Female readers know how bad period pain can be. For the men, I’d say imagine getting kicked in the balls for four days in a row every month. Oof. Ouch, right?

This is what it feels like for your mothers, daughters, sisters, wives or other friends with a vagina who experience primary menstrual pain (dysmenorrhea) or, even worse, secondary menstrual pain – due to conditions such as endometriosis, fibroids, PCOS, adenomyosisor pelvic inflammatory disease.

Australian start-up of menstrual care Ovirahas come to our rescue with a device that provides drug-free and instant pain relief.

Founded by Alice Williams as a natural and safe pain relief tool to help with her crippling endometriosis, Ovira has grown rapidly to help hundreds of thousands of women around the world better manage their menstrual pain.

Sick of the limited pain relief options available – mostly heavy drugs – Williams explored other ways to treat her pain and came across electrotherapy, better known as TENS technology – a small battery-powered device that sends light electrical currents to your abdomen to relieve pain.

“TENS technology has been around since the 1980s; that’s why I was so surprised why this hasn’t been widely applied to menstrual pain. We’ve made sure our device is the smallest on the market so we can hide it under clothes, whether they’re wearing pants or a dress and so on, and we’ve also made sure the battery lasts all day. So you can clip it in at the start of the day, and off you go,” said Williams.

Her vision for Ovira is to end the needless suffering of women worldwide, and the device is just one way to achieve this goal. Menstrual pain is a major issue the menstrual care startup aims to address. However, it’s just one of many problems women experience during their menstrual cycle, and Ovira’s bigger goal is to solve them all.

“What we’ve done so far with menstrual pain is we’ve saved women from 6.3 million days of pain, which is huge. It’s actually hard to understand,” she said.

Ovira reports that 98% of users experience less pain within 30 minutes of using the device. In the two years since Ovira was founded in 2020, the team has grown from one to ten, alongside a Facebook group of over 14,000 women and a social following of just over 6.5 million.

Williams found that the younger audience loves the brand, and she believes it’s because they spoke authentically to them.

“We talked one on one, like a normal human being, and we didn’t try to outshine them. We’re very raw and real in our marketing,” she said.

“We don’t do women running on the beach. So we like to show real menstrual blood, we show women vomiting on the toilet, we show exactly what it’s like when you experience menstrual pain, and I think because they can relate to it so much, they’re our biggest promoters.”