NYC entrepreneur wants to talk taboos

Miki Agrawal talks with an unapologetic fervor about periods and poop.

At 36, Agrawal has already run through an eclectic mix of careers, holding a job as an investment banker, playing professional soccer for the New York Magic, and working on commercial and music video sets before going on to start four businesses and writing a book whose title preaches her blunt advice for entrepreneurs: Do Cool Sh*t.

The New York-based entrepreneur is determined to get people to support two taboo subjects: menstrual cycles and bathroom habits. She also hopes to spur environmental change and help fund sanitation projects around the world.

Agrawal's company Thinx, a line of moisture-wicking, absorbent underwear meant to replace pads and tampons during a woman's period, officially launches Monday after a year in a soft launch phase. It has three different styles of underwear that range in their level of absorbency for light to heavy period days, and sell for $24 to $34. The underwear, which is meant to look and feel exactly like regular underwear, has a layer of moisture-wicking, anti-microbial, absorbent material that stays dry throughout the day and is machine washable.

Agrawal also just launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise money and awareness for her company Tushy, which sells an attachment for toilets that functions like a bidet, with the goal of both keeping people's bums cleaner and eliminating toilet paper waste.

She's matter-of-fact about the need for these products. "These are things that people do every day, multiple times a day and there are no innovations around it," she says. "We invented a plane for crying out loud ... why do we still have leaks and stains in our underwear?"

Travel inspires innovation

Both ideas sprouted from Agrawal's travels abroad. Growing up with a Japanese mother, Agrawal became familiar with bidets during visits to Japan.

"I just cannot believe that bidets don't exist in the United States," she says. "And yet, in this country people pretty much walk around with bits of poop on their butt. It's pretty gross."

But using Tushy isn't just about getting rid of the need to wipe for convenience sake. "(Toilet paper) is so bad for the environment," Agrawal says. Plus part of the proceeds from Tushy, which costs $69, go toward a sanitation non-profit called Toilet Hackers, which aims to increase access to toilets around the world.

In the years since she graduated from Cornell in 2001, Agrawal has been a serial doer, switching careers multiple times and bouncing from one idea to the next, spurred by a boundless energy, circumstance and the desire to solve problems in the world.

The idea for Thinx came after visiting South Africa for the World Cup in 2010 and meeting a girl who said she was out of school on a weekday because she was on her period. Agrawal started looking into how prevalent that is and says she found that girls in the developing world sometimes miss school because they don't have access to feminine hygiene products and can suffer from health issues due to using alternative methods, like putting leaves, newspaper or bits of mattress pad in their underwear.

Every purchase of Thinx leads to a donation to AFRIpads, which makes reusable sanitary pads for girls in Uganda. In the first year of production, Thinx has sold 15,000 pairs of underwear.

'Excitement builds believers'

Agrawal's first call to action came nine years before the World Cup, when Sept. 11 happened. She had been working across the street from the World Trade Center as an investment banker for Deutsche Bank. It was her first job out of college. She slept through her alarm that day. Two people from her office died.

"It was a wake-up call," she says. "I wrote down the things I want to do with my life, and the first was to play soccer professionally, and the second was to make movies, and the third was to start a business."

So she went about trying to make those dreams happen. Agrawal played Division I soccer at Cornell. In 2002, she tried out and made the New York Magic professional women's team, but tore her ACL in the first game. She tried out again the next year and made the team, but tore her other ACL in a game. "Clearly was not my calling," she says.

Agrawal continued working in investment banking for two years before deciding it was time to quit and cash in on her time as a college intern on Los Angeles film sets. Her first business idea was born from all the processed food she started eating on sets while working as a production assistant in New York. The fatty, salty, sugary food started giving her crippling stomachaches.

She self diagnosed herself as "processed food intolerant" and started looking for ways to enjoy her favorite foods with more natural ingredients. That's when she started drafting plans for a restaurant and recruiting a network of people to support the project. Her farm-to-table, gluten-free pizza joint, Wild, opened in New York City in 2005. There are now two locations in New York and plans to franchise the concept.

"Excitement builds believers," she says. "If you're excited about it, people want to be around that." Agrawal also knows her strengths. When she realized she couldn't get through professional business pitches about Wild without sweating and nervously trailing off, she started hosting dinner parties instead and invited potential backers to try her pizza. She's the idea person. After something gets off the ground, she's happy to hand it off to someone who can run it better than she can.

So how do you get people excited about feminine hygiene and bathroom habits?

"You ask a woman, how many pairs of underwear have you thrown away in your lifetime?" she says. "Every single woman has this issue."