I mean, let's say that the best of the best happens, and menstrual cups become all the rage in our society. And let's say that including all of the costs to design, manufacture, package, advertise, etc. the Divacup, they make $20 off of every Divacup they sell (roughly 2/3rds - does this sound reasonable? if not, change the percentages and it'll still demonstrate the point). Finally, in a woman's lifetime she'll need to purchase only two cups, and we'll throw in a third in case she decides to have a spare (haha!) or she loses it or something.
That's only $60 profit per customer, ever. The current tampon, pad and pantyliner manufactuers are probably making at least $100 profit per customer each year.
The only way the Divacup could be more profitable is if by some miracle it costs way, way less to manufacture the cup than disposable products...which I doubt is the case. Raising the cost of the product isn't really an option, it poses the risk of driving customers back toward the seemingly cheaper disposable products (and even if they did raise prices, it still couldn't begin to make up the profit difference). They're doing all right now, because it's a small operation...but there's going to be a point, as they sell more cups and expand, that the cost of producing the cups and advertising for the cups is going to outweigh the profit. Hire lots of people, build bigger facilities, push for larger marketing campaigns, and here's the kicker - fight off the rabid upstart competition. Some of that competition will be funded by bigger and badder companies, with more resources and a household name to back them. And then you'll have Tampax and Always creating smear campaigns about retrograde flow and all this, too.
It just seems like menstrual cup companies can thrive now because they're under the radar. Enough people are converting over that they're doing well but it's not enough for the big bad market to notice. Either they'll be squashed by the smear campaigns and high cost to produce at a larger scale, or some other company will take their place. Of course we'd rather the latter of the two to happen, but it makes me kind of sad that the original companies that started the revival and poured everything they had into making it...probably won't.
Thoughts? I'm not a business major...Really, I hope I'm wrong.
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