The V Word
Katie Diasti ’19 is out to change women’s health, one high-performance natural period care product at a time.
Note: The following story contains delicate subject matter that some may find uncomfortable. Others will relate 100%.
Back when Boomers were teenagers, we called it “Aunt Flo.” It was “that time of the month” again, and she was back to visit, welcome or not.
For many Gen Z women, talking about your period is still a taboo subject – and the euphemisms persist. Katie Diasti is one of them. Growing up the only child of a single mom and first-generation Muslim-American, she wasn’t allowed to use tampons.
“It was and still is fairly stigmatized culturally,” she said.
Diasti grew up in Florida playing competitive tennis and using pads even on the hottest days when “it was very uncomfortable, and I was not a fan of the options out there for me.”
Problem:There was something lacking in the market for period care.
Solution: Create a softer, more breathable, more sustainable product line.
Diasti had always been passionate about women’s health and believed it was time for a shake-up in period care products. So, in her senior year at BC, she took Professor Bridget Akinc’s Entrepreneurial Marketing in a Digital World and got to work.
“It was very much a startup – find a problem, come up with a solution for it,” she said.
Channeling Her Passion
Diasti was “deep in the hygiene realm” at the time. “I volunteered at Rosie's Place a few days a week and was passing out pads and tampons to women who would come into the shelter,” she said. “I was really passionate about menstrual equity.”
Serving as president of the residence hall association that same year, she also launched an initiative to bring free period products to campus bathrooms. The search for products fueled the entrepreneur in her.
“I realized there wasn’t really a brand that had safe, sustainable period care,” she said.
And the choices fell short in another, more important way.
“The big issue with some of the original natural brands was that they didn’t actually work very well – and these are products that people really need to work,” Diasti said.
Building a Brand
She set to work researching the competitive landscape, designing a product line, sourcing materials and manufacturers, and building a brand. She christened the brand Viv to “make it feel like a voice for young people; the cool big sister everyone needs in their life.”
Viv has since taken on a persona of its own as someone you could talk to about taboo subjects like periods or the V word without judgment. A brand with personality and a fresh perspective on a universal topic – and more-effective solutions.
Not surprisingly, Diasti focused on pads for the first Viv product. The only surprise was the choice of material – bamboo.
“Bamboo is such a soft fiber, a lot softer than cotton,” Diasti said. “It grows best without fertilizer and with less water than any other fiber, but it's softer and more absorbent.”
It also offered a distinct competitive advantage.
“Using bamboo for the pads and having the extra absorption factor allowed for sustainable, toxin-free, and also high-performance pads, which we haven’t seen before,” Diasti said.
“When people think of sustainable products, they think less powerful. So, we’ve really been leaning into the high-performance side.”
Channeling Viv Energy
Five days after graduating in the spring of 2019, Diasti came back to campus to start the Shea Center’s 10-week Accelerator program, all the while pouring herself into Viv and working hard to find manufacturers who could help bring the brand to life.
Meanwhile, like many B-school graduates, she’d lined up a high-profile consulting job for the fall, a decision she had started to feel ambivalent about.
“I remember picking my latest start date possible, which was early October, and I was like, oh my gosh, I have a whole summer to figure out what I want to do, work on this business, and I’ll see where I’m at later.”
Later came and went, and Diasti’s ambivalence only grew.
“I was spending way more than full-time hours on Viv,” she said, “and I started thinking, How am I going to do both? I ended up pushing my start date back to January and gave myself a metric for pre-orders: if I sell X number of pre-orders, I’ll let myself renege on my job offer. We ended up surpassing our pre-order amount by way more than I thought.”
Diasti emailed the HR department to schedule a call, then started calling her Shea Center mentors for advice on how to have the conversation. The consensus: Channel Viv energy.
“As soon as I sent off the email to schedule a call, they picked up the phone and called me, so I didn’t even have time to prepare. I started giving this whole spiel about how I want to change women’s health and build my own business. And they said, ‘Okay, we'll cancel your sign-on bonus, no problem.’ That was my sign that I am in the space I need to be in.”
Scaling a Startup
What happened after that is the stuff of classic startup stories.
“The products we launched with were pads and liners, and I had the minimum order quantities in our category for manufacturers,” said Diasti. “They're used to working with massive brands, and I'm just me and my laptop against the world trying to build this thing.
“I negotiated with them to send 20 cases of bulk product to my little walk-up apartment in the South End of Boston,” Diasti said. “And when the cases arrived, I was running them up and down the stairs. Luckily, I lived with my cousin at the time, who was very understanding. We had boxes stacked in our living room for many months.”
Diasti wore all the hats – packing, shipping, and marketing. During the Accelerator program, she started a newsletter and a social media page to update her followers on Viv’s progress and provide a forum for talks about period care and reproductive rights.
“We started to build the tiniest community that way,” she said. She also set up a booth with samples at markets like the Boston Women's Market.
“People would walk by the booth, and I'd say, ‘Hey, do you wanna talk about your period care routine?’ And some people were like, ‘Yeah, especially at a women's market.’”
The effort paid off. Diasti got invaluable customer feedback, “a ton of pre-orders,” and insight into how to diversify her product line. Prospects told her they were curious about menstrual cups but hesitated to use them for fear of removal. The Viv solution: a cup with a pull ring at the bottom to make it less scary.
Raising Capital
Diasti kept shipping and receiving product from her apartment for the first 18 months, including 200,000 units of bulk tampons from another company that didn’t launch.
By 2021, the Viv brand had its own tampons, “a bit of investor capital,” legal advisors, and a warehouse in Charlestown. Eventually, they transitioned to two warehouses, one in Franklin, MA, and a fulfillment center in New Jersey for direct-to-consumer orders.
While scaling was exciting, Diasti missed the intimacy of packing every shipment.
“It was a big transition for me to not see every pallet going in and out,” she said. “When you have a big order day, you physically feel it because you’re standing there for hours and hours packing boxes. Now I’m just looking at the spike on the analytics.”
The analytics were promising, and soon more seed capital came. By the time they did a full launch in April 2021, Diasti’s team had raised close to $1.3 million.
Toward the end of 2022, the retail opportunities started rolling in – Wegmans, Stop & Shop, Central Market, and then Whole Foods. By fall 2024, Viv launched nationwide and brought on more capital and an inventory financing partner.
They also started working with DNFI, one of the two largest natural product distributors. DNFI got them into one of their first trade shows, where they won a pitch competition. “
The next day, our booth was swarmed with buyers,” Diasti said.
That first trade show not only raised their profile, it helped change perceptions among prospective investors who’d called period care “a niche space” despite, as Diasti observed, “half the world’s population needing these products.”
Reflecting on BC
In 2024, Diasti made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, an honor that brought friendships with other young, ambitious women, and a sense of community.
“But the other side,” Diasti says, “is the PR for Viv. And it was a good validation point when talking to investors, especially as a young first-time founder. Any stamp of approval we can add on is crucial to be taken seriously in a room.”
Today, Viv is a serious concern that’s empowering women of all ages; a mission-driven company with a passion for service. Asked how much of Viv’s success was shaped by the BC ethos, Diasti says this:
“So much of it was inspired by my time at BC and understanding that we as a brand are also part of a community. We can’t just think of it as selling products to consumers. The menstrual equity aspect has been so important to us.”
To date, the company has donated over 200,000 Viv products statewide. And Diasti’s team is working with state policy groups to advance equity and dispel misconceptions.
She’s also still closely involved with the Shea Center, giving back as a speaker and mentor to students and alumni launching their own ventures.
“The alumni community lives on so deeply,” she said. “We have a group chat of young BC founders where we update each other and check in on how everyone’s surviving.”
Or thriving, in the case of Viv. All while building community and disrupting a category, one high-performance product at a time.