More Money Podcast - Empowering Women and Advancing Period Care - Founder of joni, Linda Biggs

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

This is a special mini-series of the More Money Podcast sponsored by Visa Canada to highlight the latest winners of the Visa She’s Next Grant Program.For the first episode in this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Linda Biggs, founder of joni, a Canadian period care brand that aims to revolutionize the industry while working to improve menstrual equity, accessibility and sustainability. Linda shares her unique entrepreneurial journey, which began after a long career in computer science and was inspired by the realization that 1 in 3 women under 25 cannot afford period care. This episode delves into how Linda started the company with her co-founder, how they navigated a challenging launch during COVID, and her best advice for other budding entrepreneurs.For full episode show notes visit jessicamoorhouse.com/436Learn moreLearn more about joniLearn more about Visa's grant programFollow meInstagram @jessicaimoorhouseThreads @jessicaimoorhouseTikTok @jessicaimoorhouseFacebook @jessicaimoorhouseYouTube @jessicamoorhouseLinkedIn - Jessica MoorhouseFinancial resourcesMy websiteMy bestselling book Everything but MoneyFree resource libraryBudget spreadsheetWealth Building Blueprint for Canadians course Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Lulu. Jessica Morehouse here and welcome to a special mini-series of the more money podcast, sponsored by Visa Canada. In this series, we're shining a light on some of the latest recipients of the Visa She's Next Grant program by speaking with six incredible Canadian women to learn about their inspiring entrepreneurial journeys. Now, each year, the Visa She's Next grant program selects 20 recipients to receive $10,000 in funding, along with access to an accelerated coaching and mentorship program through WiseSpace at York University. Since the program's inception, Visa has provided more than $900,000 in funding to help empower women-owned businesses from coast to coast with the tools and resources they need to grow. Now, as a woman entrepreneur

myself, I wanted to do something a bit different with my podcast and use my platform to share the stories of these women so we can all get to know and support the incredible Canadian businesses they're building. If you'd like to learn more about the Visa Shoes Next Grant Program, head over to visa.ca.ca slash grant program. Please note the views and opinions expressed on this podcast are solely my own and those of the guests and do not reflect the views of Visa or its affiliates. For this episode, I'll be interviewing Linda Biggs, who is based in Victoria, British Columbia. She's the founder of Joni, Canada's period care brand that developed the world's first smart tech-based period product dispenser that provides janitorial teams

with visibility into what dispensers need to be refilled, which produces labor and inventory costs. They're also the only commercial dispenser on the market that can dispense products without unnecessary boxes, eliminating a significant amount of waste while also being plastic-free and biodegradable, reducing single-use plastic waste. In addition to their commercial channel, they are also available in over 1,000 retail doors across Canada. Welcome to the More Money Podcast, Linda, so excited to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here. Yes. I am thrilled that you're on the show to really kick things off before we really dive into your business, which I think is so fascinating and so

necessary. Tell me a little bit about yourself. Did you always want to be a business owner or an entrepreneur or was this kind of a path that you ended up on, but you never expected to? Yeah, I definitely didn't see myself as an entrepreneur. I didn't even know that dream was possible for me as a little girl. I grew up in a family that didn't come from a lot of money. And so a lot of the focus was on like, how do you pay the bills? How do you get the basic necessities taking care of rent and food? And so it really was more like the corporate career that I went through. And that was my initial journey. And it was a series of really great events that put me into the entrepreneurial world very serendipitously. But I think that because I have that,

different background with the corporate side. I was able to apply a lot of that to the entrepreneurial world as well. So it comes within different lens for sure. What was that kind of corporate life? What kind of skills were you able to bring into being an entrepreneur? I'm curious. Yeah. This is funny because I often get people be like, oh, do you have a marketing background? I'm like, no, I have a computer science background. Oh, interesting. I went to school to study, you know, computers, how they run. And because at the time, like, technology was becoming the thing. It was back when, you know, the dot-com boom and technology was being brought in as part of the strategy for many organizations.

So in the corporate world, I worked for big companies that were looking to integrate their tech systems with the rest of their corporate structure. And so I did a lot of translation between the, you know, developers and the business and the tech side with the accountants and the business folks. So I sat sort of in between. But the translation for me, I think, really is, I think it's soft skills. I think with entrepreneurship, we undervalue soft skills. You can learn the hard skills. And frankly, with entrepreneurship, you're continuously learning

soft skills and hard skills. It's just part of the job. But the soft skills that I picked up from that time was just the ability to communicate with a lot of different people. So I often get, like Linda, you're a bit of a chameleon, you know, you're able to kind of, you know, shift your way of communicating. And I think that just comes from a career in dealing with a lot of different types of people and understanding my audience and then being able to speak to them in a way that gets the messaging across in the best way possible. So lots of learning good and bad throughout the journey. Speaking of your audience, so you founded Joni, which is a brand centered around periods, which I think is so fascinating. It's, I think, a topic, nonetheless,

that is still maybe considered taboo, even in, you know, countries like Canada and the U.S., what motivated you to enter this particular space? And, you know, what was something that you discovered when you're maybe doing some research about, okay, I want to start a company or this is maybe the company I'm thinking of, you know, what did you discover along the way in your research? Yeah. So, you know, going through my computer science program, I never thought I'm going to be a period care founder. But what happened. Yeah. Yeah, that didn't connect. But what happened was very serendipitously, I met my co-founder, J. Ashvekorea, and he is a pharmacologist from India. He was studying at the University of Victoria, and he was looking into this whole area of

feminine hygiene, and I use quotations because it's a euphemism. We call it period care. And he started realizing, you know, India has a real issue with menstrual equity, but so does Canada. And that's, you know, the one in three women under the age of 25 can afford period care. And he was floored. And so very serendipitously we met. And I was just coming through a transition with an organization.

I was like ready to invest in myself. And I'm like, what is it that I'm going to do next? And the universe, you know, put us together. And when we were chatting, you know, he was raised by a single mom. I was raised by a single mom. We had a lot of like life stories that really overlapped. But one of the realizations that I had was as a natural consumer and in entrepreneurship, as a founder, being a natural consumer of your product is a,

is a big win. It's, you know, how most brands build their everything essentially is through your own personal experience. I had a realization that I had menstruated over 300 times in my life at that point. The products I bought were these necessary evil. Like, I never really connected to them. I asked friends, like, what do you think about this? And like, oh, everyone would roll their eyes. And I thought, wow, we have self-driving cars. Like, how is it not possible to have like a period care brand that, you know, you really felt connected to. So you, everyone can think of a brand that they're just like, I love that brand. And I don't think there's very many period care brands that people could do that with. So I was like, I really wanted to create a brand that I felt

was missing in the market. And so what was it that I want to pick up off the shelf? And I'm kind of a brand nut. I've always been a brand nut. I love walking the shelves of grocery stores and like looking at all the packaging and like, ooh, this is an interesting way to like describe that. And So when I was thinking about Joni and the brand, it was more about what can we build that people really connect with? And as a natural consumer, I connect with the authenticity, with the transparency, with things that are efficacy and, you know, no leaks is the baseline for period care. Like, that is your one job.

But what else do you do? Like, what else do you stand for? And I'm not talking about motivational quotes on tampons. I'm like, it has to be more than that. So that's essentially how we decided to launch. I just really, Jayesh had the product vision in his head around, you know, really high efficacy products that we wanted to bring to the world and make it mainstream. So we say making sustainable, period care accessible to everybody.

And I really held the branding, marketing sort of experience with a consumer vision in my head because that's essentially what I wanted to see brought to the world. Yeah. And it's incredible to learning specifically that there is a period inequity in like a country like Canada, I think would shock a lot of people because I don't think most, I mean, no one talks about it. That's for sure. So I think most of us don't realize that. But, you know, on top of that, what I also love about your company, you also put ESG and DEI initiatives at the forefront of your business where I think maybe some companies are afraid that maybe that will. hinder our profitability, or maybe later when we're more, you know, we've been around for a few years, maybe we can focus more on those. But you really wanted to make sure at the get-go, these are kind of the foundation of the company. Why was that so, so important to you? It stemmed from very much personal values between J.S. and I, but also as a business, you have to stand for something. You have to find the people that you know are your people. And the best way to do that

is to basically state where you stand. And for us, it's we believe in inclusivity. I want to see an equitable world. So does Jayesh. He was raised by a single mom and his sister. You know, they sacrificed a lot from him. He saw the difficulty. I was raised by a single mom. I have two daughters. I want to leave this world better than I found it. And so building a business is one thing. But to build a business with impact is what keeps us going. You know, it's more than just the, a bottom line revenue. It's a triple bottom line. It's the impact and it's a personal value for both of us, that impact side of things. So we believe that economic prosperity and social impact are not mutually exclusive. We can legitimately have both as a business without it being a nonprofit.

So we really took that lens into everything we did with Joni. And so when we launched, we donated 20,000 pads to a nonprofit even before we made our first sale. And we launched, and we launched right when COVID hit. It was literally the day the World Health Organization declared the global pandemic. And we were like, okay, a couple months. But, you know, through that experience, the stats are one thing. The statistics in Canada were actually really lacking when it came to period poverty and menstrual equity. And over the years, there's been more studies done by the federal government, which gives us more stats. And it basically just validates the anecdotal stories and everything that we knew and what we saw from our nonprofit partners who were on

the front lines, who saw people coming in. in saying I have to choose between food and period care or I can't afford period care and then I can't go to work or I have endometriosis and I believe so heavily I spend so much money on pads or I don't even have pads in my area because I live in a remote community or they're $40 for a box of pads like there's so many stories that we don't realize are happening in our communities and people are really suffering and when you think about we're talking 50% of the population, over 30% menstruate, 87% of people who menstruate get caught off guard, then 37% of them will have to find a solution. Can you imagine if we had that

with toilet paper? Like, it's just, it just seems very inequitable. So for us, it was like, it just made sense for us to go down that path. And then we just started weaving it into everything we do. So our 2% give back, our B-Corp certification to really hold us, accountable to that give back, the nonprofits that we work with, the partnerships that we build with them, the advocacy that we do both federally and provincially and people we partner with to drive those policies for it because it's one thing for a company, private company to donate, donate, donate, but unless policies change, we're never going to hit the mark. So the way that we look at it is really this ecosystem. And so how is Joni impacting that ecosystem? What

ways can we really drive that forward? And that's just how we've operated all the time. And And, you know, for us, the benefit is that people see it and they love it. And then they can become really passionate about Joni because we're doing all those things and they align, those values align with them. And for those that it doesn't resonate with, that's okay. Again, we're a business. We're not going to make everyone happy. Actually, it's a really good personal thing in life to go with you. You're just not going to make everyone happy. And so we really lean into these values that we have. And through that, we feel really good about the decisions that we make and everything we do. Absolutely. And yeah, I think, you talking about, you know, 50% of the population and then, you know, 30% are menstruating. I think so many women have been in a situation where they needed to find a tampon or a pad and it just wasn't accessible. Like, a personal story that just came to mind. So this is kind of a funny timing. I went to the movies with my husband, like a weekend to go and, you know, caught off guard.

Oh, well, I'll go to the washroom. There was no dispenser. Nothing. And so I'm like, oh, wow, really? In this day and age, there's not. thought they were in every bathroom and they're not always and that's an issue. And I'm in a very privileged position where it's like, okay, that's fine. We'll just go home and I've got some things at home. But if you're not in that position, you know, what are you going to do? And we need to

really, yeah, find those solutions for those people, which I think is so important that you're doing. I want to touch on something that you mentioned that you launched Joni right as the pandemic was happening. I've been talking to other entrepreneurs during this series who similarly had, you know, experiences with the pandemic. I feel like everyone was launching their business before or during the pandemic. It just happened that way. How did that impact your business? Did it change anything? Did you find any kind of different stories from people or, you know, what was the impact on your business? Yeah, I think that if you've been around long enough, I mean, launching through the pandemic, there's definitely impacts. You hear stories about these larger companies that, you know,

everyone's familiar with that will have launched a recession. And it becomes an opportunity, right? Because if you can survive those moments, then you build a really good foundation to scale when things are great and you don't have those type of really, you know, tough things to deal with. But for us, we launched, I think the beauty of being an entrepreneur, you're really naive about, and you're like really ridiculously optimistic and you have to be. And so there's, it's like, you just have this blinder on like, we're just going to do this. Like it doesn't matter what it takes. And so we launched. And luckily, because of our values, we partnered with a lot of nonprofits early on. And it seems like a weird

business decision. But when we did a small friends and family round, Josh and I both don't come from money. So when I say friends and family, it was mostly like acquaintances that we knew that had some money and invested in us, basically to buy our first round of inventory and to sort of launch. And then we thought, okay, you know, it's only going to last a couple months. We can raise again, you know, later in 2020. Clearly that did not happen. And everyone, any kind of investor was heads down in their own portfolio, just trying to keep their own investments alive. Everyone was struggling.

And so by the end of the year, we were like, we're not going to make it. Like, this is really tough. We had, you know, sales coming in, but it was just not enough. So we ended up launching a crowdfunding campaign. And what that did for us, which was really successful, we actually raised, you know, 200% of what we originally thought we were going to raise. it really validated the brand, the idea, the direction for us. And clearly, you know, there's a need for this in the world. And so what the pandemic did for us was clearly a ton of difficulty. A lot of

anecdotal stories around, you know, period equity and or sorry, period poverty and how people are impacted by it. We knew this. But the pandemic really exposed that in new ways. We would say, you know, periods don't stop. with pandemics. So you're still having to find period care, but now these places where you would normally find them are closed or they're not accessible. So what do you do? And so we're hearing a lot of anecdotal stories around that. And that just fueled us even more to be like, how is this an issue? This is an essential product. We should be able to get this. But the pandemic really forced us to operate in a very lean way to survive. It really forced us to lean back on our values.

day and day out when we were like, how are we going to make this decision? And it provided us with opportunities to really build those relationships with our nonprofit partners. Because at a time when people were not necessarily going out to retail stores to buy things, our nonprofit partners sometimes had budgets. And then they would use those budgets with us to make those budgets last longer. And they would buy Joni to support their community. So it was that ecosystem. So we support them with donations. They support us with some purchases. And it really allowed us to survive for that first year in a bit until we kind of gained some traction. Ultimately, when we look back at the pandemic, Mike Kofern and I laugh like, you know, it's kind of in a dark way. But it really,

it really forged us into who we are, right? And how we operate. And, you know, for a lot of things I'm, I'm grateful for because we had to make tough decisions, but those decisions have allowed us to be the brand that we are today. So one thing I'm personally curious about is where the name Joni came from. In my mind, I just like think of like Jody Mitchell because that's the only Joni I know. Yes. Yes. Oh, is that right? That's exactly it. Yes. And I have to give credit to my husband because I was like, I really wanted a name that was short, sticky, you know, that was very inclusive. That was visually beautiful. And I was like struggling to find something. I had my notebook next to me in bed every night. I was waking up, writing down and then I would check it and it was not available. And my husband's like, listen, I'm going to go for a walk. He

He went for these nightly walks and he's like, I'm going to come back with three names. And he did. And I don't know what the other two names were, but I heard Joni and I was like, that's it. And I checked. It was available. And then I ran it by a friend who's also a mentor. She said that just gave me goosebumps. And so instantly knew that's what we were going to go with.

And of course, Joni Mitchell holds a very special place and our family's art for sure. I love that I got that right. You did. You know it. Yeah, I love that. But yeah, the other thing is just for, especially for people who want to maybe learn more about it or how could I get involved. tell me exactly what are all, because I know there's a couple of different elements of Joni, what are the different kind of product offerings? And is it just for businesses? Is it for

individuals? What's it all about? Yeah. So we're a bit unique in the period care sense. We really want to change the way people interact with period care. And so what that means for us is we're essentially where our customers are. And so our customers are at home, at school, at work, traveling. And so we've built Joni to meet the customer and our partners at every touch point. So we are a D to C brand. We have subscriptions online. People order us. We deliver and we ship to anywhere in Canada in the U.S., which makes it very inclusive. So folks who don't have access to, you know, urban areas with a lot of options can now order a sustainable plant-based option in their community for the same price, which is equitable in our mind. Then we're at

retail shelves so it ran over a thousand retail doors across Canada and that is significantly growing again going back to that accessibility piece but the biggest channel for us has been our commercial dispensers and so we're just launching our model V and in part of the intro you talked about you know that model B the technology we're really driving that technology you know in Canada and just globally it's the first the world's first smart dispenser and so just like your experience when you got caught off guard and there wasn't a dispenser there oftentimes You know, people's experiences with dispensers are either they're broken if they're there. You know, they're jammed or you can't get that.

You don't have the right change. Some of them are, you know, tunis and loonies or whatever change they require. Or they don't have anything in them. And so we really wanted to create a dispenser that solved all the problems that as consumers felt, but also really brought it into the minds of the people who were servicing them, which is the janitorial and facilities team. So we actually collaborated with many of those people and said, what are the pain points that you have? A lot of it was visibility, you know, ease of restocking them. And so when you're talking about, for example, an airport, you have hundreds potentially of dispensers across the airport.

That labor cost for those folks to go into everyone to make sure they're refilled is significant. So we gave them the visibility through an app to be able to be like which ones need to be refilled. And then with that, it allows them to better monitor. their inventory levels. And because bathrooms are becoming smart. You see those, you know, how is your experience in the bathroom today? And then you have to click the happy face or the sad face. And, you know, they're monitoring water usage.

They're monitoring how many people go in there. And there's, you know, SaaS systems for it. But nobody is taking care of the period care for 50% of the population. So we wanted to create this IP and this technology. And that goes, again, back to our mission to make sustainable period care accessible to everyone. So organizations across Canada and the U.S. are bringing these dispensers in.

And because we're a turnkey solution, they're bringing Joni in as well, which means there's less, there's no plastic waste. We don't have those boxes when it's dispensed. And that has been significantly growing over the past three years, which has been great.

Yeah. So it sounds like this could be a solution if you like work for a company, for example, you're an employee and you're seeing that, oh yeah, we never have tampons in the bathroom. This is something you could probably bring up to the powers that be in that organization.

to be like, hey, I found a solution that might actually help everybody in this big organization. So anyone who's listening. Yeah, it's easier than you think. We make it really easy. We have a lot of different options. And the big thing is a lot of organizations are like, oh, we're going to get cleaned out. You know, we're putting put all this product out there. And the Model V really prevents that.

I mean, one, it's a scarcity issue right now. But the model V prevents that because there's a 30 second wait time between selections. And so we have a couple airports that have brought them in and we've seen a lot of success with that. So there's a solution for every size of organizing. I love that. So you are one of the recipients of Visa She's Next Grant program. Very exciting. Congratulations. I would love to know with that experience, you know, how is the program kind of helped or what do you hope that through the funding that you're getting, the mentorship, how are you going to kind of use this program to kind of get Joni to more people and just, you know, spread the word. yeah it's been it was so great it's been so great and as a founder as an entrepreneur you're often in the weeds right and you you're like does anybody notice what you're doing like is does it mean anything and so the recognition is nice because it's like oh we see you and there's definitely support there

so going back to you know the idea that entrepreneurs have to learn a lot of new things very quickly having that mentorship where you're like listen this is an area that i i don't have any experience in, but we have to do it. So who in the ecosystem can support me? And that has been fantastic. And of course, I'm a big believer in funding women. And so that, you know, funding is really important to drive initiatives forward. We are going to use it for marketing. We're, you know, hiring some new folks. So that's going to be really helpful. So it just drives those our goals that we have forward. And it's, it's fantastic. It was really exciting. That's amazing. And, You know, speaking of, you know, supporting women, women entrepreneurship, you have launched this

amazing business that is very women-focused, which is amazing. Would you have any advice from all of these years, especially going through what you've gone through over the past five years, starting your own business? Any advice for anyone thinking of maybe doing something similar? They worked in the corporate world. They want to do something on their own, but they don't necessarily know what to do and maybe what things to look out for. Yeah. I mean, nobody really knows what they're doing. If that's in any consolation, even the founders that you look at, you know, they're killing it. I guess my advice would be there's no right time and there's no right way. So often we hear narratives around, you know, the all or nothing, you take the leap.

You have to raise millions. You know, there's a playbook that seems to be the popular playbook. But the longer I do this and the more people I speak to that are building amazing businesses is that we're all doing it in slightly different ways. And, you know, my co-founder and I worked two jobs for three years to support us for the first three years. Strategically, we made that decision. And so you can take those steps. I think the big step is, are you going to take believe in yourself? Because that's ultimately what entrepreneurship is. And are you passionate enough about what you're doing that you can do that at night in the morning on the weekends? Because that is what it takes. And it's two steps forward, sometimes three steps back, but you're always kind of

moving in that direction. And I guess the patience of it all, that's one thing I've had to realize things don't happen right away. You've been doing this for a number of years. And I'm sure it felt like it was very slow at the start, but now you're making some really big waves. So you just got to, yeah, I know it's like cliche advice, but you do just got to stick it out sometimes. Absolutely. There is no such thing as an overnight success. That is absolutely not true. That overnight success that you've heard has been grinding in the back end for five to ten years. It's like the duck. You see the duck, but the little legs underneath it are going like crazy. That's what it is. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Honestly, I know I could probably talk to you for so much longer. I'm so excited about your business journey and for more people to learn more about it because I think it's so, so important. You know, before I let you go, is there any other things that we didn't touch on or anything that you want to leave listeners with before they say goodbye? A lot of people don't know, but we launched a book. I know. I know. We launched a book. It's called Bleed. It's a coffee table book. It's available on Amazon, U.S. and Canada, but it's essentially a collection of real period stories. It's this beautiful book. The idea was it's meant to be a coffee table book because we want our period stories, these anecdotal stories to show up in these unconventional places so we can have these conversations. So if that's something that interests you, take a look at our website. It's under Bleed and our footer or you can look online. at Amazon. But that has been really, we've had really great responses from that. And again,

it just kind of pushes those boundaries a bit around the stigma and those conversations. Oh my gosh, I love that. That's amazing. Love the title. That's a great title. Well, thank you so much, Linda, for joining me on the podcast. It was a pleasure having you on. Thanks, Jessica. It was great. And that was my interview with Linda Biggs, founder of Joni. You can learn more about the company at getjoney.com and follow them on Instagram and take talk at Get underscore Joni, as well as Facebook and LinkedIn at Get Joni. And if you've been inspired by Linda Story and are a woman entrepreneur interested in learning more about this grant program, you can find more information at visa.ca.ca slash grant program. A big thank you to Visa for funding

this amazing grant program, supporting Canadian women entrepreneurs, and sponsoring this special series on the More Money Podcast. Thanks for listening and watching on YouTube. Until next time. The More Money Podcast would not be possible without the amazing talents of video editor, Justice Carrar, and podcast producer Matt Rideout, who you can find at MRAVCanada.com.