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Lobsters and martinis ordered to impress but left untouched. Bourbon-drenched brunches, cross-country flights, and lavish luncheon spreads, all to land a client. Such are the excesses of the glamorous 1960s world of advertising in “Mad Men”.

From our modern perspective of emailed office memos and online ads replacing direct mail, the reams of paper tossed into the trash and general squandering of resources in advertising back then are cringe-worthy.

The advent of the environmentalist movement a decade after “Mad Men” didn’t actually change the wastefulness of advertising. It just introduced a whole new segment: green-washing.

Don Draper was ahead of his game. His client’s cigarettes weren’t poisonous; they were…toasted.

Products are still just as poisonous, but now they’re often falsely labeled “eco” or “natural”. All that green-washing is printed in brilliantly colored ink on shiny paper, packed into layers of Styrofoam and cardboard, and shipped around the world in lengthy supply chains that stretch from countries with horrendous environmental records to the target consumers who buy “green” to soothe their conscious.

Even if a product is truly earth-friendly in its materials, that is countered by the toxic advertising done to convince the client of its purity. The magical images of wholesome air sprayed out of a chemical cleaning bottle are all dreamed up by overpaid executives in a boardroom— at the client’s expense—and those costs get passed down to the supermarket consumer.

Natural products shouldn’t be within reach of only the rich. Environmental sustainability becomes an issue of socioeconomically justice as well.

What if the billions of dollars spent on flashy advertising was instead invested in research and development to improve the product and drive down costs? Less Mad (for profit) Men and more Lab Men. What if planned obsolescence itself was made obsolete?

In an ideal world, a product would be

  • manufactured locally with harmless ingredients
  • designed for longevity
  • engineered for sustainability
  • packaged minimally
  • sold at an affordable price, and
  • not even need advertising to convince us of its benefits.

That pretty much sums up how the Keeper works.

  • manufactured in the U.S.A. out of natural gum rubber
  • designed to last 10 years, in contrast with single use menstrual products
  • generates 0 plastic or paper waste, what would otherwise be 65.6 lbs of garbage from disposable pads and tampons
  • packaged in a plain cloth pouch
  • sold for $35.00, saving you $445 in comparison with tampons
  • advertised mostly word-of-mouth from one happy woman to the next

I’ve never seen a single ad for the Keeper. I first heard about it as a freshman from an upperclasswoman (who suddenly seemed that much the wiser). I did my own advertising on a few half sheets of scratch paper in my dorm’s bathroom to make a more economical bulk purchase. When you stumble upon something this great you want everyone else to not miss out, but printing up thousands of full-color, full-page, glossy flyers would go against our environmental values and those of the company.

The Keeper stays true to its mission as an earth-friendly company by not wasting our Earth’s resources in marketing its ecological product and in keeping advertising simple.

NO BOX                                NO LOGO                              NO NONSENSE

 

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