Female Entrepreneur Miki Agrawal Champions Global Sustainability Initiatives With TUSHY

Entrepreneur and innovator Miki Agrawal has systemically championed global sustainability initiatives within all of her professional and personal ventures. Her commitment to spreading awareness related to sustainability (or lack thereof) in traditional personal hygiene methods remains unwavering through Agrawal's leadership at TUSHY. As the founder and CEO of TUSHY, Miki Agrawal has vowed to bring bidets to every toilet in America, breaking cultural barriers and taboos related to bidet usage, sustainability, and the realm of hygiene.

Every Problem Needs a Solution

At the core of her professional endeavors, Miki Agrawal has always sought to fix a problem relevant to her own existence, and the collective experiences of those around her. Agrawal's first foray into entrepreneurship flourished after she suffered from continual gastrointestinal issues connected to food. Seeking a comfort food staple that wouldn't upset her stomach for hours was a useless feat. After not finding a solution, Agrawal created one, launching NYC-based WILD, a gluten-free farm-to-table pizzeria chain.

Similarly, the birth of TUSHY came after years of experiencing issues with traditional toilet paper and personal hygiene practices. According to Miki Agrawal, 'Wiping with toilet paper after you poop is not only ineffective but contributes to health issues like UTIs, hemorrhoids, yeast infections, anal fissures, anal itching (from wet wipes too)!' Experiencing a myriad of issues herself, Agrawal welcomed a practical gift, a bidet, from her then-boyfriend (now husband). However, Agrawal quickly recognized the hole in the market in the US for bidets. They were either too expensive for average consumers or too poorly manufactured to last. That's when she decided to step in!

The Problem With Toilet Paper

In the US, wiping with toilet paper is the predominant method of 'cleaning oneself'. Across the world, however, bidets are widely utilized and touted for their ability to provide a clean experience, while simultaneously being sustainable and environmentally friendly. It is estimated that Americans use roughly 36.5 billion rolls of toilet paper annually. This translates to the equivalent of destroying 15 million trees solely for the purpose of manufacturing this single-use product. The wasteful nature of toilet paper production doesn't just stop at trees, though. To make a years' worth of toilet paper utilized by Americans, it takes roughly 473,587,500,000 gallons of water, 253,000 tons of chlorine for bleaching, and 17.3 terawatts of electricity to produce this amount of toilet paper.

According to an article published on Forbes, Miki Agrawal's TUSHY 'helps ease environmental strife and fight the global sanitation crisis.' By eliminating the need for single-use toilet paper, using less water than needed for flushing and manufacturing toilet paper, and providing a superior clean, bidets like TUSHY provide a greener solution. For Agrawal, the motivation 'is to eliminate single-use products. If we can eliminate overconsumption and the need to buy things over and over again, those are good, smart purchases. It is ideal to have something, for example, a Tushy bidet, that lasts for years and years and saves thousands of trees and millions of trees collectively.'

While an average American uses about 55.5 gallons of water every week, a TUSHY bidet requires only 1.3 gallons of water per week, diminishing the ecological footprint related to bathroom use almost instantly.

Sustainability Meets Philanthropy

After a life-changing trip to India, Miki Agrawal (who is of Indian and Japanese descent) witnessed various defecation and personal hygiene issues. According to the CDC, the global sanitation problem negatively affects in excess of three billion people across the globe, including a large number of families in India.

Recognizing the importance of corporate social responsibility, Miki Agrawal decided to leverage her platform with TUSHY to provide aid for these issues. Creating a corporate give-back initiative, Agrawal partnered with Samagra House to ensure that a portion of every TUSHY sale would directly provide clean community restroom access to a family in India. This organization provides clean latrines to communities without access to them otherwise. Creating new meaningful jobs and ensuring the success of this program, Samagra House also employs local individuals to clean and maintain these restrooms and educates local residents about the importance of clean and accessible latrines.

TUSHY: Coming To A Toilet Near You

Since launching in 2015, TUSHY has continued to enjoy continued company growth, with significant growth during the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, TUSHY sales remain at a rate of x5 times that of sales in a pre-pandemic existence. To date, Miki Agrawal's TUSHY products have helped to clean over two million tushies.

Miki Agrawal: Creating A Better Future

Since TUSHY's launch and creation of sustainability initiatives and corporate give-back programs, TUSHY's partnership with Samagra House has provided clean latrines to over 60,000 families. The societal and environmental benefits of this partnership are already monumental, and will undoubtedly shape the future for the next generation.

In a recent interview with Ettitude Journal, Agrawal was asked to identify the most rewarding effect of living sustainably. Committed to creating a more sustainable world, Miki Agrawal cited her meaningful nature of 'knowing that I am doing my part to support my child and his generation and the generations that follow.'

Championing global sustainability, hygiene, and education is second nature to Miki Agrawal. Driven by the desire to leave the world in a better place than she found it, the innovator and constant disrupt-her is certainly doing her part to spread the word, one clean butt at a time.