Chapter One
Insert.Co
A speculative venture design project reimagining menstrual care through material innovation, built and pitched as a full business venture over one academic semester.
Role: Strategy, Product Design, Branding
Duration: 4 months
Team: Kate Muldoon, Rucha Kale, Patrick Ortiz, Bisola Folarin, Emma Huang, a cross-disciplinary team spanning Brown and RISD
Advisors: Danny Warshay (business strategy), Julie Sygiel (menstrual health & marketing, founder of Dear Kate), Megan Valanidas (biomaterials), Dr. Sara Vargas (menstrual health research, Brown/Miriam Hospital), Dan Holmander (patent law)
InsertCo was built inside a structured entrepreneurship program, using Danny Warshay's See, Solve, Scale methodology, a three-stage framework for finding, validating, and building around a problem worth solving, rather than starting from a pre-formed solution. The brief was ambitious by design: build a venture capable of reaching $100M in revenue within five years, on paper, with mentorship from advisors connected to Brown, RISD, and Harvard Business School spanning legal, financial, marketing, and business strategy, and pitch the finished venture to a real life investor at the end.
Process
Bottom Up Research
1
Landscape & Market Research
2
Critical Path Product Design
3
Bottom Up Research
The methodology's starting principle is bottom-up research: observing and listening to people describe their actual experience, rather than starting from market data or existing product categories. We deliberately withheld questions about what products people used or preferred, and instead listened for how people described their experience with menstruation itself.
What surfaced, repeatedly and unprompted, was a distinction we hadn't gone looking for: people weren't describing period products in the language of care. They were describing management and concealment, getting through the day without incident, rather than being tended to.
That gap, between what people needed and what the market offered, became the seed of the entire project.
Featured Item One
Describe the service and how customers or clients can benefit from it. This is the place to add a short description with relevant details, like pricing, duration and how to book.
Featured Item Two
Describe the service and how customers or clients can benefit from it. This is the place to add a short description with relevant details, like pricing, duration and how to book.
Featured Item Three
Describe the service and how customers or clients can benefit from it. This is the place to add a short description with relevant details, like pricing, duration and how to book.
Landscape and market research
With the experiential problem named, we layered in top-down research: material composition and associated health risk across every major product category, and the scale of the market itself. Independent research has linked bleached cotton, synthetic superabsorbents, and fragrance chemicals which are standard across mainstream pads and tampons, to toxic shock syndrome, endocrine disruption, and, in third-party lab testing, detectable levels of lead, arsenic, and cadmium. PFAS ("forever chemicals") have been found in both tampons and period underwear, associated with reproductive and hormonal risk. Much of this is undisclosed on packaging as U.S. federal regulation does not mandate full ingredient labeling for menstrual products.
Set against this was a market valued at $25 billion globally, growing at a 5% CAGR, serving over 160 million menstruators in the U.S. alone with most of them changing products three to six times a day, using designs that have been fundamentally unchanged since the 1930s–1950s. This confirmed the problem wasn't singular. Safety, convenience, and access were three separate, compounding failure points, not one fixable defect.
Featured Item One
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Critical path and product design
That exercise produced the wild card: a speculative seven-day insertable called The Insert Super, designed around microbiome balance rather than absorption alone, using antimicrobial peptide coatings and pH-responsive bacterial suppression. I want to be precise about what this claim is: a speculative design target developed in consultation with a biomaterials researcher, not a medically validated device.
Working backward from that endpoint, I designed a three-phase critical path:
Featured Item One
Featured Item Two
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The Insert
A first-generation tampon replacing bleached cotton and rayon with unbleached organic cotton and a seaweed-bioplastic core, engineered specifically to qualify for the FDA's 510(k) exemption pathway as substantially equivalent to existing tampons.
This was a regulatory shortcut that would let the venture enter the market quickly while the flagship product was still in development.
The Insert Plus
The flagship: a 24-hour insertable in seaweed-based bioplastic and bacterial cellulose, both materials already established in wound care for antimicrobial and biocompatible properties. Seaweed-derived polymers such as carrageenan have demonstrated up to 88% wound closure in healing studies; bacterial cellulose has shown up to 90% reduction in bacterial presence compared to synthetic alternatives in medical dressings.
I designed the product's soft, contouring geometry specifically to reduce toxic shock syndrome risk relative to rigid conventional shapes, and to eliminate the need for multiple daily changes.
The Insert Super
The wild card was a "looks-like" speculative concept, not a working prototype, designed to challenge what "period care" could mean rather than to demonstrate how it would function.
Once inserted, it wouldn't just manage blood flow - it would release medication to ease cramps and bloating, and gather health data as an ongoing wellness indicator, functioning as a single, long-duration device that took care of the whole experience of menstruating, not just its byproduct.
My work here extended beyond the object itself: developing the material composition in consultation with Megan Valanidas, a RISD researcher specializing in biomaterials and speculative design; designing packaging and labeling for each phase; and because the team was five people covering an entire venture, sitting in on financial and marketing conversations to make sure design decisions (unit cost, manufacturing feasibility, the specific safety claims we could defensibly make) held up outside the design function alone.
Business model and pitch
The final stage translated the validated direction into a business model: a hybrid go-to-market combining direct-to-consumer e-commerce with retail partnerships (Whole Foods, Erewhon), a phased FDA strategy pairing a fast 510(k) exemption for the entry product with a longer clinical and biocompatibility pathway for the flagship, and financial modeling, built as a course exercise, not validated market traction, projecting $117.9M in Year 5 revenue against a $2M seed raise, 18 months of runway, and a 2.83 LTV/CAC ratio.
The venture was pitched at the close of the program to Aneesha Mehta, then a Partner at Bain Capital Ventures (now Co-Founder of Valspring Capital, a Boston-based healthcare growth equity firm). Her interest in the concept extended past the classroom setting. The venture did not continue past this point.
The biggest shift came after presenting this work to a menstrual activist, researcher and author - Prof. Chris Bobel, whose response reframed the whole direction: even the most innovative product still asks people to hide it. If the stigma and shame around menstruation doesn't move, no amount of material innovation reaches it. That question then was not "what product," but "what changes the social experience", is what the next two chapters take on.
Continue to Chapter 2: Objects as Inquiry