Let me set the scene. You’re at a festival and music is about to play. You’ve got all of ten minutes to make it to the loo and back. Do you wait it out, or run the risk of missing the crucial first minutes of your favourite act?
It’s a scenario most women find themselves in. Of course, it’s not confined to women alone, but the queues for female loos are often much longer than the men's.
For Amber Probyn, 25, and Hazel McShane, 23, this is a structural inequality issue. “Women have had enough, and are in a position now to accept a taboo product,” they say.
The pair met on a Masters course at Bristol University. They were tasked with inventing something to tackle an unaddressed issue in today’s society.
Hazel and Amber both have experience working at music festivals. “It got to the point where I had to choose between getting food and going to the loo on my break,” Hazel said, “because the queues were that long.”
It was through their own experiences that Hazel and Amber began to tackle female health head-on, researching the concept of a female urinal.
“When we looked into it more, we found the issue is rooted in historical structural inequality,” Amber said. "That’s because the infrastructure was “invented by men.”
Driven by their ‘restlessness for a product that solves the problem’, the pair designed the UK’s first touch-free women’s urinal, and founded PEEQUAL.
It was through chatting to women in Wetherspoons toilets in Bristol, and taking inspiration from infrastructure around them, that the pair created a prototype for their urinal.
Women can squat over the urinal which is in a “bowl shape,” Hazel said.
“It has complex curves to minimise splash back and there is a bar at the front to help people get up if they need it.”
It is described as a “safe, hygienic and well lit space” for women, with cleverly placed screens for privacy.
Not to mention it is made from 100 percent recyclable materials, and is said to produce 98 percent less CO2 than portable toilets.
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They now have 250 units under construction and are signing deals with large-scale festival operators.
This week the pair secured £250,000 in their first funding round.
Investors include the British Design Fund and the co-founder of Monzo bank.
The pair hope to make the urinals a common sight at not only festivals but shopping centres and airports too.
“Having people who have so much experience, we take real encouragement that they see value in it,” Hazel said.
“We are preparing for our first festival season. We are hiring right now and looking for volunteers to help us.
“We’ve got many, many plans. We’ve had interest from the global market, including Australia and South Korea. We’re going to try and scale up pretty fast.”
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