The Bohemian Capitalist

Congratulations to Ms. Argrawal. Creative, entrepreneurial and with investment expertise-- great package. Would have been interested in reading more about her background-- you don't just walk into investment banking at DeutscheBank, and certainly not as a bohemian.

It's about time. Congratulations! If only Thinx existed when I needed it.

You can't be both, you know. Unless if by bohemian you just mean, a style of clothes or fashion design. In which case, I guess you can be a capitalist anything. How bourgeois.

How does she qualify as bohemian? Seems like classic american entrepreneurialism and capitalism to me.

Brava, Ms Agrawal. Some of the comments are totally off the mark. I am 75 years old and menstruation happily went away many years ago after a partial hysterectomy. However, I am not so old that I do not mourn for girls caught off guard for lack of education.

I also do not find you "snarky." I find you fresh and enthusiastic, and hopefully a sample of today's young people working to make better lives for themselves and others.

I'll partially go along with the "ageist" claim.
Being 65 you can assume I grew up with different ideas of modesty. Whemade n I wrestled in jr. high and high school we wore a pair of shorts and a tank top.
I recently saw a match and was appalled at the uniform on the boys. It was a Spandex Onesie that was so tight it left nothing to the imagination. I thought of an old expression, "beans and franks". One boy even had an erection from all the straining that was obvious to all. There was a bicycle race here and I noticed the same lack of modesty and embarrassment with the racers too.
I would never have worn anything like this but younger people seem to have no problem with the realities of life including menstruation. I didn't know what that entailed until I was married.
It's stuff like this that makes me feel out of order any more.

Read the article with admiration. And immediately ordered some Thinx from Amazon. I am 81. You are missing a huge market if you don't advertise to older women. Like post partum moms and menstruating women, we too have intermittent leakage problems. Those little panty liners from the drug store are unsatisfactory.

I am more concerned with her last comment: She wants to have a baby that the community will raise. Poor child! Such an uninformed and immature thought by the potential mother. A child is not a dog that everyone can feed and toss a ball to or a car that everyone can be scheduled to wash and change the oil. It should not be about you and where your whimsy takes you. It should be all about the child.

" If you take issue with any of this you are probably lurching arthritically toward irrelevance."

The ads sound clever, but that is an arrogant, insulting statement. No one is "irrelevant" and certainly not just because they have aged out of the intended target market. Show some respect.

Kudos to the creators but why is it necessary to be ageist about the evolution of underwear? Shame on Ms Bellafante for her snarky comments: "If you have a problem with any of this you are probably lurching arthritically towards irrelevance." And "It’s only the middle-aged and diminishingly ambitious who view fun as an end itself.." Really? (Read sarcastically with lifted eye brow)

I am a 58 year old, feminist. Yes, I am aging, as is Ms Bellafante, who will soon grow out of her young, hipper-than-though stage and will likely find herself perceived as irrelevant in her new found middle age.

The space dedicated to her snarkiness could have been used to illuminate the product or business model better. Perhaps a remedial journalism class is in order? Or a better editor.

Go forth and do well ladies, but please ditch the ageism as it will come back to haunt you.

The campaign was both beautiful and a little cringe-inducing, but no moreso than other subway ads. There is no one solution to keep women from having accidents, but Thinx is a good (albeit expensive) option. I have two daughters and we all think it's a useful product. It gives you added security when you're expecting or on your period. None of us uses it instead of a sanitary napkin or a tampon because we live in the real world. Sure, the Millennial developers are a little pretentious, but they are focusing on products that help solve actual problems for first and third world women. This condescension is one of the reasons why my adult daughter doesn't read the NYT.

Period tracker apps? Back in the day we just used to use the calendar in our brain.

It's a new millennial world out there, though -- and it's interesting to read about these kids and their inventions. Good on them!

I think the ad campaign is brilliant and well designed. The ads, and the article, however, are kinda slim on explaining how the product actually works; also, the actual history of the invention and funding of Thinx, as well as Ms Agrawal's life history, seem fairly unexamined.

I really like the jeans with the thighs torn out though. Might try wearing a pair for my next client presentation.

"ideate". why the use of quotes? ideate is a perfectly well-defined word.

Great product idea and trying to help women in Africa is awesome.

Like the chutzpah from a advertising standpoint, kudos to Ms. Agrawal and her team. They unbashfully created a campaign that at it’s core does what advertising suppose to do — start a conversation with the consumer, be it positive or negative. And they did so in an artful way--- excellent art direction. (Although I may never view a grapefruit in the same way).

I don't get the idea, from the advertisements I see in the subway, that this product is trying to replace tampons. This product, and the others she has planned, are additional options for women who monthly have to deal with menstruation. Good for her. I don't see any downside here.

I firmly believe that consumers vote with their dollars. I don't if this idea will catch on but I doubt it.

"Creatively purposeful." Well, all right.

A great profile, and I have much respect for Ms. Agrawal. But this sentence, in its lack of clarity, does not do this piece any justice: "She moved onto film, where she found herself undone by the yucky processed food laid out by craft services." Does this mean the catered food on sets actually caused her to drop out entirely from attempting to make films?

The subject of this interview may be the epitome of why many people think another tech bubble emerges. She wants to create some ridiculous new product that is, as she bizarrely describes it, "the Apple meets Nest product of bidets". She also likes to "ideate" with friends. Neither of these statements makes any logical sense and yet the reporter makes no attempt to question these odd statements or ask whether they are grounded any in business reality.

After the menstrual "moisture" is wicked away by these special panties, what becomes of that portion which cannot be evaporated? What becomes of the dried blood?

"makes tampons virtually unnecessary"? Who are you kidding? That would be for any female ms Radwha's size. but it's doubtful that any woman who has heavy menses would trust this thong to get them through an hour of heavy flow.

And honestly, could this brilliant entrepreneur even remotely guesstimate she might possibly start her period during the three-legged race?

Every woman I know has been tracking her menstrual cycle since the first day they started, and at age 11 I was concerned about anticipating the start of a flow so I wouldn't be caught off guard without the appropriate supplies.

At age 35, no longer on the pill, I anxiously circled those days when I was at my most fertile.

But maybe the community does this for her.

I think this is underwear itself is really interesting. That being said, I HATE the advertising campaign. I take my young daughter (7) on the train every day and the language of blood and underwear is highly inappropriate for her to read about (yet). I am pretty open-minded about this stuff, but it is just such a direct exposure to material that she's not ready for yet. Yuck.