behaves on the inside with the same respect and compassion and honesty as it preaches on the outside. That innovates and invests in the future of work culture as much as it does in the future of menstrual culture. 

And to actually do that, we’re pretty sure we have to be vulnerable and open and honest. We have to not gloss over the angst. We have to not reduce tears to “moments of weakness.” We have to tell it like it is, not frame it as we suspect it should look like. 

So we’re modeling the behavior we wish to see in the world. We’re telling our whole end-of-year truths. That 2021 has been a shining beacon of hope and thrill and champagne toast emojis. But like for so many people, it’s also been…all that other stuff, with some tears and cursing in between. 

Our plans for MOONS are big. We want to be in every bathroom in the country. We want to be as common as toilet paper. We want to invent things that make lives better and easier and less lonely. We want to shift language and culture. We want dads to feel comfortable talking about moons, and daughters to feel comfortable asking for what they need from a world built to ignore them. 

Now that we’ve told you our woes, we can more truthfully tell you our promise: that in order to achieve all that, we promise to keep being insane. We promise to keep chasing. We promise to wake up every day and give this company, and in turn, you, a whole lot of our hearts. And most of our energy. 

So, stay tuned. There’s a lot coming. 2022 is going to be a big year for MOONS. It’s terrifying and wonderful and exhausting and electrifying—just as life’s best, most important things tend to be.

With love & gratitude,
- Rachel, Kaity & the MOONS team