Mahina

Periods have always been managed. What they haven’t been is understood. Mahina came to us with a question that the category had never properly asked: what does menstruation actually cost, not in product spend, but in mental load, behavioural adaptation, and emotional labour? The answer required a methodology that could hold both scale and intimacy at once.

We began with qualitative research across Mumbai and Bangalore, assembling women across age cohorts and life contexts, not to map product preference, but to document lived reality. Uniquely, Pegboard Picnics” served as our primary research medium, using community gatherings as a way to access unguarded, honest conversation in naturalistic settings, rather than the artificial pressure of a focus group room. How menstruation is managed within families. How it shapes what women wear, where they go, how they sleep, what they say out loud and what they carry quietly. The sessions surfaced belief systems, domestic restrictions, and behavioural workarounds that corporate conversations had consistently flattened or missed entirely.

Those qualitative frameworks were then taken into a pan-India quantitative survey of over 1,000 respondents, validating what the rooms had told us at scale. What emerged was Beyond Blood: The Burden Behind Every Cycle, a thought leadership report that reframed menstruation not as a product category, but as a fundamental human experience with measurable, documentable weight. The data showed that 97% of menstruators rearrange their routines every cycle. That the burden is not just physical. That it begins in childhood and runs, unacknowledged, for decades.

The report gave Mahina a permanent research foundation to lead category conversations, not as a brand making claims, but as the organisation that finally bothered to ask.