Nadya Okamoto, young Asian American female who is ready to change how entrepreneurship history is written, one PERIOD at a time

Nadya Okamoto is a 23-year-old Harvard student. In early 2020, Okamoto co-founded August, a lifestyle brand working to reimagine periods. Nadya Okamoto is also the Founder of PERIOD (period. org), an organization fighting to end period poverty and stigma that she founded at the age of 16.

Under her leadership as Executive Director for five years, PERIOD addressed over 1.5 million periods and registered over 800 campus chapters in all 50 states and 50 other countries.

In 2017, Nadya ran for public office in Cambridge, MA at age 19 — at the time, becoming the youngest Asian American to run. In 2018, Nadya published her debut book, Period Power: A Manifesto for the Menstrual Movement with publisher Simon & Schuster, which made the Kirkus Reviews list for Best Young Adult Nonfiction of 2018.

Nadya is also the former Chief Brand Officer and current Board Member of JUV Consulting, a Generation Z marketing agency based in NYC. She has been recognized on the lists of Forbes 30 under 30, Bloomberg 50 “Ones to Watch” and People Magazine’s Women Changing the World.

1. How did your family and academic background help you to become such a competent professional?

• I was always a diligent worker in school and my mom taught me a lot about the nonprofit space and resilience. My mom also went to Harvard as well, and she also grew up in a household that really valued education — so academics were always a priority for me growing up.

2.  What is On My Period movement and why it is important?

• #onmyperiod is a campaign started by August that works towards our goals to eliminate period stigma and reimagining period care as powerful. The campaign is about showing up unapologetically and sharing that we are CAPABLE and can be CONFIDENT, regardless of whether or not we are menstruating.

3. How did you come up with @itsaugust and where does your entrepreneurial background come from?

• I decided to start August with my co-founder in January 2020. Before then, I had been working in the nonprofit sector for many years as the founder of period.org, and several years ago, I think I started to really feel like I could personally make a bigger impact on the overall conversation about periods and what period care is from the social enterprise side. I knew that period care could be more sustainable, ethically-made, and impactful — and that’s what August aims to address.

4. Can you tell us more about what your podcast @ tigresspodcast is all about?

• It is the unedited, unfiltered – me. When I’m feeling everything, and nothing at all. I talk about mental health, intersectional feminism and empowerment, and anything that comes to mind on the day. Tigress is somewhat of an honest, in the moment, audio love note.

5. Nominate five people to take part in an interview like this.

• Nastassia Ponomarenko, Ameya Okamoto, Nick Jain, Maya Siegel, and Anyone else from August’s team