How it all started

You may be wondering why we launched The SuPer Project.

Surely we don’t have period poverty in the UK? Aren’t there already companies doing reusable menstrual products?

But aren’t reusable menstrual products kinda gross??

Toni Jarvis has been sewing since childhood and has been teaching people to sew through Tiger Community Enterprise CIC for years.

It was at one of these classes (pre-pandemic) that women were repeatedly asking to learn how to make reusable menstrual pads.

Following up on these requests, Toni took some time to do research, design a pattern and source specialist materials that would be effective but also easy for her sewers to learn how to make. With this pattern she even hosted a few workshops at Shop Zero, a Nottingham based Zero Waste shop.

At this point Toni had the idea to create a project that would give away reusable menstrual products to those in need, but wasn’t sure how it would work.

The potential production costs, combined with the material costs, would make the menstrual products really expensive.

Then the pandemic happened….

During the pandemic Tiger Community Enterprise took over the coordination of the Nottingham For The Love of Scrubs group and made over 33,000 items for the frontline in Nottinghamshire.

This meant that our brief delve into reusable menstrual products got shelved.

However, as the pandemic eased off and we began to think about where we would go next, Mel started looking at how we could take what we learned from the pandemic and merge it into future projects.

We gained a lot of sewing volunteers during the pandemic who wanted to continue to help the community post-covid.

This meant one of the biggest costs - production - could be covered by our volunteers.

That would allow us to have a buy one give one scheme for our menstrual products, while still keeping the retail price of menstrual products at an accessible cost.

Mel also began researching period poverty in the UK and was appalled to discover that period poverty had grown astronomically throughout the pandemic.

Mel was so shocked and inspired that combined with Toni’s menstrual pad design, the SuPer Project was born.

The SuPer Project officially launched in May 2021 and has continued to grow ever since.

We have donated 100’s of reusable menstrual products within Nottingham, including to young girls, refugees and families on low incomes.

We continue to grow there project and aim to be doing more education as we head into 2023.