Aruna's Blog

Business Showcase

Preparing for this was a little of a rush, but it was straightforward. We had much to share about the past 5 months and putting them together was a good team activity. I hoped for us to practise more because presentations make me nervous but otherwise I believe it went smoothly.

Customer reviews

Since we started sales, a few of our customers have had the opportunity to use it and they have written back to me saying that they wished they could have started sooner. That was really satisfying to hear, and it prompted to think how to get customers to write reviews. How do we incorporate it on the website? That's some homework for me to do.

Blog

Deen wrote 2 drafts some time back, and I have been trying to edit it, but was always distracted by some more urgent task. This is an issue I faced so many times that I think we need to be more structured in our way of planning things. All for our us are spontaneous sort of people; which makes it difficult to organise things in a more deliberately organised manner.

Una Brands

Someone from this company approached us recently on multiple platforms (personal email, Dawn Cups email, LinkedIn chat, Dawn Cups website). It seems like an exciting opportunity for us to look into regional expansion or to even get some funding. We were surprised to be reached by them rather insistently, which makes it clear that they are quite keen on meeting with us. Upon researching the company, we found out that they had just received some Series A funding and are expanding. Here are 2 screenshots on what they have to offer:

Google Business Profile

The setup of our Business Profile is complete, and this makes us google-able on even Google Maps though we don't have a location. Our product is also viewable there and there's a 'Buy' action that links to our website's product page. If future customers were to give reviews, they could do so here. This helped pushed our website to be the first search result for a search of "dawn cups".

We are also going to activate the ad and make use of the $75 dollar credit to push our website to appear under more generic searches.

TikTok

This week was my first exposure to creating a TikTok video! Though some functions were intuitive, it was a bit of a struggle because there are some restrictions that come with a Business TikTok account. We did 3 videos and will be posting them over the following week.

Atome

I have begun liaising with Atome to offer a 3-month installment payment plan for our younger audience (women aged between 18-25; the minimum age for Atome is 18). I hope it could be activated by the time we push out the "Try with a buddy" (the name TBC) campaign.

Future

I have started thinking a lot about how I want to take Dawn Cups further after the module ends. Unfortunately, since the end of October, we spent way too long doing the basic things of setting up a business. December could have been utilised better, but that's too bad.

First, I want Dawn Cups to have a proper print packaging (using the kraft boxes and stickers is a temporary thing) to prevent us from looking amateurish. I'm also considering seeking brand consultation (I find our brand incredibly messy, and that's my fault because I am always working in a rush) and hire someone part-time to be a Social Media Manager for TikTok videos and Instagram reels. I also wish to do another product photoshoot, but professionally, with a hired photographer.

Next, I'd like to proceed with the school engagement plan, but to start at a junior college level and kick that into full swing, which is why I wanted to activate Atome as soon as possible. Currently, with my internship on, it'll be hard to do the school engagement thing, but once I get a permanent job, I can take half days on these engagement days. Eventually, I could hire and train some young post N / A-level students or university students who wish to earn an extra buck. I'm not sure if we have to register our company as an MOE enrichment instructor if we were to give 'presentations' or 'talks' or 'menstrual health education' to schools. I'd have to check on that.

I'm really not sure what the rest of the team's plans are. Rama seems keen on continuing, while the other two, not as much. I would like to spend a bit to develop the business to feel legitimate to our customers, especially if we wish to target younger girls in the future, and I don't think the team would take that well.

Micro-influencers are going to be so crucial for our social media as well. I plan for Dawn Cups to be more aggressive on finding KOLs to collaborate with.

Perhaps, by the year-end mark, it would be time to take the business to media, with the school engagement as an angle. The dream is to show a proud statistic of how many pads we have diverted from ending up as plastic waste on our website and in our media outreach.

IG

I have taken over Instagram management completely, from conceptualisation, design, captions and scheduling, which has been quite time-consuming. I have also run a very simple ad for 3 days to direct more clicks to the website. Engagement continues to be low and we really need more followers too.

Unfortunately, the influencers who have agreed to work with us will be putting up their posts later than we would have liked due to the timing of their menstrual cycles. However, I believe continuous collaborations with influencers (and other small businsses) will enable us to have a bigger reach and gain more followers. We just have to keep working hard to seek more influencers (after we sort out a technical issue we faced while sending out messages). I realised that pictures with people on them receive better engagement - so perhaps doing collaborative posts with some nano-influencers can effectively help expand our following.

I want to run an IG (and maybe TikTok) campaign before the module ends: it's not a full-fledged idea yet but something along the line of "get a cup with your best friend and take the journey together". Based on customer interactions and people I have been reaching out to try the cup, I've noticed that most people love the concept and are intrigued. But it stops there. They mention that they're either too daunted to try, or that they need time to process and digest to learn more information and gather some courage to do it. All of these reasons are completely fair and aren't excuses at all; the menstrual cup IS intimidating for young women who haven't even tried tampons before. This is why I wanted to try a campaign where they get to do it with their friend. Instead of just running an ad campaign, I think we should also try to reach girls who are close friends (or sisters or cousins; doesn't matter), and get them to buy together. And then we can form a Telegram group with just the 2 girls and an experienced user to talk them through the first few attempts. This would properly work well with our target group.

Logistics

There has been a few hiccups to do with polymailers and delivery, so some of my time was spent trying to sort that out with Rama and Deen. After some basic research, I instructed Deen to look into using Ninja Van, because it has decent prices and numerous convenient drop-off points for parcels. We shall be ironing out our operational workflow later this week. Until then, Rama has been doing the packing and delivery through SingPost.

Website

I made some reorganisation of our website: I improved the home page, added more informative pictures to the product page and added a "Benefits" page to highlight how a menstrual cup works with some images. I've also added buttons everywhere and make sure that at any page, there's something prompting them to proceed to 'Shop' or at least engage with us in some way.

Inventory management and finances

Regrettably, since I have so much to do, I have not been paying much attention to the 'admin' side of things. For example, the way we track our cashflow is quite simplistic, and aside from our main product, the Dawn Cup, we don't track other miscellaneous items and log things down properly. For example, it completely skipped my mind that PayPal and Stripe (as payment processors) take a percentage of the payment for their services. I forgot to log that as an expense. Rama said he would look into this once we have sorted out courier service and delivery workflow.

Leadership

As usual, there's a lot of pushing, calling for updates and reminding that needs to be done. Fortunately, there is considerably less friction between me and the rest since we met to do the product photoshoot. Whenever things are moving too slowly, I just try to get less upset about it and get someone else to take over or finish the task myself. I realised that I should have been a more decisive leader from the beginning and set very clear roles for everyone (then again, I've only just met this team and it's a huge emotional commitment to run a business together).

Pop-up store

Nila managed to secure an opportunity to set up a pop-up store at NTU for a few days, which is another mode of outreach to NTU students. We shall be displaying our product, some accessories, packaging, our flyers, and 4 posters (1 with a QR code). We are selling at a discount at the store – only available to NTU students. I designed the posters:

IG

I've begun experimenting with a different tone in our posts. Reposting tweets, writing memes and sharing relatable jokes / affirmations about period struggles and menstrual cups. For example, the second post is a trending meme from Euphoria (a popular TV series that just released a new season). We have been getting new engagement from people who aren't originally our followers with these posts, which is a good sign. I shall continue experimenting.

Influencer marketing

With our compiled list of influencers on Instagram, we have started sending out messages as Dawn Cups – a new brand venture, which wants to empower young females in Singapore into experiencing better period care – for potential collaborations. We are targeting those with below 10k and between 10-20k followers with healthy post engagement (500-1000+ likes and active comments), because that's what we can afford at the moment. Also, it ties in well with our brand – one that offers an intimate product, where successful conversions work best if experienced with friends. So we're interested in influencers who have a tight-knit community of followers that are largely made up of their friends and friends of friends.

I came up with a deck of slides presented to the first nano-influencer who agreed to collaborate with us:

Printing output

Another disappointment I had faced was that the stickers, cards and flyers we sent for printing came up significantly darker. I should have asked for a test print first and made adjustments accordingly. I also wonder if I should have gone to a printing place that I have always used and of which I'm sure of the quality. It's really not worth it to skimp on this just to save some bucks.

IG
Engagement of our posts has gone down tremendously this week as the starting buzz dwindled. We're hoping that our shift in content topic will help with this.

Consultation with Roderick and Lili

I was slightly discouraged after this consultation as I believed we were going in the right direction for building a brand that was suitable and relatable to our target audience. But we learnt that it's still a bit vague and there isn't such a strong brand voice yet – both in terms of content and manner of engagement.

We know that we want to target 17-25 years old, and if it spills below or above by ~3 years of age, that's okay too. The reason is simple; it's the audience that is accessible to us right now and is the best way to gain a foothold. This age group loves organic content and short, funny videos – the best placement for this is TikTok and IG stories & reels. We have not posted any videos so far because we haven't had the chance to make any yet. In terms of visuals, I think the current look and feel is not too bad. We used young models for our photography that reflect the appropriate age group of our target audience. Our pictures in IG and our website are vibrant, welcoming and light. They aren't edgy but they pop. I'm not too sure about the copy though. Maybe those are a little generic and not captivating enough. At the moment, I am not too sure how to improve them but I have started examining many accounts that have younger followers and seeing how they do it.

I find this aspect of marketing really difficult because I need to try very hard to separate my personal preferences and biases and put myself in the shoes of our target audience to gauge what they would like to see. Though the way I've designed things so far is no way close to my personal style, I'm wondering if I'm missing out something. Should I make the content less aesthetic and perhaps louder? Should we interview random young females who have interesting pursuits in their lives and feature them to show our support in girls and young women? Should we shift our focus from the convenience / simplicity / comfort of this mode of period care and move towards stories? Should our tone change? Previously, we kept a neutral tone because even though our target audience is 17-25 and the bold, explorative type, technically any female can buy our product so it has to be kept open to cater to all ages and sensibilities.

For example, I was thinking about doing a series of stories and a post about the female hymen and the surrounding myths that impact the uptake of menstrual cups. I wasn't sure if it would be too inappropriate for our more conservative audiences.

Sick

I fell ill a few days ago and missed one of the meetings (I really wanted them to proceed and get things done without me). I didn't manage to make much progress in rethinking the brand direction as a result and didn't participate in our group discussion for it. From what I understood, the 3 of them came up with ideas for the following week's IG posts and stories with less focus on menstrual cups and more on general relatable period posts. The issue here is they're great with suggesting a direction or ideas for content / print collaterals / actually most things, but I've never seen them execute them to fruition a single time so far (for e.g. coming up with the actual posts, plan how exactly it should look like, writing the copy text, timeline for everything). I really hope that they put in the work of concretising the ideas into actionable tasks and proceed to do them. Rama and Deen are currently in the process of brainstorming for TikTok videos. A Telegram channel will also be created soon by Rama. However, getting people to join and engaging them consistently will be challenging to maintain.

Hall flyers

Another angle we are definitely proceeding with is hall flyers – which I just finished designing (see below). NTU students are within our reach and we should take advantage of that. We shall be printing these in A6 and slipping them under doors of female residents, during the week of 7-11 Feb and also leaving the same flyers at 'A Better Flow' booth. (I haven't included Telegram yet because we haven't created it or come up with a solid plan for it yet).

Consultation with a Digital Marketing Expert

On Wednesday, we had a 1-hour consultation with a Digital Market Expert from Sephora, Nadia, with whom Ferozdeen linked us (it's his sister-in-law). We asked her advice on our branding, increasing content engagement, Instagram ads and SEO. It was very valuable, and upon her feedback, I started tweaking the content strategy for IG.

Our posts are now going to be more explicit on the benefits Dawn Cups can provide, instead of being aesthetic. Though they aren't super informative, they still answer the basic questions that usually arise in a newbie to menstrual cups. We are also shortening our captions such that whatever we need to communicate goes on the post itself.

She also gave us some tips on the website, saying that it's hard to access to product / shop page directly. Thus, I've modified the website temporarily to shift more focus to the product (than from the company and what we do). Another useful tip she gave us was to see the source code of other successful brands and try to use similar keywords in the metadata to help boost our SEO ranking.

Google Business Profile

On a side note, I created a Google Business Profile (verified, but still processing) so that our business is "on the Google map". Now, Google Analytics is connected to our Squarespace, so we can do more advanced tracking. Upon signing up, we received a promotion of spend 45 SGD for 75 SGD Google Ads credit, which we are tempted to try just to learn how it works.

Influencers
I've instructed Rama and Deen to compile a list of microinfluencers and content creators (the aim is at least 100), whom we will contact next week in the hopes that at least 2-3 will respond. I thought that the following groups will be relevant to our brand (as their lifestyle would require the convenience that Dawn Cups can provide):

• Makeup artists

• Dancers

• Athletes

• Air hostesses

• Lifestyle influencers

• Female empowerment / environmental activism related influencers

Unfortunately, one of us contracted COVID this week and has sadly fallen ill, and all of us may have been exposed. To take precaution, we will not be meeting physically this week as we initially planned to.

Sales

The most important thing it all boils down to - sales! I have set up a quota for each of us to sell within our social circles (famously dubbed as 'friends and family'). The idea is that while we know we can exhaust this group of potential customers quickly and not sell well beyond that (like how most MiE businesses end up), we need time to build a reliable brand before strangers can trust to purchase from us or before reaching out to KOLs / organisations like schools. It's also due to the very personal nature of our product - it always helps for someone who has experience in using it to realise how beneficial a menstrual cup is and then share about it with their immediate circles. I want us to reach out to our female friends (and even interested acquaintances) to learn and try it out for themselves before we seek their support to spread the word. With them, we can compile a sufficient starting number of reviews that could bolster our reliability.

By the end of Februrary, the following is our individual quota to sell within our social circles:

1) Aruna - 17
2) Nila - 8 (because Nila is not local)
3) Rama - 5 (harder for a guy to sell a highly personal feminine hygiene product)
4) Ferozdeen - 5 (same reason as Rama)
Total: 35

As a conservative goal, we would be quite happy with making 5 sales outside our social circles by the beginning of March, through pure marketing (both digital and physical) and brand awareness.

SEO/SEM

After using some free tools to understand the SEO analytics of our website and reading tips on improving it, I added relevant names and descriptive alt text to most of the images on the website, and ensured that certain key phrases have some markup tags (bold, italic) on them. I also incorporated keywords such as "Singapore" and "menstrual cup" in each page's SEO description as much as possible. In the following week, I'll be creating a new page 'Blog' to have regular new content to improve SEO as well. (Deen has helped come up with a first draft of a blog post, but it will require some editing to be more copy-friendly.) Our people in our mailing list will receive emails that will be linked to these blog posts (when we have a sizeable enough mailing list).

According to a few free extensions and websites that can assess SEO, the Page Speed (loading) scores very low, especially for mobile. I believe this is attributed to our large image sizes. When I have more time, I am planning to reduce the size of images and (re)upload them. If there were other reasons, I could not find them so far. Rama will help by looking deeper into this.

Consultation

Deen has coordinated with a relative of his - a Digital Marketing executive from Sephora - who has agreed to provide us some tips on IG ads. Hopefully, she can help provide some inspiration for our social media marketing strategy.

Instruction booklet

This is taking a considerable amount of time as I want it to be thorough and really helpful to the user. I am in the midst of designing diagram-like images (corresponding to our branding guidelines) that can help provide visual aid to user to comprehend the steps better.

Leadership

This week had been really horrible as I had clashes with everyone due to different problems presenting in the team, such as horrible lack of punctuality, forgetting of tasks, lack of clarification and other communication issues. I think I have been feeling a growing sense of dissatisfaction that there is an insufficient sense of urgency amongst my team mates while I'm overworked on the other hand. Consequently, my patience grew thin and I began using harsher tones or stopped taking effort to hide my frustration when expectations are not met. I'm not sure how I could have handled things better to encourage people to take better charge, do more and be more considerate of others' time – when we are already lagging behind in our targets. However, Deen has been stepping up lately and been trying to be more proactive, which I appreciate.

Support

On a lighter note, many of my friends (and distant acquaintances) poured in with their support when we did a soft launch on Instagram, which was highly encouraging. Of course, this is just a beginning and the real challenge is to attract strangers to strive for their sales conversions.

Website Construction

I spent a lot of time on the website to make it look effortless – every single evening after my internship hours. Personally, I'm still not satisfied; I'm hoping to improve the "How to use" page with more graphics to make it look less wordy and more friendly. Of course, we need more product pictures but our current version should suffice for a soft launch.

Back to full swing

The December lull has come to an end and it's time to rally the team together to push for a robust digital marketing strategy (Facebook/IG ads, SEO). Learning it in theory and applying it are definitely different but by the end of this month, I aim for all four of us to be well-versed with the basics.

Content creation (See exploration of ideas below)

I've started on content creation, but we have not started posting them yet. Nila will be assisting me here with planning the calendar, scheduling of posts and monitoring the analytics.

Email marketing

Coupled with setting up the website, I had been exploring the different automations for email marketing integrations with Squarespace. Rama had set up MailChimp and together, we are testing a few pathways – a welcome email after subscribing, checkout emails, gift card emails (for the gift card recipient), 'Your cart is waiting' email, etc.

Packaging

Unfortunately, in this area, I have not been pulling my weight enough and we need to find a cost effective solution as soon as possible. I'm also working on the printed guides that will go together with the packaging.

To put it bluntly, time management is a bi***.

Outdoor Photoshoot

This was the first time I had to direct a photography shoot, so I was extremely nervous. Our shoot depended on good weather and was time-sensitive because we wanted to shoot at dawn and use the morning light. I had a vision but executing it is another thing altogether. Without Nila (who has the interest and an eye for such things - she's in India), it was challenging to plan it (especially making creative decisions alone). Fortunately, our 3 muses and another friend who came along to assist were extremely easy to work with and were really accommodating. It went very smoothly without major hiccups. The first draft of pictures of the shoot looked really good as well. It's exciting to see things shaping up well.

Once I have the retouched photos from our photographer, the pre-launch website will be good to go in a couple of days. Currently, I am scouring the net for good Lightroom presets that we may be able to apply to our photos. Though the photographer is doing a great job with the post processing, I was hoping to explore further to achieve a consistent unique visual identity which may be the first baby step to establishing brand recognition. We would be ready to make our social media soft launch very soon after as well.

Upcoming indoor photoshoot

The next photoshoot will be scheduled early January, for our 'Shop' page and social media content. We're purchasing a few things (e.g. props) for the shoot (to create the 'colouful studio' effect), and Rama is looking into product shoot techniques. We may rent a camera and some lighting equipment for this shoot and do it by ourselves; or get a less established photographer who can do it at a lower cost.

Video interview with WKW's 'A Better Flow' Team

As a part of our efforts in helping one another, I agreed to participate in a video interview about menstrual cup usage as part of A Better Flow's educational content. I was interviewed with another female NTU student who has not tried the cup before but is open to learning, and I shared my experiences and some tips during the interview. When they release their video in January, we shall be sharing it on our social media and embed the video on our website's 'Learn' page.

Leadership

I'm constantly met with disappointment due a detached member, and as the person who got this team together and am sort of leading it, I feel like I am failing to keep the motivation levels healthy or consistent. I never had the confidence to lead a group for longer than a semester sprint because by nature, I like to also get my hands on some quiet work on my own (usually design work, writing, flow state activities) and would like others to take the initiative as fellow entrepreneurs from time to time. My brother, who used to do corporate leadership coaching, told me that in such situations there simply is no choice, and I would have to delegate simple, straightforward tasks, communicating everything clearly (leaving zero things to ambiguity) to passive members. He advised me to accept that if I have tried everything to encourage active participation, it would perhaps be better to reserve energy and make large decisions with the remaining active members.

Coping with burnout and building stamina

Since our last consultation with Roderick and Adrian, it took us a week to get to a consensus on how to move forward with the decisions we were stuck with. We often back-pedalled back to the same discussions, which was quite draining. Personally, I feel that other members on my team are a little too concerned with appearing to be unique from our competitors by trivial means, which frustrated me quite a bit.

We also had other problems in the past weeks. Since only Rama, Nila and myself are putting in money for this business and we had spent a large chunk of it on the cups themselves, we all had to work to make sure we have enough cash to get by. As we have limited capital, there were many disagreements on where to save costs as well. Ferozdeen had also started his internship; and that kept us all extremely busy. To merely organise virtual meetings and ensure that they were fruitful took much effort. After working during the day, we were simply drained to spend time and energy on Dawn Cups in the evenings or at night. This made me appreciate or understand why entrepreneurs have a higher chance of success only if they focused most of their energy on their venture. Pursuing their venture on top of a day-job is not sustainable at all, especially when every partner is doing it. Ideally, I would have ensured that my team would have a balanced amount of commitments, but I didn't have the luxury of doing that while forming this team. Hence, during this period, I suffered a serious burnout for a short bit and had hoped my peers would lead the topics in that time. Progress was thus very slow.

Now, I am still experiencing an immense feeling of being drained, but I am trying my best to get things going these days. It's really tough. I recently spoke to a friend who has a business about team management and communicating with absent/unmotivated/stubborn members, and I realised I had to control my overt frustration better and be more empathetic. Over this month, I also learnt a very important thing: to be okay with losing some battles and not be overly controlling over creative decisions. On top of that, I also had to accept that, like in every university project, not all members would be putting in equal effort.

Now to the tangible things achieved these few weeks:

POUCHES
We are now in the midst of awaiting the order of pouches that will go along with menstrual cups. Nila is helping liaise with our supplier, while I designed the print (front and back in our brand colours):

WEBSITE
We switched to Squarespace because it's a far more efficient website builder and it's cheaper. I'm hoping to launch the website by New Year.

PHOTOSHOOT
Rama and I have organised 2 photoshoots. One is an outdoor shoot that is going to be carried out this weekend on Boxing Day. We got 3 young women to assist us as models and are hiring a professional photographer for the shoot. These pictures shall be used for our website, social media content and digital marketing.

The second shoot will be held on another day (TBC) indoors; it is purely a product photography shoot for our 'Shop' page and social media content (of course). This will be held after our pouches arrive.

Here are the mood boards for our outdoor and indoor shoots (respectively)!

CONTENT CREATION
Deen had gathered research for our educational content that we have just started converting into bite-sized content. He helped find some inspiration from the existing brands as well.

I'm very excited for the photoshoots and the launch of our website. Hopefully, these events and little steps forward would give the momentum to start the new year with more gusto and tenacity.

Post-presentation discussion

What is the next step?

• Administrative stuff to settle: Email domain formation, registration of Dawn Cups as LLP

• Supplier search (Wholesale cup, cloth pouch, steam steriliser)

• Market survey

• Branding development (logo, colour scheme, typography rules)

• Setting up a basic landing page using Webflow

I'll be handling LLP registration, branding development, and setting up a landing page for the next week or so.

Deen and Rama will be working on the supplier search, while Nila will be working on the Market survey.

We're pivoting away from 2-in-1 steriliser/carry-on pouch and are looking into steam steriliser and a cheap linen/cotton pouch as 2 separate products. The reason is we now think that we do not have the luxury of time to design this 2-in-1 product in December for it to be ready by January. Hopefully, the steriliser will pan out without too much risk to electrical safety. We have to be very careful about it. If the risk or cost is too high, we may have to look into selling the basic package: menstrual + small cloth pouch.

You can reach us at info@dawncups.com!

2-9 Oct: Forming our team & finalising our idea

The weekend of the 2nd was intensely pressurising as I had to fight and struggle to find a group from a batch that I'd never met before. In the end, I couldn't just 'join' any group but had to become responsible for a new one, and a very small one at that.

Over the next week, we had a few online and offline meetings to explore a few more ideas before deciding to go with menstrual cups. I had always been passionate about menstrual cups, but I was also afraid because it's a venture that would need a very heavy, diverse and well-thought out level of marketing - and by the looks of it, our team was severely lacking in manpower to be able to carry that. However, Nila and Rama were thankfully optimistic and inspired some confidence that we will be able to do it. Ferozdeen needed a bit more convincing, but his constant questioning was useful in filling in gaps that I hadn't considered yet.

By the end of the first week, it became clear to me that our team was able to work together quite well, considering we had never interacted with each other before. We had to bond and learn to trust each other very quickly, as there was barely enough time to do our research, and prepare for the report and presentation. Another thing became clear to me. I think this team trusts me to be their unofficial leader, and I am glad that they believe in me. I found myself leading the discussions, planning the direction forward and delegating tasks. However, I hope that I will not be required to do that at all times.

One of the biggest challenges was finding our unique selling point, as they are so many brands out there, trying to do exactly what we're hoping to achieve. Another was to determine our target segments, given the risks we face, and think of practical ways of reaching out them. Also, as we were a small team, we have a limited amount of starting capital and I foresee that we have to compromise our future opportunities because of that. One thing I was determined about was to be absolutely practical about the feasibility of our venture and our sales projections. Rama, who oversaw that section, was of similar mind.

9-16 Oct: Developing the idea & working on the report + website

9-16th October was a mad rush. School assignments, coupled with writing the content for the report, were draining. Since I took MiE 3 years ago, I couldn't remember some of the theories and had to look them up again. I led the direction in planning the organisation of the report and helping everyone with pointers - which they used to expand and explore deeper ideas. Everyone pitched in well to do their parts. Nila and I bounce off each others' ideas rather well. Deen was very detailed for his parts and did his due diligence to substantiate everything properly. Rama was good at facilitating discussions whenever there is a misunderstanding of points between the others. He often acts as the voice of reason.

I wish we had one more team member to ease the workload. Or I wish we had more time. I didn't want our group to fare significantly worse than the other two groups. Something about my interactions with both groups stirred the competitiveness deeply in me. This venture is going to be extremely challenging. I foresee that I will be responsible for a lot of the marketing efforts. However, I am ecstatic for the opportunity to work on this topic. When I first tried the menstrual cup in 2018, I wrote a blog post on Medium - which converted around 8 women in total, and more were intrigued (even called or messaged me to ask me questions). This makes me believe that women in Singapore are ready; they just need to be aware of such a product and guided through the process. They need a community. I hope our efforts can create this space for such women.

Based on the feedback we received after our presentation, I think that the best way forward may be for Dawn Cups to be a private label business with a suitable manufacturer from US. We have yet to find out how much that would cost us, but I think this is the best way to get the products as soon as possible to avoid the logistical and credibility risks by engaging a Chinese manufacturer or wholesaler.

Personally, over the next two weeks, I plan for our group to finalise our supplier options, and for me to get started on the UX design and branding development. I hope for the UX to be the most optimal journey for them to learn about menstrual health, join our channels and purchase the cups.