She Built a Movement Around a Taboo, Then Walked Away From It

Most founder stories end with an exit that looks like a win, an acquisition, an IPO, a headline. Kathy Walkling's story ends somewhere stranger and, honestly, more interesting. After 15 years of building, she handed her company to the people who worked for her and got on a plane back to Australia.

Kathy is the co-founder of Eco Femme, a woman-led social enterprise that started in the forests of Auroville, Tamil Nadu, and grew into India's pioneer in washable cloth pads. The numbers alone are worth sitting with: women in 27 countries, partnerships with more than 80 NGOs, free menstrual education programs run across the country, and a supply chain built almost entirely around rural women who learned tailoring as their entry point into a livelihood.

But the numbers aren't really the story. The story is that Kathy, an Australian who moved to India in 1996 with no business background at all, built something around one of the most avoided topics in the country, menstruation, and did it by training rural women, not by chasing venture capital. And then, at what looked like the peak, she walked.

This conversation is about both halves of that story. How Eco Femme got built from a homemade cloth pad found on a New Zealand holiday. And how Kathy knew, after a decade and a half, that the most loving thing she could do for the thing she built was to let someone else carry it.

Key Takeaways: Building Something That Outlives You

The Origin Was Personal, Not Strategic:

• Eco Femme wasn't born from a market gap analysis. It came from Kathy being handed a "mumpty" and pointed to the forest to bury her own sanitary waste after moving to Auroville in 1996.
• The first cloth pad she ever used was a homemade, unbranded product she picked up on holiday in New Zealand years before Eco Femme existed.
• It took roughly a decade, from 1996 to around 2009, for the personal habit to turn into an actual enterprise, once she connected with an NGO training rural women in tailoring.

Timing You Can't Plan For:

• Eco Femme entered the market right as disposable pad advertising was exploding and the Indian government was rolling out free sanitary napkin disposal schemes, around 2010.
• Kathy credits Auroville's culture of "systems thinking" for helping her spot the linkages between waste, rural livelihoods, and a shifting cultural conversation, rather than any formal market research.
• India isn't one market. Rural, tier-two, and metro India each needed completely different messaging, pricing, and distribution, and Eco Femme had to build for all three at once.

Knowing When to Let Go:

• The decision to step back started forming around COVID, when supply chain shocks and the sudden dominance of digital marketing outpaced what a values-first, community-built organization could absorb.
• Succession planning started with a residential retreat and a small team pulled together specifically to help Kathy and her co-founder plan their exit, roughly a year before they actually left.
• Two months before their deadline, with no clear successor lined up, Kathy seriously proposed shutting the company down. It was a small group of senior team members stepping forward that changed the outcome.

Q: Can you take us back to the very beginning? How did Eco Femme actually start?

Kathy Walkling: Well obviously I'm not Indian, I'm an Australian, and I moved to the international township of Auroville in 1996. So about half my life ago. Auroville really was the genesis of Eco Femme, because it's a very unique place, it's a spiritual community, but it's also very much founded in ecological principles and a recognition of the interconnectedness of life.

Moving there, I was struck by the natural beauty, but also by the very personal challenge of dealing with sanitary waste. It was very confronting. I was given a mumpty, as they call those digging tools in Tamil Nadu, and pointed to the forest as the place where I could dig a hole and bury my sanitary waste. That was a real wake up moment, realizing that we do have a waste disposal problem, and sanitary waste is a particular issue within that.

So I started looking for alternatives, and I found my first cloth pad on a holiday in New Zealand. It was a homemade, unbranded product, probably somebody just making it for her local community. But I bought it and really connected with it. I could feel it offered multiple benefits, the waste problem mitigated by washing and reusing, but also a doorway to a closer connection with myself, and the economics of a reusable product saving money.

About ten years down the track, I started working with an NGO that was trying to provide income generating opportunities for rural women who had learned tailoring but didn't have much education or other skills. That's when I started thinking about training them to make a cloth pad, and really working hard on the marketing and communication side.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: The best products often don't start as products. They start as a problem you personally can't stop thinking about, and Kathy carried hers around for a full decade before it became a business.

Q: When did it stop feeling like a pet project and start feeling like something much bigger?

Kathy Walkling: It was interesting timing. At the time I had no real understanding of what the product's position would be in the Indian marketplace, we were just doing it more or less for fun. We felt more confident about niche international markets, women in the West who wanted something good for the body, good for the earth, that supported local livelihoods.

But because we were in India, and because the waste problem was so visible here, we were curious to see where the product would take root. As we asked more questions, learning how menstruation was perceived, what girls were actually using, our understanding just increased exponentially. We realized we were on the cusp of disposable products gaining huge traction. There was a lot of advertising, a lot of media narrative developing around girls dropping out of school because they didn't have access to products, and the government had just started a free sanitary napkin disposal scheme, around 2010.

We didn't plan any of that, but we saw the linkages. I really attribute that to Auroville, being trained organically in systems thinking, looking at how things connect. The market landscape, the lack of alternatives, the pollution issue, the opportunity through the NGO to work with women looking for income. All the ducks lined up, and we just saw the chance to run with it.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: You don't always predict the wave. Sometimes you just spend enough time paying attention to a problem that you're already standing in the water when it arrives.

Q: The market was pushing disposable pads hard. How did you even get reusable cloth pads in front of consumers who'd never consider washing and reusing something like that?

Kathy Walkling: Huge pushback. What we didn't understand initially, and learned very quickly, was the perception around menstruation and menstrual blood as being somehow impure. We learned a lot about that cultural dimension, and there was a lot of resistance. People thought we were completely mad. Nobody would use a product like this, it's dirty, people are too busy to wash it.

We could see it was an uphill battle just conveying why anyone should even think about such a product. But like any innovation, there were early adopters, people like us who could see the problem clearly. When we started running the numbers, how much plastic is in each disposable pad, how long they sit in the earth, it doesn't take Einstein to figure out this was going to be a major problem. There were enough people ready to at least give it a go.

And even within the market there were different segments. Rural was a completely different proposition than urban educated consumers. A big part of what we had to learn was how to deliver messaging to these different groups, and grassroots rural marketing is very different from an online, urban sales channel.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Cultural resistance isn't a marketing problem you solve with a better tagline. It's a trust problem you solve over years, one early adopter at a time.

Q: India isn't one market, it's basically three or four different countries stacked on top of each other. How did that reality show up for Eco Femme?

Kathy Walkling: There was no precedent. We basically introduced the cloth pad into the Indian marketplace, so it was hard, definitely challenging, but also very exciting because we could make it up as we went and try things out. Because of Auroville's location and our proximity to both villages and international markets, we had all these different linkages, foreign market access alongside rural access, so we could explore what would be required for each channel.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Geography can be a strategy. Being physically close to both your rural producers and your global customers let Eco Femme learn faster than a team sitting in a single city ever could have.

Q: Looking back at going from zero to one, what was the hardest part?

Kathy Walkling: That's really hard to say. I think we had a really charmed start, every aspect had its big challenges, but somehow we had the people, the resources, and maybe the patience to crack it. What got very difficult was the pace of change in the market. Suddenly we were facing a load of competitors, new products coming onto the market, and also challenges around COVID and how that impacted supply chain and distribution, and the shift to digital marketing. We just weren't quite ready for that.

We started off doing a lot in house, social media on Facebook, then Instagram, but the pace of change and the evolution of online marketing outpaced us. That was really hard, especially trying to do it the way we were, because we were always a social enterprise, very value driven. We said from the beginning that the mission was bigger than the brand. We didn't want to compromise, we went for organic cotton, we spent a lot of resources on people development and building networks, and that created a strong culture and brand identity initially.

But at a certain moment the market just whooshed ahead. Price sensitivity became more and more acute, and doing this intimate, small scale, values driven approach started to feel a little quaint. We were missing the boat, if that makes sense.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Values can build you a brand. They can also slow you down when the market suddenly starts moving at a different speed than your principles allow for.

Q: At some point you decided Eco Femme should continue, but under someone else's leadership. What was happening in your life when that decision started to make sense?

Kathy Walkling: It was an evolution over a couple of years. COVID was when we first started recognizing we were hitting challenging waters, and the complexity of what we were facing, which problem to address first, whether to pivot on product, whether to concentrate on certain market segments. We were confronted with all these decisions quickly.

My co-founder and I realized that Eco Femme as an enterprise would have needed people with much more business sophistication than we had. We did have help, we became part of a green business incubator, so we weren't completely alone. But it required getting up to speed at a pace I personally found very difficult and exhausting. I'm also at this point basically hitting menopause and feeling like I just didn't have the brain capacity or the energetic capacity anymore.

So already about four years ago we were starting to think we'd need different leadership, and trying to find that leadership in a place like Auroville, which itself was going through a big challenge, more and more people leaving. We also weren't able to offer competitive salaries, we weren't in a metro. And the product landscape was changing, period panties were suddenly all the rage, and we didn't have the capacity to really pivot the product line. My co-founder Yeshi and I were both more or less the same age, and we both felt, let's move out, let's get more talent in that can navigate these changes.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Knowing your limits isn't weakness, it's data. Kathy read her own exhaustion as clearly as she read the market, and that's rarer than it should be.

Q: Once you made that decision, what did you actually do to prepare the company and the team for the handover?

Kathy Walkling: In the very beginning we kept it to ourselves, afraid of creating instability in the team. We knew our role went beyond just being the boss, it was never even that. It was a company, but really it was a community, built on love, that was the core value that bound us together, and we felt deeply committed to everybody.

So the first year we naively thought something magical would happen and it would sort itself out. Nothing was shifting, we were getting more burdened and pressured, and we realized we had to take active steps. About just over a year before we actually stepped out, which I wouldn't even recommend, that short a runway, but we were already hanging on by a thread, we put a team together to help us through succession planning. Three people worked with us, we told them we wanted out and needed help figuring it out.

We had intensive meetings, even a residential retreat where we really planned where we wanted to be and started building a roadmap. Then we planned a strategy for communicating it to the team.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: A year sounds like a long runway until you realize you're trying to rebuild the emotional architecture of a company, not just its org chart.

Q: You mentioned the day you told the team was one you'll never forget. What happened?

Kathy Walkling: It was so emotional. I don't think the team, they were all women at that time, ever imagined there would be a day when we wouldn't be there. We were kind of like mom, and suddenly we're talking about leaving. There was a palpable sense of grief, a lot of tears. That was the first time it really hit us that this was going to be a hugely emotional journey, not just a mechanical thing of finding a replacement and building systems.

It needed that too, but more than that it needed navigating the emotional impact and preparing the team, telling them that if this is going to go on, the culture of the organization needs to shift from being entirely embodied in the founders to being carried by the team. You're the custodians of culture going forward, and Eco Femme will change, it will lose something, but it can gain something too.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Culture that only lives in the founder isn't culture, it's a hostage situation waiting to happen. The real work of succession is teaching people to be custodians, not just successors.

Q: There was a point where you actually considered closing the company entirely. What led to that?

Kathy Walkling: We worked a lot on systems for handing over, we looked and searched for new leaders, and about two months before our set deadline, we still didn't really have a solution. We were quite desperate. I was at the point of saying maybe we just have to close it down. My co-founder was already quite sick, we both couldn't carry it anymore, it was like carrying a boulder and it was crushing us. So I proposed closing it down. My philosophical take was, things live and they die, that's also a natural cycle, things don't have to last forever.

But nobody wanted that. People were looking at me like, how can you want to kill your child. I said, fine, then help me, how are we going to do this? That was a moment of real crisis. And then a couple of people with more senior roles on the team said, okay, let's give it a go, we'll try it, it won't be you guys, it'll be different, but they didn't want to see it collapse.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Sometimes the willingness to actually let something die is what finally gets the people who love it to step up and keep it alive.

Q: Who were the people who stepped in, and what was that transition like for them?

Kathy Walkling: They were senior leaders from our own team, though even there we didn't have enough middle management really established. In an ideal world we'd have had more layers ready to go. I got fascinated myself in learning about successful leadership transitions, because it's an incredibly precarious undertaking, and it was hard to find comparable examples.

The people who stepped in did it with a lot of bravery and courage, but some of them were quite new, they didn't have the institutional history or knowledge, or all the confidence from the team that a longer tenured leader would have had. There were many flaws in what happened, not that the people themselves were flawed, the situation itself was just really hard for them. But it's what it was.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Perfect successors are a myth founders tell themselves to avoid ever handing over the keys. Eco Femme's transition worked because people showed up brave, not because they showed up ready.

Q: How was the experience of coming back to Australia after being in India for so long, and being such a different person than the one who left?

Kathy Walkling: It's been now less than a year since we're fully back. We came earlier last year for a visit to explore whether we could make it, then went back to India, then came back in August, September last year. I definitely still feel one foot in India. It's my known country of birth even though I'm living in a place that wasn't where I grew up, we moved to a town where I knew nobody. So it's been an adventure.

We've been very fortunate, things have worked out surprisingly well, there's a felt sense of a new destiny unfolding here. But in terms of the depth of meaning of what my life was in Auroville and India, it's not at all comparable. Life here is comfortable, it's nice, but it doesn't have the juiciness of what life had, with all its challenges. I'm not missing the exhaustion, I'm still recovering from that last year, but I am asking myself now, okay, so now what is this. Losing the context of Eco Femme and Auroville that sustained my life, my vision, my passion for so many years, I don't quite have the ground under my feet yet.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Nobody warns founders that walking away from the mission is its own kind of grief, even when it's the right decision and even when you're the one who chose it.

Q: If you had to give advice to founders building something today, what would you tell them?

Kathy Walkling: I can only speak from my own perspective. I never studied business, I always say I was an accidental entrepreneur, business ended up being the vehicle to create something, and what it was a creation of was an expression of my heart, my love, in my case, love of the earth and love of women.

There are two layers to it. One, as an individual creating something, it's really important to find the deepest place within you where your heart beats most strongly, because it's got to sustain you and get you out of bed, you've got to feel that beating heart connection, not necessarily forever, but you've got to feel it.

The second thing is to ask what the earth needs right now too. We're so disconnected, and I think we're heading more and more into collapse scenarios, looking at things in isolation. The whole capitalist agenda is running out of steam, and if we just do things for the sake of money or status, it's not enough. It's got to come from what the earth needs as well, and find where your passion and the needs of the earth meet. Ask the big questions. What are we here for? What are people for? And when you tap into that sense that we're here to create something of beauty, of truth, of goodness, find the thing that makes your heart beat loudly and give everything you've got to it.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Product-market fit gets all the airtime. Kathy's version, finding where your passion meets what the world actually needs, is a harder question and arguably a more durable one.

Q: Looking at the whole journey, is there one thing you would want to have done differently?

Kathy Walkling: I guess in a way I think everything had to be what it was in the time that it was. For sure I wish I had better skills to navigate some of it, I just felt like I was breaking eggs all the time. But more or less whatever happened, happened for the right reason, and that's how it was supposed to be.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: The most honest answer to "what would you change" is often "nothing," not because everything went right, but because every mistake was the price of the thing that actually got built.

Final Thoughts: What You Carry When You Walk Away

Kathy's closing perspective: "Sometimes people wonder, how could you walk away, it was your child. We just knew we couldn't keep going, and there's no other way around it."

The bottom line: Kathy Walkling didn't build Eco Femme to exit it for a payday. She built it to solve a problem she couldn't stop thinking about, sanitary waste, cultural silence around menstruation, and a lack of dignified livelihood for rural women, and she stayed with that problem for 15 years. The real lesson here isn't the founding story, as remarkable as that is. It's the ending.

Most founders never plan for succession because it feels like admitting the company doesn't need them anymore. Kathy's experience shows the opposite is true, the healthiest thing you can do for something you've built is recognize when your presence has become the ceiling rather than the foundation. That recognition took years, a global pandemic, a personal health toll, and the near collapse of the company itself before it turned into action.

What stands out most is what she says she misses least, the exhaustion, and what she misses most, not the organization, but the relationships and the sense of a mission bigger than herself. For founders sitting at the peak of something they built, Eco Femme's story is a reminder that handing over the baton isn't failure. It's often the last and hardest act of building something meant to outlive you.

Q: How can people connect with you and continue learning about Eco Femme's work?

Kathy Walkling: I'd love for people to look up Eco Femme and see the work the new leadership is continuing to carry forward, the education programs, the partnerships with NGOs, and the community of women across the country who make and use the products. For anyone drawn to social enterprise, sustainability, or menstrual health work in India, that's where the story continues, even without me at the center of it anymore.

Final words: Eco Femme was never just a product. It was a fifteen year experiment in building something that mattered more than the people who built it, and Kathy Walkling's final act as its founder was proving that letting go, done with enough love and enough preparation, can be as much a part of building something lasting as the founding itself ever was.

---