Lynn Tao, here, CEO of Juniper (www.getjuniper.com). I figure I’ll chime in and address some of the questions and comments here:<p>1. Yes, the majority of the women I’ve talked to have thought that we have a brilliant idea.<p>2. Why not just buy from Amazon subscribe and save? Of the women we talked to, many have little insight into how much they use. This is not because they’re dumb — if I were to ask you how many bottles of shampoo you use in any given month or year, you can probably estimate, but you may be off. That’s something you use on a daily basis. A box of tampons is something you use every 28 days — estimating how and when to tell Amazon to deliver that seems trivial, but in practice, one ends up with either a shortage or more likely, backlog. Inconvenient.<p>3. This leads me to my next point: why is this a tech culture vs a culture culture issue? Because tampons are needed by different women on different cycles. You can use paypal or shopify or maybe even an esty store to deliver this type of thing once a box. To actually get it to the set-it-and-forget-it state, and scale it up, you’d need to invest in infrastructure that’s a bit more involved than an internal wiki. Tampon delivery and Late should never be in the same sentence together. We comp all the Juniper boxes that are delivered even one day late.<p>4. Why not just buy a huge box? Like someone already said – there’s a space issue. Some women, my self included, like to switch between different products during the course of a period, which means they have to buy different bulky boxes that has to take up a lot of space. Again, inconvenient. Juniper eliminates that need.<p>5. While some women are embarrassed to buy it, that’s not the biggest pain point. My customers are not timid girls, they’re women. However, being busy women, it’s inconvenient to not have them when you need them the most, and convenient stores only carry a limited number of brands, Walgreens and big-box stores will carry more brands but consumer still have to go to them. In Manhattan, there’s a drug store on every corner, in other cities and towns it’s not the case.<p>6. re: Gourmet snacks and Tampons being a weird combination to ship: Our customers love that they get to savor high quality treats around the time of the month when it feels extra stressful. Our treats rotate every month to feature something new, so there’s a surprise element to it as well. A good surprise.<p>7. Washable tampons? Unlike pads, tampons go into a sensitive ph-balanced body cavity. Washing it and reinserting it may introduce bacteria into that cavity and cause infections and even TSS. Diva cups are wash-and-reuseable, and some women love them. However, other women are used to pads or tampons and simply do not prefer them, even if they like the concept.<p>Bottom line: Yes, chuckle worthy subject. But this is far from trivial. Half of the population has to deal with a monthly period, and everyone complains about it. If we can have pizza and books delivered to us, why not tampons? I could go into a fem-empowerment rant on why we didn’t have this service earlier, but it’s 9am on the west coast and I have to go run a company now.