Equality, one pee at a time

Amber Probyn and Hazel McShane are co-founders of PEEQUAL. Their award-winning, flat-pack urinal is designed to support all women, non-binary and trans people with a fairer, faster way to pee. In case you’re wondering, these brightly coloured conveniences are manufactured in Poland and have been designed for logistical ease. The goal: to set the standard for women’s urinals. To achieve this, their new product has been designed with six years of insight, making it easy to build and break, efficient to transport on a lorry (to reduce CO2 emissions) and quick to empty. These design features will enable PEEQUAL to be rolled out and deployed by anyone producing an event from festivals to marathons.

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As a brand it is disrupting a category, we’re busting to find out more. Melissa Fretwell, our founder chatted to Amber about how it all began. Grab your lunch, hit play on your favourite Reading and Leeds Festival sounds and enjoy.

“So, me and my co-founder Hazel, were students together and during our summers we would be working at festivals. I was working in safeguarding and Hazel was working in hospitality and we both had the same problem on our breaks. We'd have to choose between going to the loo or getting food without missing the act that we wanted to see. We couldn't do both in the time we had. We weren't the first women to think, like, why is this the case? We're all waiting patiently in line, crossing our legs, annoyed that the men are whizzing in and out of the urinals and we're having to put up with this. Surely there's another way to spend a penny quickly.

Looking back, I think we were positioned well to solve this challenge because we were at university studying Innovation alongside our core discipline; Anthropology for me and Physics for Hazel. It was a really great blend of mindsets and we got together and basically thought 'let's make this our master’s year project'. We didn't want to accept that this experience is considered just what it means to be a woman. Let's find out why.

So we did lots of research and I think for me a standout eureka moment was when we were looking at what innovation had been done in public toilets and in portable toilets. There had literally been a big fat zero in investment in new development for women's products and women's sanitation. Everything like that is extremely underfunded but me and Hazel realised our idea had legs. This could go somewhere and scale. Every woman we were speaking to as part of our research was behind us, wanting to contribute and shake up the status quo. Which gave us loads of confidence that there’s a need and no one's meeting it. We were just heading into COVID and a lot of business leaders and innovators were thinking of switching up solutions, how can we make change, how can we be more hygienic, how can we be more aware of what our community needs? In that sense it was a great moment for us to bring our innovative ideas. Another eureka moment was both the realisation of the huge market and the validation that women were wanting to work for free because they were so desperate to see a solution come into the world.

I'm grateful for every prototype because we're now on our version five. But before that there were roughly 20 different cultural probes, cardboard prototypes and small scale metal maquettes. We had to try so many different things because we were asking people for feedback about how they felt about something personal, something that's taboo and so there’s a delicacy and sensitivity at play when gathering your insights.

Early prototyping was so informative and every learning both positive and negative steered us towards the PEEQUAL product we have now. We learnt that convenience and efficiency were highly prized by the user. So anything about the prototypes that weren't targeted at efficiency, at cleanliness, at safety would go by the wayside. We thought about having mirrors in some of them, but actually that slowed down women's use of the cubicle. So actually we took them out and it meant that women are now three times faster than a portable toilet.

We did a cultural probe once where we put big sheets of paper on the back of public toilet doors as we are already in the habit of seeing messages in that space. Our version had a pen attached to it, encouraging women to draw their ideal urinal as we were so curious to see what comes to the mind of a woman when they think of it. How does it exist? What would you want? Write down your needs, your must haves and your nice to haves. It showed us that users have no idea about what they actually want, although they were extremely keen to participate. Women really went for us showing their willingness to engage without really knowing for sure what they wanted.

The prototyping has definitely been a constant validation and feedback loop where we're testing and hearing their thoughts on whether they like it or not. There’s a bit of a push and pull because with anything new and novel the users are going to push back, you have to know where there's give and take. Taking semi-privacy as an example as part of our product is semi-private. When you're standing, you can be seen from the waist up, but when you squat, you're completely private. And a lot of people struggle with that because we're used to having full privacy and we're used to checking our phone or whatever else you want to do in the toilet. Whereas this is just you pee and you go. So, then we were worried that women wouldn't like that. Actually the convenience side of this really drove the product forward. So again, if it's convenient but a bit uncomfortable, people will try it. It's about designing a product with all of this front and centre and packaged in a way that addresses a taboo with a knowing humour. This has really helped us with developing our product.

And then when it comes to positioning our challenger brand, it’s not just a urinal it's a huge movement towards bringing women equality and equitable provision across the world. This wider mission is what all of our staff are driving towards.

There are so many problems in the world today, pick one and try to innovate around it. People can get distracted when they fall in love with an idea. I think it should be the other way around because if you can fall in love with the problem, your ideas can shift around it and take the shape of something that is actually useful and will solve that problem. Rather than feeling precious about that idea and forcing stuff into it. There's no point in developing a product for something that doesn't have demand for it. That's never going to work. So, I think if you're in that new category, make sure that the problem is legit.

Then it’s all about thinking laterally around the challenge. So for us, there’s the taboo around women's health and sanitation. Tackling this in lots of different ways is definitely something we've done across all our workflows and brand touchpoints. Whether that's being on site and talking to event organisers about getting women's urinals set up or talking to investors about toilet habits. You have to be creative about it because you're in a new category that you're defining as you go.

I think people will follow because you are pioneering but you also have to set the standard. That's really hard because you don't have anything to compare yourself to necessarily. So with pricing, brand reputation, the business model you are building from the ground up and I think it's challenging. On the one hand you have the advantage of setting the benchmark. You remain relevant by consistently keeping it up and this filters down into how you price, how you value your business, everything. This all then leads into confidence that leads into courage to back yourself. It's all connected.

Especially in a new category, people will laugh you out of the room. We've had that. It's hard because you have to believe in it more than anyone else. You have to be sold out for it even though people will doubt you. You have to be okay with feeling like an idiot and feeling like you're the one that's skipping the grad employment schemes and going on a different route. We chose to be experimental and to think, if not now, when are we going to do this? Let's just give it a go.

With our age came difficulties as well. People always underestimate us. People assume I’m the intern, or micro things like you going to a meeting and it's all men and then you're asked to take the minutes. As a new category business it can feel like you are fighting on all fronts all of the time. You have to pick your battles.”

At this point there’s a lot of nodding in agreement by Melissa and amazement that this is still going on in 2026.

“So I would always give this piece of advice to all new business owners which is to find a support system whether that's an accelerator or a business incubator or something like that that you can sit within and they might run courses on marketing, on vision writing, on KPIs, on finances and so on. You will learn the core things you need to know to run a business. So we jumped from one accelerator, to the next, to the next. And so we always had a support system. Now we have built this ecosystem that we're sitting within that we can reach out to. Off the back of those accelerators we had mentors who have connected us with investors and have become part of the staff team.

I always say that a startup founders' first currency is relationships.

If you can build a network of relationships that's so important at the start because we had so many people volunteer to work for free because they saw the importance of what we were doing. From our IP lawyer to financial support to just boots on the ground, our friends are coming to help us at site - relationships are the key. If you can't build them quickly and communicate your mission well, then you're going to be in trouble at the start.”

And we at White Camino help founders to tell their story because stories told well, organise and influence people, move them to show support for new businesses.

"From the end of July we're at Tramlines Festival, Wilderness Festival, Green Gathering and Brighton Pride. Then for August, it's even bigger, look out for us at: York 10K Run, Houghton Festival, Boardmasters, Medicine Festival, We Out Here, Green Man, Shambala, Big Church Day Out, Forwards Festival and the big one, Reading and Leeds Festival.

We will be hitting a new milestone for PEEQUAL on August bank holiday-- with over 300 facilities being used at five different events over one weekend. I am so proud of the PEEQUAL team!

We have just launched internationally selling direct to portable toilet providers. We are sending stock to the US, Norway and Ireland already and are keen to sell into more countries in Europe. It's definitely our mission for all women to access equitable provision anywhere. We really like chatting to new customers internationally because you always learn a new angle or discover what is important to them or how their audience might react differently.

The reason we wanted to start selling internationally was to provide women with better facilities, faster. Our best practice guides and our marketing maintains that relationship with them. So, we support them as much as possible to make it a success locally. We also go to trade shows internationally where we speak to lots of portable toilet providers. In November 2025 we went to Berlin for The Future Festival event. That was the first one we went to outside of the UK followed by Eurotoi that is focused on portable toilets. We're spreading our wings slowly globally.

At the end of August and into September we start to rebook for the next year. So, we want to be in the procurement budgets as early as possible. Women's urinals haven't ever had a budget line before. It's kind of difficult to convince organisers who are new to the concept to make provision when they are trying to reduce operational costs. However, now that we've collected a decent bank of data, shown how efficient we are and gathered some amazing social proof with our client testimonials, we can justify PEEQUAL's value. We try to do this everywhere we go. But with tenacity and a little toilet humour, we do get there eventually."

And on that hopeful note, the next festival beckons. If you want to find out more about the trailblazing world of PEEQUAL, check them out here or or follow them on Instagram @peequaluk.

If you’d like a hand telling your brand story, getting it seen, heard and bought, we can help with that. Drop Melissa a line: melissa.fretwell@whitecamino.com .