Asan launches period tracking app that offers free insights, records environmental footprint
Menstrual cup company Asan has launched the Asan Period Tracker, an app that tracks all aspects of users’ menstrual cycles, moods, and symptoms, and offers free insights. Its environmental tracker enables women to track the carbon footprint of their period products.
In April 2021, Ira Guha launched Asan menstrual cup, patented and designed by the Harvard Innovation Lab.
The menstrual cup, made from medical-grade silicone, features a unique removal ring, making it easier to use than other cups. Each Asan cup is reusable for 10 years and replaces 6,500 sanitary napkins.
The brand is also modelled on “buy one, donate one”; for every cup sold, one is donated to a woman in need, particularly from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, to end period poverty.
Ira is the founder of Asan a menstrual cup brand that for every cup sold, donates one to a woman in need.
Asan has sold over 100,000 cups and is available in 12 countries across Asia, Africa, the UK, and the EU.
In addition to the menstrual cup, Asan launched the Asan Period Tracker app recently. The app, available on The App Store and Google Play, is designed to help women and girls track their menstrual cycles and recognise symptoms that could indicate health issues.
Last year, Asan won two cash awards—the Cartier Women’s Initiative Prize for Social Impact, and the Innovate UK Unlocking Potential award, and saw an opportunity to build something new.
“We look at the community we built, and think what is missing, what can we provide? While working closely with women, we learned that awareness about periods and the woman’s body starts and is concentrated around fertility,” Guha explains.
Indicator of health throughout a woman’s life
Guha points out that until a woman thinks of having children, she does not think of whether periods are regular or her period pain is normal, and even after you have had children, very few talk about menopause.
“Even in the period app space, everything is designed around fertility–how to track your period to get pregnant, when you are ovulating, etc. At Asan, we wanted to make women aware that their periods are an incredible indicator of health throughout their life. Our period tracking app is about all phases of the cycle,” she adds.
It covers all aspects of the menstrual cycle–follicular, ovular, luteal, and menstrual. It enables users to track their moods and symptoms throughout these phases and to easily spot irregularities and anomalies.
The Asan Period Tracker app offers 100% free analytics and insights unlike other apps that charge for this feature and is available free of cost, Guha also reiterates that data is not shared or sold to third parties, and there is no in-app advertising. Users are free to delete their accounts anytime.
The Environmental Tracker on the app enables women to track the carbon footprint of their period products.
“You can track in real-time your carbon footprint, if you switch from pads or tampons not just to the Asan cup, even to cloth pads, period underwear or anything sustainable. It will tell you how much you’ve stopped from going to landfills, money saved, and carbon emissions averted,” she elaborates.
Women-led team
The entire team that developed the app—from software designers and front-end developers to back-end developers are all women. Guha says every person involved thought about themselves while building the app, making it simple and intuitive.
Guha is aiming to engage the large community of Asan Cup users as the app’s first users. In just a few days of launch, the app has already crossed 1,000 downloads. To enhance user experience, every new user of the Cup will be sent an email with a download link to the app.
In the future, Guha hopes to add an AI chatbot to the app to answer health queries.
Social aspect of Asan
Guha shares that the brand has grown across India and internationally. Also, the menstrual cup business focuses on two key areas–the for-profit D2C business and the social impact aspect.
“We sell on Shopify and on Amazon in India, the UK, and EU. We were part of the Amazon sustainability accelerator. We launched a menstrual cup cleanser to sterilise the cup. We also launched a lubricant, making it easier for teens to insert the cup. We are planning to launch other products in this line,” she says.
Asan still adheres to the “buy one, donate one” policy, but Guha says it’s not enough because there are millions of women and girls from low income groups across the world.
“We got some inbound requests from funders, non-profits, and manufacturing institutions with a high percentage of female workers, and pivoted to wholesale where we sell the cup at subsidised prices. We also conduct education and training programs as part of this,” she adds.
In Bengaluru’s Kanakapura, where Asan had adopted 10 villages to use the app during its launch, now has 100 villages and more than 30,000 women and girls using it, making it the world’s largest menstrual cup adoption programme. This has translated into the number of extra days the community has gained, including school days, and also household savings because they are no longer spending money on sanitary pads.
Asan has also distributed more than 5,000 Asan cups in Malawi, and 2,000 in Zanzibar where it has entered into a project with the military. They are looking at launching in the US, France, and Germany soon.
“We are looking at the app as a tool aimed at education and awareness and want to grow organically. We are laser-focused on our mission to end period poverty globally, and are expanding our social impact partnerships to several new countries,” Guha concludes.
(The story was updated to correct a typo.)
Edited by Megha Reddy