Scarlet by RedDrop Built a Premium Period Brand. Walmart Wanted an $8.97 Pack.

Scarlet by RedDrop landed in 476 Walmart stores in May, the company says, the first national mass-retail deal for a brand that had sold period care straight to families for years and, since last summer, through Ulta Beauty. On Walmart’s shelves the products are first-party, sold and shipped by Walmart rather than listed through a third-party seller, and they sit within a new tween-focused period-care section the retailer has built out, about a dozen products by Modern Retail’s account. The prices tell you what kind of launch this is. Scarlet’s own period kits run from $27.99 to $46.99 on its site, and its larger bundles sell for $49.99 to $69.99. For Walmart, the brand made a $14.97 first-period kit, an $8.97 kit it calls Code Red, and a 32-pad value pack at $8.97, two of the three built specifically for the retailer.

The idea came from a classroom, not a category study

Dana Roberts spent 22 years teaching, including years in a fifth-grade classroom, where the same scene kept repeating: girls getting their first periods at school with no idea what was happening to them. One girl once asked her, in Roberts’ recounting, “am I dying?” Roberts began assembling small kits of pads and supplies for her students, and in 2019 she turned that habit into a company, RedDrop, with co-founder Dr. Monica Williams, a physician. The brand became Scarlet by RedDrop in 2025 as it widened its focus from first periods to the full stretch of the teenage years.

The products hold to the founding premise: period care built for tween and teen bodies, not adult products scaled down. The pads are smaller, with extra adhesive so a girl can still move at recess, and the line runs to a menstrual cup sized for younger users. That argument drew a $1 million grand prize from Pharrell Williams’ Black Ambition nonprofit in 2024, a grant rather than an ownership stake, and a 2025 launch into more than 350 Ulta stores. The company stays independent and founder-owned, sells to families directly by subscription, and runs two channels into K-12 schools. It says it has reached more than a million tweens and teens since 2019 and cites roughly $15 million in lifetime revenue, figures it reports itself.

Winning a Walmart shelf meant designing to the price, not porting the line

Here is the part worth a supplier’s attention. Walmart’s buyer wanted three items at a value price, and Scarlet did not simply shrink its existing kits to reach it. It built new products for that shelf, the $8.97 pad pack and the $8.97 Code Red kit, which carries a pink pouch the buyer specifically requested. Williams describes the design work as thinking about “what the consumer would want to put on her shelf versus in her cabinet,” a different job than the education-heavy starter kits Scarlet sells at Ulta and online.

That split is the strategy. Scarlet keeps its higher-priced, resource-rich kits where discovery happens, direct and at Ulta, and meets families on their weekly value trip with a pack priced to move. Roberts has called the Walmart shelf a form of validation and a way into communities the brand’s other channels do not reach. It is not alone in that aisle. Pinkie, a rival that has taken outside funding, already sells in Walmart, Target, and CVS, and Always, which fields a teen-labeled line of its own, and Kotex remain the category’s incumbents. Period products fall outside SNAP but are generally eligible for FSA and HSA dollars, which softens the cost for some families, though the shelf still sets an $8.97 Scarlet pack beside the giants.

Scarlet built its name arguing that girls deserved better than a cheaper, smaller version of an adult product. Its Walmart debut is, in part, a cheaper, smaller product, set on the shelf beside the very incumbents it set out to outdo. So the launch leaves a real question: does the education Scarlet wraps around that $8.97 pack, the booklets, the QR codes, the voice of a friend, travel onto a mass shelf intact, or does the value pack that won the placement become the Scarlet the next million families come to know first?

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