Dear Instagram, please reactivate @saaltco to help us lift 30,000 people out of period poverty!
UPDATE: It worked!! @saaltco is now live again! A huge thank you to all those that shared our letter and added their support! 🤍xo, Cherie
Dear Instagram,
My name is Cherie Hoeger, co-founder and CEO of Saalt, a sustainable period care company with a give-back mission allocating 2% of our top-line revenue to help lift people across the world out of period poverty.
On March 3rd, our Instagram account, @saaltco, was deactivated. We think we may know why. For the past couple of months, we’ve been reaching out to a lot of people about our biggest give-back campaign ever launching on April 19th.
While our messages may have looked like spam, our intention was to get a lot of folks on board quickly–and it worked! Hundreds of people signed up to help spread the word on Instagram — that is, until @saaltco went dark. Of course, we reached out to Meta customer service. We filled out multiple help forms. We reached out to our paid ads representative. We even used LinkedIn to contact people who worked at Meta to see if anyone could be of help, all to no avail.
Now we’re at a crossroads.
Do we postpone our campaign to end period poverty? Do we start a new Instagram account with the risk of being taken down again? Do we transfer the campaign to a new social platform like (dare I say) TikTok?
We’re hoping to get Instagram’s attention with this letter.
Clearly, we crossed beyond Instagram’s terms of use, though not purposefully or flippantly. If we contacted anyone that preferred not to be, we did so inadvertently, and we apologize. We worked to only contact those that aligned with our sustainability and social mission, specifically looking for people who wanted to use their platform to influence for good.
We hope that full transparency and some background to the “why” behind our social cause may have your team consider reactivating our Instagram account in time for our April campaign.
As a certified B Corp with an integrated social mission, we aim to use our business influence to be a force for good in the world. That means that whenever we launch a new product, we see it as an opportunity to make an impact beyond just our Saalt community.
- We paired the launch of our new Saalt Period Cup in purple with one-for-one product donations to Faces of Hope, an organization that supports victims of domestic and sexual violence.
- The launch of our Saalt Period Cup in seafoam green helped support mass-scale beach cleanups on Earth Day with Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii. (Did you know that single-use tampon applicators are among the top items found washed up on beaches? One Saalt Cup lasts 10 years, diverting up to 3,000 disposable menstrual products from our waterways.)
- When we launched our first line of Saalt Period Underwear, we removed 300,000 ocean-bound plastic water bottles from the environment to create our underwear’s soft body fabric made with post-consumer recycled plastic.
Though sustainability is core to our product offering, our passion really lies in donating our reusable, long-lasting period products to lift people across the world out of period poverty.
To date, we’ve donated over 30,000 of our Saalt period cups to women and girls in 35 countries and have seen first-hand how life-changing each product can be. As a founder entrenched in the menstrual care industry, I can say that there’s not much that compares to the exponential ROI a product as small as a period cup has in the hands of a donation recipient. Saalt products have the power to keep girls in school, increase economic opportunity for women, add to the GDP of communities and nations, and break cycles of poverty for generations. Click here for a quick read about period poverty and why we believe long-lasting reusable period products are the answer to solving it.
On April 19th, we’re launching a new line of period underwear with a buy one, give one campaign.
The new line is sustainably made from fabric derived from renewable beech wood and will provide expanded absorbency options to cover the needs of people in all stages of life (periods, postpartum, and bladder leaks).
As we considered how we could make a significant impact with this new product launch, we had an audacious idea.
What if we aimed to donate just as many pairs of our new period underwear as we have of our period cups? It took us four years to donate 30,000 cups, but what if we could donate 30,000 pairs of underwear in just one week?
We decided to offer a buy one, give one donation of our Saalt Period Underwear to a person in need for every pair of our new collection sold during the week of our launch from April 19th to the 25th. With not a minute to waste, we started contacting hundreds of brand friends and influencers to invite them to try the product, join the campaign, and spread the word.
We knew that we’d also need some influential movers and shakers to pull it off, so we reached out to the likes of Jennifer Garner, Gal Gadot, Cameron Diaz, Busy Phillips, Reese Witherspoon, and the incredible female all-stars on our U.S. Women’s Soccer and Olympic Teams. We even sent personal invitations to some of the greatest women’s advocates living today: Oprah, Melinda Gates, Emma Watson, Michelle Obama, and Malala Yousafzai.
Call us crazy, but you can’t say we’re not passionate. :)
The initial response is promising, but now the success of our give-back campaign is on the line.
Instagram, we need your help: We’re kindly requesting that you consider our cause and choose to reactivate our @saaltco account so we can use your industry-leading platform to change 30,000 lives for the better.
Will you help us?
A final note–if you’re interested in supporting us, or if Saalt’s mission or products have improved your life, please share your support to reactivate @saaltco in the comments below. Thank you!
With gratitude,
Cherie Hoeger
Saalt Co-founder & CEO
@cheriehoeger
@saaltco (IT’S BACK!!)
Read more about Saalt’s impact efforts here:
Our Impact Mission
Saalt’s 2021 Impact Report
See Saalt’s Impact in Action in Rural Nepal
USA TODAY’s Women of the Year Award
Saalt: Indie Beauty Expo’s 2021 Philanthropy Champion
Social Impact Heroes: Authority Magazine
