People often ask me why I started Imara Flo.
The short answer? I had questions about period care, and once I start asking questions, I tend not to stop.
The longer answer begins with my own body.
For years, I navigated fibroids, surgeries, fertility challenges and pain, while trying to carry on with life and work. Later, I learned I had a benign pituitary tumour. There were moments when getting through another appointment felt like an achievement in itself.
I spent more than 15 years working in financial services, helping organisations identify risks and ask difficult questions. Yet when it came to my own health, I often felt I had to fight to be heard. I know I’m far from the only woman who has felt that way.
We’re told to push through pain. To treat it as part of being a woman. To keep going, even when something doesn’t feel right. I began to wonder how many of us had accepted that message for too long.
Then I started looking more closely at the period products we use every month. What are they made from? How are they tested? Why can it be so difficult to find clear answers?
Those questions became Imara Flo.
I wanted to create the kind of brand I would have valued during my own health journey: one that respects women enough to be honest with them. That means asking suppliers difficult questions, reading the certifications, checking the materials and being clear about what we know. I want women to have products they can feel confident choosing and information that helps them decide what is right for their bodies.
But Imara Flo has never been only about products.
It’s about the conversations we should be having about our bodies. It’s about women who have lived with pain in silence, women who have felt dismissed, and women who want to understand their options without fear or confusion. It’s about making period care available wherever life happens: at home, at work, at university, while travelling and, yes, while dancing at a festival.
Music has been part of my own healing. On days when I felt disconnected from my body, African music reminded me that I could still feel joy. That’s one reason it matters to me that period care has a place in cultural spaces too. Our periods don’t pause because we’re out living our lives.
The name carries the heart of what I’m building. Imara speaks to strength and resilience. Flo speaks to the rhythm of our bodies and the freedom to move through life on our own terms.
I built Imara Flo from personal experience, but its future belongs to the women who shape it with us. I’ll keep listening, asking questions and working to make period care more transparent and accessible.
I’m Ednah Sibanda, founder of Imara Flo. This is our story, and we’re only getting started.
Ednah
