GladRags Gab

We love to hear from our customers!

Read what Teresa from Oakland, CA had to say about her experience with GladRags: 

"Hi! I just wanted to fire off a quick testimonial. GladRags are a wonderful product on a number of levels. I am a new customer and have been using GladRags for about 3 months now. I am delighted that I am no longer putting disposable products into the environment, and I feel that the use of your product has improved my health and my comfort when having a period as well. The design is genius and well-executed; and you're absolutely right about cold water soaking doing the job, much to my amazement! And, it really isn't a lot of extra work. In just 3 months I've developed a simple routine to keep things flowing (please excuse the bad pun). The biggest challenge was finding a place in my small apartment to put the soaking container ! Thank you so much for working out this "technology" so that it was there and pretty well perfected by the time I was looking for it! Good work!"

Thanks Teresa! 

Dan is our monthly friend for June. He's been my best friend since my days at UCLA. And yeah, he's a guy, but guys can be monthly GladRags friends too (see Oct 07 newsletter).  Dan is a hiker, camper, wilderness loving, city dwelling, college professor, and is an all around brilliant and funny man. While I know he would be passively pro-GladRags even if he didn't know me, because he does know and love me, he is a very vocal GladRags advocate.  He guerrilla markets for GladRags  by asking for them in every natural foods market in New England. And if you have dinner at his house (he's a great cook), you can be sure that sometime during dinner, he'll get out his GladRags brochures and demo pads and educate you about the virtures of reusables. (This has disconcerted more than a few unsuspecting guests).  After a few martinis, he's been known to throw on some tighty-whiteys over his jeans so he can show exactly how they work!  He's our East Coast Rep extraordinaire! 

We've got some new faces at GladRags these days. One of the great benefits of owning the GladRags business is meeting great customers and getting to work with amazing women.  Elizabeth and Tanya continue the tradition of GladRags employees being forward thinking, trail blazing, interesting women.

Elizabeth grew up in California's Bay Area. She moved to Portland, Oregon to attend Reed College in 2002. Since graduating with a BA in Anthropology, in addition to working for GladRags, Elizabeth has led groups for teenage survivors of domestic violence and organized books at the public library. Her interests include: learning, music, art where animals wearing clothing is featured prominently, gender studies, road trips, and Anthropological theory. This summer Elizabeth is joining other activists as part of a bicycle caravan for reproductive justice called Wanderlust where she’ll ride from New Orleans to New York. Elizabeth loves working for GladRags because she gets to help create more positivity around our cycles.

Tanya moved to Portland late summer 2007 from Boulder, Colorado where she had worked for Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy (a great place to purchase GladRags products!) for the past two and some odd years.  A graduate of The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington in 2005, she has wanted to move back to the Pacific Northwest since leaving the area.  Her interests include but are not limited to making and appreciating all art, especially visual art, biking around Portland, friends, bars, concerts, gardens, fish tanks, traveling and languages. She has always been a passionate bleeder and has been dealing with her menstruation alternatively as well as sharing her knowledge with her peers since late high school.  She can’t really remember what inspired her to do so, but she thinks it might have had something to do with common sense and the book Cunt by Inga Muscio. She is really excited for the opportunity to work for a small, local, proud-to-be-bleeding company such as GladRags and it ready to give it her all.

Dear GladRags.

 I've been a customer for seven years. I came across my first GladRags pad in high school while dusting shelves at the Knoxville Community Food Co-op (in Tennessee). After a few weeks, I braved up enough to try the Keeper. I've never looked back to plastic and paper since!  Meanwhile, I've seen Glad Rags products appear at a wider variety of stores, and found that more and more of my friends already know about alternative menstrual products before I launch into my self-inspired sales pitch.

This July, I'm leading a 2-hour discussion about women's lives and bodies for young women at the Southeast Unitarian Universalist Summer Institute in Radford, Virginia. SUUSI is a week-long intergenerational camp for UUs (and other quirky folks), and I've been going since I was a kid. This is my first year on Young Adult staff, and I'm looking forward to building a supportive community for other women ages 18-25. Much of the year, we cope with anti-woman advertising, strict gender roles, and sexual harassment, but SUUSI is a time for us to decompress, share hugs, and build friendships that are amazingly intense for only a week. The discussion is called Wonder Woman; meanwhile the guys have their own discussion called He-Manery.(he-he)

I'm writing to ask whether you can provide any materials for the discussion. I was delighted to find a lot of great links at your website that I'll be tapping into for discussion questions and information. My vision is to talk about some of the major issues young women face in a positive light, and I think having some GladRags around for show-and-tell would give us something concrete to celebrate. I believe that feminism is not at all abstract, and the way we treat our bodies is integrally related to the way we carry ourselves in society. I would love to show women pads and/or cups and sponges as a starting point for hearing their own stories about being women in the (southeastern) US today. Then at the end of the discussion, we would distribute the materials as door prizes. What do you think? Our budget is slim because the camp keeps costs low in order to be affordable, and the young adults don't exactly show up with bulging wallets. If you could provide anything, we would all be grateful (and excited)!

Thank you,

Isabel Call
 

And our answer to Isabel was a resounding "yes!" to her request for materials. We love articulate, caring women like Isabel who share the word about GladRags and other reusable options with other young women. Thanks, Isabel and have fun at camp!