“This Is a Product That Can Change People’s Lives”

The project originated when our teams learned that by age 14, girls are dropping out of sport at twice the rate of boys. By age 17, a time in which most people have gone through puberty, 51 percent will have dropped out of sport. And one of the critical components of that is menstruation. We wanted to create a product that would help give people peace of mind and confidence to play their sport, do their movement.

We didn’t want to just call it “the period short.” We wanted to have a cool internal code name. Someone suggested TMI. And we were like, no, that’s not sitting right. It’s not “too much information” — it’s FYI, "for your information." And that code name truly embodied our mission of creating a future where menstruation is celebrated and not shamed.

Fear of bleed-through is real. It’s not just through the teen years. It is through the entire adventure with menstruation, which can be a 40-year journey. I still have fear of bleed-through here at work. Hopefully we can be the catalyst for change that even if you do bleed through, there is no embarrassment. And in the meantime, until we get to that future state of normalizing menstruation and bleed-through, we have created a product that people will love and that will give them assurance and confidence.

There was a lady that had been collecting her menstrual fluid and she had written “shameless” on her leg with it — I found that picture when we were kicking off the project and I was just trying to pull together images for a deck. That resonated so strongly with me because I truly believe that we should feel no shame — no shame if we bleed through, no shame for menstruating. And that’s what I hope the younger generations take from this, and hopefully the older generations as well, that we can talk more openly about bleeding. I hope we can help be a catalyst for that, get to a world where menstruation is celebrated like motherhood is.

We tested with synthetic blood. Because we couldn’t just test with water. We needed to make sure that the fluid we were testing with was representative of menstrual fluid and the viscosity was correct — it played a crucial role in understanding how the material was performing and making sure that there was no bleed-through. We spent so much time ensuring we had the right liquid for testing. We had to dial that in perfectly.

We’re always trying to learn about athlete pain points, struggles in daily life and how we can make a product that will meaningfully change people’s lives, whether it is people who bleed, whether it is people who need more support with chest tissue when running or playing basketball or whatever it is. We always come back to, what is the athlete telling us? Whatever we’re testing and validating, we’re always gut-checking ourselves against, is this making a meaningful difference to those people? That’s what we do. That’s what’s most important in innovation. It’s what’s most important at Nike. And that is literally what puts a smile on my face before I go to bed at night, knowing that we can truly impact people’s lives in this incredibly positive way.