roslyn campbell – tsuno
Small Business
Melbourne, VIC
Tsuno is a social enterprise I started after learning about women and girls living in poverty and the ways their menstrual cycles can affect their lives and ability to stay in school. I created a brand that not only offers a more sustainable disposable option than most current offerings, but Tsuno also contributes 50 per cent of profits from the sale of our pads and tampons to a charity called One Girl, whose mission is to send one million girls in Africa to school. Tsuno aims to minimise plastic used in our products and processes wherever possible, and sources organic cotton for our tampons and sustainable natural bamboo fibre for our pads.
After coming up with the idea for Tsuno in 2013, I needed $40K to purchase the minimum order of pads from my manufacturer, so opted for a crowdfunding campaign to launch the company. It took two months of hustling and had about 1300 people pre-order pads till the $40,000 goal was reached, and Tsuno became a real thing in May 2014. Since then, I’ve managed to get distribution in retail stores in WA, QLD and VIC, the UK, Slovenia and Mauritius, and hope to continue to grow the number of retailers across Australia and internationally.
In 2017 we launched our Tsuno tampons, after overwhelming demand from our customers and another $45K crowdfunding campaign. I run Tsuno predominantly on my own, but recently have the support of Natasha Zeng, who joined Tsuno one day a week last year, and Anita Sharma, who is helping keep the books in order.
On top of this, the products are beautifully packaged. The packaging features different editions of different artists’ work. To date we have featured the work of Erin Lightfoot, Tim Royall, Evi O, Eloise Rapp and Andrew Shaw on our packets of pads and tampons.
