This July, I was having drinks in the Biergarten in Berlin, following a great entrepreneurial meet up when it hit me: I was going to sell condoms!
To give you a bit of context, my name is Gabrielle and I am a swiss entrepreneur who cares a lot about sustainability. I started my own stylish cloth diapers brand in 2013 called Sustain a Bum and launched a sustainable products e-commerce shop in 2015 called Sustain a Living.
However, I was faced with the « issue » that my customers were only using my products (the cloth diapers) for the 3 years, at best, if their kid was not yet potty trained. I needed to change that in order to keep them longer and offer them additional sustainable products they could use, for both their interest and mine.
So after some beers and the realization I was already in the genital sphere, albeit for babies, I decided to go ahead and sell sustainable condoms! Since I was in a social setting, I immediately started asking around whether people would buy them, for how much, in which context, etc. That’s when someone suggested I start a subscription service – BAM, the idea of the Green Condom Club was born!
Coming back home, I started researching brands of « sustainable » condoms and discovered there are not that many worldwide. The organic awareness around food and cosmetics does not seem to have reached the condoms, yet – I very much hope to change this! After contacting a brand in the US that was not ready to expand internationally and trying to reach out without success to two European brands, I decided to go ahead with Glyde, an Australian brand manufactured in Malaysia.
You might ask yourself for a minute why did I not start my own sustainable condoms brand. I looked into it but given that large amount of technical testing and health regulations for such products, I decided to use an existing brand… for the moment. If the Green Condom Club project goes well, this might change in the future!
Since I had the condom brand, the prices were easy to get and I could start doing calculations to see if the whole project would be financially sustainable for both the clients and for me. When making the spreadsheet, I was trying to estimate how many condoms should be put in each of the packages… and that was very difficult! I knew I wanted to have only 3 types of subscriptions for simplicity reasons but since I could only relate to my own experience with condom use, that was not going to be very reliable data.
I started asking around social events, networking events and parties questions such as: « hey, I know we don’t know each other that well but I am soon launching a condom subscription service called Green Condom Club! It will have 3 types of subscriptions, how many condoms would you put in each? Oh boy, the answers I got! People started telling me about their sex life in details, some guys directly asked me if I wanted to sleep with them. I got some interesting data out of those conversations but nothing really reliable so I figured I was asking the wrong question.
In the spirit of the Lean Start Up and listening to the pains of your customers, I launched a survey asking people how many condoms they used per month, if they were male or female and if they were single or not. Here are some of the results I got from the 85 respondents:
61% were male, 39% were female: the condom still seemed to be a male concern on average
36% were single, 64% were in a relationship: I was surprised by this as I thought condoms were more used by single people. That being said, more and more female friends are going off the hormonal contraception after 15 years on it and most have gone back to using condoms in relationship so that might be the reason.
Male single reported using 14 condoms per month on average when female single reported using 5.25 per month: are the numbers different because men take care of busing the condoms, because they exaggerate their consumption or just because they have more sex? I still don’t know 
Male in relationship reported using 13.6 condoms per month on average when female in relationship reported using a little bit over 14.4: the numbers here are a lot more similar, perhaps because the ladies take more responsibility with buying the condoms? At least people seem to be getting more (protected) sex in relationships.
Looking at the data, I decided to group the results in 3 subscriptions types. Here they are including the percentage of people who would use them:
5 condoms/month (36%)
15 condoms/month (52%)
30 condoms/month (13%).
Here is what they retail for:
Why am I telling you all this now? Because the Green Condom Club is launching today as it’s World AIDS day!
With Lvstprinzip we are having a giveaway for:
1 subscription of 5 condoms/month for 6 month (value 82.80€)!
To be chosen by the condom fairy, just answer the following question: what´s the maximum amount of condoms you ever used in one night? You can apply only once until December 10th.
Gemeinsam mit GreenCondomClub verlosen wir zum Welt-Aidstag ein Kondom-Abo für sechs Monate. Um zu gewinnen, beantworte einfach in den Kommentaren die folgende Superpreisfrage: was war die Höchstanzahl an Kondomen, die du mal in einer Nacht verbraucht hast? Einsendeschluss ist der 10. Dezember.
Headerphoto: Aaron Tsuru (c) Tsurufoto.com
Textphotos: (c) GreenCondomClub
You can also follow the Green Condom Club on Instagram.
Der Beitrag Launching the Green Condom Club – ein Text von Gabrielle erschien zuerst auf Lvstprinzip.