(Bloomberg) -- Two young Swedish women have turned their high-school project into a startup to make headway into tackling period poverty.RedLocker AB, founded by Liza Eriksson and Clara Lidman in 2018, wants to improve menstrual health and access to safe, hygienic period products. It’s best known for its tampon dispensers, bright red devices mounted in bathrooms from schools to businesses that give out products for free.Globally around 500 million people suffer from period poverty, according to the World Bank, and the surging cost of living is exacerbating the situation for those struggling to afford hygiene products. The RedLocker founders want to see period-product dispensers become as normal as toilet paper in public bathrooms. 

RedLocker counts over a third of the companies on Sweden’s large-cap OMX Stockholm 30 index as customers, and has installed the machines in about half of Sweden’s high schools. The plan next is to embark on an international expansion, starting in the Nordic region. “Our founding vision is to drive change,” said Eriksson in an interview. “There’s a wide range of women’s issues we care for deeply.”For Eriksson and Lidman, it’s not just about pads and tampons. Education and activism are central facets of their business, and that influences the firms they work with.“You can’t just put up a dispenser and move on,” Lidman said, explaining they have turned down customers who they sensed weren’t truly engaged in improving things for women. That happened when the would-be clients declined to purchase educational sessions and materials, making RedLocker think they were going to be used for femwashing. The term, similar to greenwashing, refers to attempts to boost environmental, social and governance credentials with surface-level improvements for women without really making a difference.

Eriksson and Lidman, now both 22, first met when they were tasked to start a business together as part of a course in entrepreneurship. Since then, the pair has sold over 3,500 of the bright-red machines. They target 20 million kronor ($1.9 million) in revenue this year, up from 2.5 million in 2021. One of the firms that RedLocker does count as its customer is industrial giant Sandvik AB, Sweden’s sixth largest company by market capitalization. Sandvik has over 100 dispensers places across its sites in the country and plans to start rolling out the solution elsewhere in the world in 2023, it said in response to questions.The tampons are free of charge to users, and are only dispensed every four minutes to prevent abuse. Companies and schools that buy the dispensers can subscribe to RedLocker goods or fill the units with any commercially available products.In the coming weeks, the firm introduce a second iteration of its machine, one which also dispenses menstrual pads, preferred by younger women over tampons, Eriksson and Lidman said.The field is not without challengers. In the US, the firm Aunt Flow has offered a similar, albeit less colorful, dispenser since 2016. In 2021, toilet and hygiene product giant Essity AB introduced a basic display box stacked with the firm’s well-known Libresse brand of menstrual products.RedLocker’s success taps into a wider global discussion over the need — and costs — of menstrual products across the world. A few weeks ago, Spain passed a law allowing people who have painful periods to take “menstrual leave,” in 2020 Scotland had become the first country in the world to offer free sanitary products and in 2019, South Africa removed taxes on tampons and pads, an initiative called for in many other countries.For Lidman, the priority is clear. “We want to lift the responsibility from the individual,” she said.

--With assistance from Rob Dawson.

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