Words: Lara Pacillo // Main photo: Chi Catalano
If you think you might’ve seen someone dressed in a giant tampon costume on North Terrace recently, we can confirm this — yes, you did.
The costume wearer was 23-year-old entrepreneur Eloise Hall, who is the co-founder of menstrual health social enterprise TABOO.
The dress-up was a part of her mission to end period poverty in Australia and break down the stigma surrounding menstruation.
“We do some real wacky media and marketing campaigns,” Eloise says.
“Sometimes you need to come at it in a really confronting way to open up discussion.”
TABOO sells pads and tampons that are made with certified organic and ethically sourced cotton, which can be purchased from OTR stores, National Pharmacies, and Foodland stores across the state, as well as online.
All net profits are dedicated to eradicating period poverty, with Eloise’s goal to end period poverty in Australia by 2030.
Period poverty is an experience where someone is unable to afford menstrual care products or doesn’t have access to resources to manage their period, such as disposal facilities.
It acts as a significant obstacle to health and comfort and holds people back from participating in general day-to-day activities.
While it’s a big issue in many developing countries, period poverty also hits close to home. A 2021 report by Helen Connolly, Commissioner for Children and Young People in South Australia, revealed that one in four girls experience barriers in accessing period products, affecting their school attendance.
“They might use things like chucks, sponges, or rippings of old clothes,” Eloise says.
“We initially thought Australia’s so well off and so well resourced that surely it’s not a problem here, but the further we dug, the more pertinent we realised period poverty was.”
In 2016, Eloise was in her final year of school when she and her best friend Isobel Marshall became aware of how big of an issue period poverty was in Australia.
They were intrigued by the concept of a social enterprise business model and how it used commercial strategies to address social and environmental issues.
“I guess we were really shocked that nothing like that existed already with menstrual care and also started to learn how under-discussed the topic was,” Eloise says.
“It really highlighted how stigmatised menstruation still is, even in the market of selling period products.”
The girls had to wait until Eloise’s 18th birthday to register their business name, and then TABOO was born from there.
Eloise is now the sole owner of TABOO. In February 2023, she won the EY 2023 Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the Impact Entrepreneurship category.
TABOO has sold tens of thousands of pad and tampon boxes, and from those sales, about 4,000 boxes of pads have been donated to people who are experiencing period poverty through the Pad it Forward Program.
The program works through a subscription model where people can purchase TABOO products on behalf of someone at risk of period poverty for $7 a month.
TABOO then distributes these to 16 partner organisations, such as Vinnies Women’s Crisis Centre, providing period products directly to those in need.
“We have partnerships with homeless shelters, rural Aboriginal health clinics, and domestic violence services,” Eloise says.
“Period poverty commonly has greater ramifications for those population groups who are already marginalised, as it exacerbates the inequalities experienced by these groups.”
For both environmental and health reasons, TABOO products are organic and made with ethically sourced cotton, unlike most other products on the market.
In particular, health issues with synthetic plastic tampons stem from a material they use known as viscose rayon, which is pretty much microplastics that are absorbed easily into the blood having a harmful effect on the body.
TABOO’s focus this year is to provide education so more people are aware of not only the health implications of nonorganic products, but to offer knowledge on period management and encourage conversation on period poverty.
“I’m not trying to push an agenda on anyone, but it really does make people think about why they’re so uncomfortable about something so simple and so human,” Eloise says.
“There’s also a lot of discussion to go ahead about whose responsibility it actually is to provide period products.
“In ending period poverty, there’s lot of work to be done, but it’s really quite exciting and achievable.”
Subscribe to TABOO’s Pad it Forward program here.
