Kristy Chong’s belief there was a market for fashionable period-proof underwear didn’t just lead to a multimillion-dollar global company; it transformed the relationship retailers could have with customers.
Currently, the business has close to 200,000 active customers — most of whom purchase online — spread across New Zealand, Canada, the US, the UK and Australia.
Globally the so-called ‘menstrual underwear market’ is also growing. It is climbing at an annual rate of 1.3%, as several upstarts seek to capture an untapped international market that has until recently been ignored.
The market was valued at $269 million (US$200.7 million) in 2020 and is expected to reach $1.61 billion (US$1.20 billion) by the end of 2027.
Modibodi’s rapidly expanding global customer base is likely to be buoyed by this rising tide thanks to a raft of new partnerships, including one with international sportswear giant PUMA launching in May.
Founder and chief executive of Modibodi Kristy Chong chatted with SmartCompany Plus to explain how an obsession with solving her customer’s problems helped her build a brand that’s fast-becoming a household name.
Founded in 2013, Modibodi was born out of Chong’s personal needs; for a product that would help her protect against both periods and the light incontinence that she had begun to experience as a young mother.
But the options at the time were limited to utilitarian products geared toward elderly people or the medical sector.
Chong immediately saw a gap in the market to offer women across the spectrum of age and experience a quality product that wouldn’t look amiss nestled among fashionable brands in an underwear drawer.
From the start, Chong knew that as her business’s very first customer, her personal experience would be shared by thousands of other women.
She also felt strongly that speaking honestly and openly about these universal experiences had to be central to how she marketed the brand.
Modibodi marketing material. Source: supplied
“I followed my gut about what I felt like women wanted to see or how they wanted to be heard,” Chong tells SmartCompany Plus.
The approach to customer communication was about “humanising the brand and being compassionate and understanding those customers,” Chong says, as well as “educating them as well about the truth and facts.”
Selling Modibodi as a mainstream product also involved working to “break[ing] down all those societal taboos,” Chong explains.
This translated into marketing campaigns that normalised leaks and spoke honestly about these experiences.
Listening to the Modibodi customer and sharing their perspective was core tenet of the brand from its inception and continues to drive almost everything the company does, from product development to social media campaigns to partnerships.
“We were one of the first,” Chong says of creating campaigns that were diverse and size inclusive.
While the company has never received strong criticism from customers, in the early days Chong says it was actually the media and social media users who pushed back on showing periods and blood in marketing materials.
“Dealing with the media was challenging,” Chong said, and social media users on occasion would respond negatively to using non-traditional models.
But growing sales bore out Chong’s strategy of winning her customer’s trust by speaking honestly and openly about leaks of all kinds that women experience.
While celebrating diversity and championing the cause of marginalised groups is now a widespread marketing play, Chong says it’s easy for brands that haven’t connected their marketing in a meaningful way to their brand’s mission statement to appear inauthentic.
“I do think some brands are doing that,” Chong said of brands “representing the authentic and human side” of their business.
But “not a lot”, Chong says. “And not a lot of doing it that well.”
She says the brand’s marketing strategy has always revolved around an authentic conversation with customers that helps them feel they have an ally.
“I think the difference is we actually try to understand the customer, we’re fighting for them.”
Chong says she thinks this is also the reason the brand has never has to weather backlash or manage a misstep when engaging with the public.
“We haven’t gotten any negative feedback. And I think it truly is because we’ve got our fingers on the pulse when it comes to understanding that customer,” Chong says.
As Modibodi’s customer base has grown, so too has its product offerings.
The PUMA x Modibodi collection, for example, will offer a range of leak-free period underwear and activewear, accompanied by a campaign that reminds women leaks shouldn’t keep them from athletic pursuits.
Modibodi also launched over 30 new and limited-edition products in 2021, including a launch into the reusable nappies category, a new maternity range, anti-chafing shorts, sleep shorts and recycled range of activewear and leak proof underwear.
While the brand began with leak-proof underwear to manage periods and other leaks, it has evolved to include an array of products including adaptive underwear for people with disabilities and mobility issues.
Modibodi reuseable nappies. Image: supplied.
This was born out of feedback from the community that women with mobility issues were using Modibodi products, but needed the design to be adapted further to make getting in and out of underwear easier.
What began as her voice calling out for solutions has “become the voice of our customers”, Chong says.
This feedback loop was the catalyst for the raft of products now sold that most recently expanded to a range of products for men.
“When we started we were always a multi-need product,” Chong explained, and this has simply expanded into new categories according to customer needs.
Competitors had tended to divide products into period or incontinence products, Chong says.
“[But] I always understood that you don’t need a separate product for a period when you’ve got light incontinence, you need one product that does the same thing.”
From its headquarters in Rozelle in Sydney’s inner west, a team of around 39 employees conduct quarterly surveys to 20,000 customers to stay in touch with their experience of the products.
“Basically it helps to guide our product innovation,” Chong explains.
“I’ve worked in businesses where customer issues have been sort of shoved down the back.”
But listening obsessively to customers through monthly meetings with the customer experience team, product team, and marketing team has helped Modibodi keep track of how company actions are translating to customer reactions.
Because the brand was built around a fearless pursuit of normalising bodily leaks, Chong says educating not only the customer but the wider public set the company apart from competitors.
This has also extended to sustainability practices that are built into the brand’s supply chain. The company is aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and is working toward making its entire range of products using sustainable materials.
Another thing that’s changed over time is that the company has grown this mission of trying to “normalise the conversation” about periods to other areas.
“We’re … educating around areas that haven’t been spoken about whether that be periods of incontinence, menopause, the postpartum experience,” Chong says.
“I absolutely believe that you’ve got to normalise periods, you’ve got to normalise all the leaks whether that’s incontinence, or breast milk; all the themes of normal parts of life,” she says.
Even back when the company was founded, direct marketing about periods was “quite taboo”. Chong credits the company work as part of a new wave of brands that developed a more authentic conversation in the public square.
“I feel like there’s been some normalisation with the work we’ve done,” she said.
And despite doing something completely new in the early days of the business, Chong says she was “never scared” about its direct approach to marketing its product.
“I came into this because I just sort of felt like this had to happen; the new way of speaking to women, representing people,” she said.
“It just felt very natural and normal for me.”
This gut instinct, guided by Chong’s personal experience, is also why the company has steered clear of humour when speaking to customers.
“We don’t take a comical approach at Modibodi,” Chong explains, adding that brands addressing sensitive concerns such as endometriosis with humour risk misreading their customers
“We are much more about understanding and showing compassion for our customer.”
Bianca Healey is the startups and tech reporter at SmartCompany, with a particular interest in regulation, the creator economy and the growth of the Australian tech sector. You can follow her on Twitter at @biancahealey.
