How to have a pee without the queues – an interview with PEEQUAL business owners Amber Probyn and Hazel McShane
Young graduate entrepreneurs, Amber Probyn and Hazel McShane, are making a splash in the world of public toilets. They have created an innovative business idea that fills a very pressing need for pee equality.
PEEQUAL is a new product – a women’s urinal that is easy to transport, quick to use, and eliminates women’s need to queue for a loo at festivals and other outdoor events.
It ticks all of the boxes of sustainability and goes far beyond, with design considerations covering all aspects of women’s needs for a quick and easy pee. With five investors currently backing them to the tune of £250,000, PEEQUAL has gone into production and will be coming to an event near you in the very near future.
I had the opportunity to speak to the PEEQUAL team and find out how they came up with their idea and what it’s all about.
How did you come up with the concept of a women’s urinal?
It basically came from our experience of working at festivals. In our summers, we’d spend the season just working - myself in catering, Amber in welfare. You see women’s toilet queues everywhere, but festivals are particularly bad. So, for example, in my break, I’d have to choose between going to the loo or getting food because the queues were so long. Then Amber and I studied at Bristol University, Physics with Innovation and Anthropology with Innovation. For our Master’s project, we were tasked with solving a real-world brief, and straightaway we knew what we wanted to do. We were asking ourselves, why hasn’t anything been done about this before? Why is there this taboo around female urination? Why is there still this problem that women face every day? Why haven’t there been more facilities for women earlier than this?
I think it’s such a fundamental need. Biologically, women need to go to the toilet more than men anyway. It’s just a no brainer. It actually just highlights the inequality of it all. It’s quite shocking (that women have to queue for so long). So PEEQUAL started as a research project.
How does PEEQUAL work in terms of privacy?
It is semi-private. We realise this is a change of behaviour for women that are used to a completely sealed-up cubicle. When you’re standing in the cubicle, you can be seen from the waist up, so you’re private from the waist down, and when you squat, you’ll be completely private. So actually, when you’re in the cubicle using it, you can’t be seen. There’s also a light that will be red when you’re in the cubicle and then when you exit, it will turn green, showing the current occupancy. This is something we’re developing at the moment and we’re excited to try out on our first manufactured units.
What about accessibility and inclusivity?
We found this one issue in our first season of testing prototypes. A lot of women said they could squat but they couldn’t get back up easily. We introduced a bar in the front to help you stabilise yourself and also get yourself back up from the squatting position. Another insight came from Amber’s mum, who was probably the first person to trial our first ever prototype, and we now have the floor slightly sloping. When you squat down, your heels naturally come off the ground. And this lends itself to a feeling of instability. We’ve now created a slope that makes you feel more stable as you squat down.
We don’t see ourselves as revolutionising the toilet. It’s just that 90% of women that need a quick pee can use a PEEQUAL to get them out of the queue. So those that really do need to use the cubicle can, and don’t, have to wait for 30 minutes to use it.
PEEQUAL is called a woman’s urinal rather than female urinal. That’s because it’s for anyone that identifies and feels comfortable and safe in a woman’s space. And we wanted to make it as inclusive as possible in that way.
How is the new funding that you’ve just been offered going to develop the business?
We’re currently manufacturing around 250 cubicles, that’s what the money has gone towards most recently. Manufacturing and tooling the materials, a large part of it will go towards those processes. We’re also looking to employ two more people to join the PEEQUAL team, which we are really excited about. It’s a bit surreal to be growing outside me and Hazel and being able to actually go further, achieve more. We’re hoping to employ more people and then reach out to customers for this summer season. We’re booking up our festival calendar, also running events and any large event where women end up queuing - we’re looking to target those places.
And then the rest of the money is making it go commercial, working with transport partners, getting PEEQUAL to events, all the sort of back door stuff - getting all the different consumables ready for different events and those bits and pieces that go into making your service happen. The quarter of a million enables us to reach as many women as possible really, because building a hardware product is quite expensive.
What impact does the product have on the environment?
Sustainability is at the core of PEEQUAL. We’ve made it flat pack, so many more fit on a truck than traditional portable loos. One of the biggest impacts is actually the lorries delivering stuff and picking it up for temporary events like festivals. So that’s how we limit the environmental impact most significantly. We are also innovating on the material. We’re working with a really cool company who have developed this material using plastic waste from the sea. Old fishermen’s nets can be repurposed into our PEEQUALS.
It’s a bit more expensive than other materials, but we really want to go down this route, we really see value in it. We’re choosing to spend more money now and be in the right place with the right product, rather than having to change our minds in the future.
And to deal with the waste product, the company we’re working with is called PEEPOWER. They have developed a microbial fuel cell that eats the urine and converts it directly into electricity. The best fact we’ve found is that women’s urine is more energy rich than men’s, so we can actually create more electricity from our urine.
Are you attending events to get feedback in person?
Yes, it’s a constant development. We will definitely adapt based on feedback each year and make tweaks, because we’re constantly learning. We don’t see this as the final design. We will be there at every event with a team of what we’re going to call PEEQUAL pioneers, some incredible women that are working with us. Someone will always be on site with the PEEQUAL.
The first time you use something different, especially in an intimate space like this is slightly daunting. We recognise that and so we want a woman to be there to help guide other women through it. For example, we were at Shambala last year. As soon as women were told what to do one time, they were happy to whizz past and be like, “I just want to use it so I can get back on with my day, and go see the show I wanted to see.” That’s why we want to be there on the ground for the first few years.
Have you had 100% positive feedback from women?
It’s definitely not 100%. But we were surprised about how many women loved it. It’s quite situational. If you’re desperate, and it’s the only solution compared to waiting in a 30-minute queue, it’s a great way of quickly going to the loo and coming back to the event. We understand it’s not for everyone. But if we can get our target 90% of women out of the queue, we will be really happy.
We did a test event last year at a half marathon, and we found that more and more people used PEEQUAL the closer it got to the start time. Women didn’t want to miss the start of the event. I guess it’s that convenience that actually is driving behaviour. That’s something we are depending on for the adoption of PEEQUAL. You’re always going to have backlash with any novel product, but we just see this convenience driving it forwards and being the solution for when you really need to go.
How have you been impacted by COVID-19 lockdown?
I think it has impacted us positively in some ways. It meant we could work around the clock on it. You know, no social life meant we could really focus all our time on PEEQUAL! It also meant we could jump on a Zoom call with anyone. Everyone was available just for a quick 15-minute chat. We developed the design with industry experts to make sure it worked for the biggest names in the festival industry, and also logistics people and waste removal people. We just got on the phone to absolutely everyone.
I think the pandemic enabled us to reach more people and we could think about everything very thoroughly. And we had so much support from women online. It was such a shame we couldn’t go to events, but we’re so excited for this summer because everyone is so keen to get back to how it was, or even better.
People just want to get back into socialising and having fun in that way. We expect it to be a big boom. And actually, the portable toilet industry has suffered quite a lot in the last few years because of COVID-19. There’s a lack of companies providing toilet facilities right now in the UK, which means that festivals would be more open to look into hiring us. If anything, it’s actually all coming together to create this perfect storm for us, of anticipation for the events to get back and the public really wanting to get back to having fun.
Also, people have had time to reflect and are wanting more sustainable solutions. Loads of festivals are getting onboard with Vision 2025, an initiative to change and innovate, to have a lesser carbon footprint.
Have you noticed a difference at all in the response from men vs. women?
We have a full range of investors. Two of them are women. One is a former COO, who has been our marketing advisor for a few years before she invested, and has just helped us so much for free. We’ve also got a famous art collector, one who we met on a Female Founders call. It’s this community of female investors that is so supportive and has been so pivotal for our success.
Only 1% of funding goes to all female founded teams. We have felt that, you know. We’ve pitched the idea to many investors and we’ve been trying for a while. You have to learn to deal with a lot of rejection.
Our male investors are also very supportive. When you present an idea like this, people either get it or they don’t. I think the male investors we have, they just understood the problem and saw the need either in their family, their wife or their daughter, or they realise actually, you always see women standing in queues and that situation is awful, and they want they get behind our idea and encourage it.
We really appreciate men encouraging equality. We think equality can’t happen without men and women wanting it to happen. We appreciate the men who do support us, but really, we have come up against it because of gender divide as well.
How about taking PEEQUAL to the developing world?
We definitely see the need at refugee camps or natural disaster sites, where there’s limited access to sanitation, or safety. We definitely see ourselves helping in the future, when we have that reach. But right now, what we’re hoping to do is work with charities that we believe in that help in those ways, more from a donation point of view. And when we get to a point where we can adapt the design to be fitting for those cultures and environments, we’ll go there with our product. We don’t want to just crash into a culture and think that this what they need. We want to come in from their lane and go to them to ask, what are your constraints, what do you need from us right now? That’s the plan when we’re going into the relief sector.
What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs wanting to create an innovative product?
Amber: I say, make sure that you’re solving a problem. I think there’s a lot of products and ideas that are things that have just happened and people are trying to trying to push them into a problem. Whereas if you start with a problem you want to solve, your product can vary depending on how effective it is. I think that’s the biggest piece of advice I’d give – you can’t go wrong if you’re actually solving a problem.
Hazel: And I think mine would be more about confidence. If you look around you, everything created by human beings on this planet was designed and built by a person. Why can’t that person be you? It’s not just you existing in the unchangeable world - you have the ability to change it. My advice would be to have that kind of confidence to say why can’t it be me? And give it a go.
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Rosie is a Scottish blogger and bouldering enthusiast. She writes on feminism, equality, family and relationships. She interviewed several Booker Prize shortlisted authors for BBC Two’s 'The Culture Show.' If you can’t find her, she's lost in a book.
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