Sunny, a startup co-founded by IU alumna Drew Jarvis while she was a student at the Kelley School of Business, is aiming to make period care more accessible to people across the world.
When Jarvis was a senior at Fishers High School, she researched menstrual cups and participated in a pitch competition. Jarvis won the competition and $25,000 in funding for her early-stage idea of a menstrual cup that inserts like a tampon. She went on to co-found Sunny, a period and self-care startup.
Jarvis is the Chief Marketing Officer of Sunny, while Sunny’s co-founder Cindy Belardo is CEO. When Sunny’s product demonstration videos went viral on TikTok in April 2022, Sunny gained traction and opened pre-orders for their menstrual cup and applicator kit. After five years of development, their product officially launched Sept. 30, 2023. The kit is now being batch-produced and shipped to customers.
Experience in Bloomington
Jarvis graduated from the Kelley School of Business with majors in marketing and international business in May 2022.
From her sophomore year to senior year at Kelley, Jarvis worked on product development and building Sunny as a brand. Kelley served as a resource for her, and she was able to connect with various professors about developing Sunny. Her classes served as a learning opportunity that allowed her to implement business practices into Sunny in real time, Jarvis said.
Bloomington’s entrepreneurship community was a resource for Jarvis as well. The Mill, a nonprofit center for entrepreneurship in Bloomington, served as a place for Jarvis to network. Elevate Ventures, a local venture capital firm, was one of Sunny’s first investors.
Jarvis connected with IU Venture’s Chief Venture Officer Jason Whitney through the pitch competition in 2018. IU Ventures provides IU entrepreneurs with connections to investors and Whitney works specifically with early-stage founders such as Jarvis.
Right before Sunny’s product launched, Sunny was pitched to the IU Angel Network, a network of 150 investors looking for opportunities to commit capital. Sunny was presented to investors due to the company’s growth since 2019, significant product pre-sales and Sunny’s partnership with Glassboard, Whitney said.
In Spring 2022, Sunny closed a $1.5 million pre-seed round, where investors contribute capital to a business. This allowed Jarvis to start full time and salaried with Sunny after graduating.
“It was a leap of faith that made going viral in April, just one month before graduation, so surreal,” Jarvis said. “The universe was gifting me something for having faith in Sunny is always what it feels like.”
Working with Glassboard
In 2019, Jarvis reached out to Glassboard, a product engineering firm in Indianapolis that she was connected to after winning the pitch competition in high school. At Glassboard, she pitched her problem statement to Ben Ettinger, the current director of product. Jarvis’ product statement focused on what the problem to solve is, why the problem matters and how her product would solve that.
Jarvis, who had done previous research on period products and the history of menstrual cups, wanted core features of her product to include environmentally-friendly ingredients and reduce rough user experience. Her original product pitch idea was for a menstrual cup that inserts similarly to a tampon, Jarvis said. The final product is a foldable menstrual cup that is put into an applicator, like a tampon is, to allow for easier insertion.
To the partnership with Glassboard, Jarvis brought background knowledge on the benefits of using a menstrual cup, the difficulties of application and the lack of innovation since the cup’s development. She presented this information to the team of engineers at Glassboard, who were excited to develop the product with Jarvis.
“She could speak to the customer experience and the demographic of potential users that this idea would resonate with really well from day one,” Ettinger said. “Her energy around that was pretty contagious for everyone at Glassboard.”
The engineers at Glassboard that Jarvis was working with were all male. Ettinger and the team’s approach to development was to first understand the end clients need through empathetic research. Ettinger said this approach, along with Jarvis’s research and experience, allowed them to build mutual trust.
The biggest potential concern they had at the start of product development was that Jarvis was the only person on the team who could test out the menstrual cup and applicator. However, this did not stop development as having limited knowledge on the product usage proved to be a benefit in the overall development process, Ettinger said.
“We got to look at it with fresh eyes, hear all the problems that Drew was talking about, take those to heart and then look at it through a much more engineering product design lens,” Ettinger said. “Not having any preconceived notions ended up being a benefit, and I think Drew saw that early on.”
Glassboard connected Sunny with manufacturers and all kit components are manufactured domestically, Ettinger said. Sunny is Food and Drug Administration registered and uses medical grade materials that are both safe for the body and reusable to make their product, according to their website.
Meeting Cindy Belardo
Nine months into developing the product idea with Jarvis, Glassboard got an inquiry from Cindy Belardo with a similar idea to develop a novel, easier to use approach to menstrual cups. Glassboard has a policy where they do not work on developing competitor products, so they could either say no to Belardo or connect her with Jarvis. They connected her with Jarvis and the pair became co-founders; Belardo is now the CEO of Sunny.
“We said ‘you two seem to have a lot in common and have the same heart and mission behind this idea, so you two should at least connect,’” Ettinger said. “After they connected, they hit it off and they blossomed into co-founders together.”
Belardo graduated college with an environmental studies degree from the University of Oklahoma in 2019. During college, she founded a period care club and traveled to Northern India in 2018 with a grant to do research on first-time menstrual cup exposure and usage. Belardo presented her grant research during a TedxOU Talk in 2019. Her research highlighted that insertion fear and difficulty in learning how to use a menstrual cup are the main barriers to product use, Jarvis said.
With the data Belardo collected during her research trip and her background in college, Jarvis saw the benefit of partnering together. The information Belardo could contribute would help Jarvis and Glassboard by driving the decision-making process to develop a better product for consumers.
“The starkest difference was having another voice in the room that had the heart for this category of product, forcing conversations about the product features,” Ettinger said. “It forced a better conversation; it sparked a lot more dialogue that ended up being beneficial for the product.”
Sunny as a self-care brand
When she joined the development team, Belardo brought her period care brand “Menstrual Mates” with her. As co-founders, Jarvis and Belardo decided to originally use the Menstrual Mates branding for their joint-venture. They rebranded to the current branding of Sunny in January 2022 to be more encompassing of the brand’s direction and vision.
“We realized we needed something a little bit catchier,” Jarvis said. “We want to be that older sibling to inform everyone on period care, that friendly voice. That is what Sunny tries to embody.”
Sunny has three main pillars of focus: earth-friendly products, inclusive education and global impact, according to their website.
“A lot of people know us for the Sunny cup and applicator but we are also really interested in period and reproductive education that is inclusive to all genders and global impact to help end period poverty,” Jarvis said.
Through their research, Jarvis and Belardo have learned more about period poverty. Period poverty encompasses the disparities in access to period products, especially the cost associated with period care and the limited access to products that exist globally, Jarvis said.
For their education pillar, Sunny works to educate their target demographic through newsletters and use of social media. Jarvis said they are hoping to eventually work with schools, healthcare providers or period care advocates to expand their education pillar.
For their global impact pillar, Sunny has partnered with period.org, a global non-profit working to end period poverty. As they continue to expand as a brand, Sunny is looking to increase their non-profit partnerships, create a non-profit arm of their own and begin product donations, Jarvis said.
“From the beginning it’s been both my mission and Cindy’s mission individually and eventually our mission together to help end period poverty,” Jarvis said.
Besides Jarvis and Belardo, Sunny also has four employees based remotely across the U.S., Jarvis said. As the period and self-care brand continues to grow, Jarvis wants to continue expanding Sunny’s values and reaching more people.
“Our goal is to just reach people with periods,” Jarvis said. “It doesn’t matter who you are beyond that.”
