Nadya Okamoto

Periods can sometimes cost you more than comfort. They can cost you dignity.

When she was 16, Nadya Okamoto was facing legal homelessness.

She was commuting over two hours to school.

And every month, she saw how hard it was for women (especially those without stable housing) to access basic period products.

“That experience stayed with me. It opened my eyes to how invisible period poverty really is.”

So she started a nonprofit.

PERIOD was born in 2014, while she was still in high school.

Within five years, it became one of the largest youth-run NGOs in women’s health, with over 800 chapters across the world.

She wrote Period Power to shift the conversation, and she traveled the country talking about the stigma that follows anyone who bleeds.

But after stepping away from the nonprofit, Nadya started asking a new question: What if we could rebuild the entire experience of period care, from scratch?

In 2020, she launched August, a lifestyle period brand designed with her Gen Z community from day one.

No pastel boxes.

No shame language.

Just sustainable pads and tampons, a peer-led education platform, and a mission to make periods powerful. Not embarrassing.

Here’s the part that stood out to me: when August launched in retail stores, they lost the ability to auto-refund customers for tampon tax.

So Nadya’s team built a workaround.

“Now people just text us their receipt, and we Venmo them back. It wasn’t about building flashy tech. It was about doing the right thing.”

That mindset... resourceful, relentless, community-first... is what sets her apart.

For a long time, period talk wasn’t allowed in schools, in homes, or on platforms like TikTok... meaning her content often got flagged and her ads pulled.

But she kept showing up anyway.

“There are so many basic questions people turn to the internet to ask because they never got the education they deserved.”