| First Kotex Ad |
In 1913, Congress passed the Underwood Tariff Act. This act lowered tariffs on manufactured goods and had the unintended consequence of putting paper producers in a major price war. At the same time, a major infestation of boll weevils and flooding of the Mississippi River devastated southern cotton farmers. Paper-production company Kimberly Clark saw an opportunity. In 1914, a chemist working for K-C, Ernst Mahler, began researching ways to turn wood into a good cotton substitute. Their primary interest was to create a material suitable for surgical dressings, so it had to be absorbent, clean, and strong.
By 1915, Mahler and his team of researchers had developed a material dubbed Cellucotton and learned how to create it in large quantities. This material was more absorbent that regular cotton and cost 60% less to produce. When World War I broke out, K-C supplied the Red Cross with its Cellucotton surgical gauze for free. They also worked with the army to turn this material into a gas mask filter to protect soldiers involved in trench warfare from the chemical weapons that had become abundant in the war.
These gas masks and surgical dressings were so successful, the government ordered increased production. When the war ended, however, K-C was left holding tons of excess Cellucotton without anyone to buy. When the heads of the company learned that Red Cross nurses had been using the Cellucotton as sanitary pads during their periods, the quickly developed. They got the name for their product by noting the cotton-like texture—Kotex was born. The first ad for Kotex sanitary napkins ran in Ladies Home Journal in 1921.
References:
American Experience: Wilson—A Portrait. Legislative Victories.
Mum.org. Old Kotexads.
Sarver Coombs, Danielle and Bob Batchelor, eds. We Are What We Sell: How Advertising Shapes American Life…and Always Has. Vol. 1. pp187-190
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