A video for “Hello Flo,” a new start-up business that caters to young girls that have started to menstruate, has gone viral, and generated over 5.4 million video-views so far on YouTube.com.
In the video, 9-year-old actress, Macy McGrail, is a young female summer sleep-away camper. She is not very popular, but she becomes very popular and a bossy leader and feminine hygiene educator after she is the first to menstruate. She morphs into the Camp Gyno, the camp expert on monthly flows (heck, I was merely Camp Rabbi for Camp Pinemere in the Poconos, we never had a Gyno). The text of the video is very blunt, direct, funny and descriptive. It also uses the vagina word many times, a word that cannot even be said in the Michigan State Assembly.
The video has created a buzz, and orders for the Period Started Kit, which were once a trickle, are beginning to flow in more.
The creator of Hello Flo and the video is Naama Bloom. Hello Flo, located in Brownstone Brooklyn, sends feminine hygiene products and a candy each month to young women, timed with their menstrual cycle. Naama Bloom, 40, is a former camper from Camp Galil, a camp affiliated with Habonim Dror and situated near Philadelphia, PA (Her parents are both from Israel, the products of a moshav and a kibbutz). The video was filmed at Surprise Lake Camp, a popular Jewish sleep-away camp located in Cold Spring, NY.
The idea for the youtube video came from a night of drinking wine and eating Thai, most likely from a Carroll Gardens Brooklyn restaurant. It was unclear if the Thai dish was Pad See Euw or Pad Thai. Bloom said, “I was listing out my insights about the period experience and shared the story of the girl at [Camp Galil] that my friends and I all turned to for advice. When Pete said ‘You mean like a Camp Gyno?’ we basically knew what we had to do. Only humor could tell this story in a way that would be relatable, endearing and shareable.”
Awesome post Larry!