"The world was so recent that many things lacked a name, and to mention them you had to point your finger at them," García Márquez wrote in the first paragraph of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
.
What does a name mean?
For
Kotex
, the first brand of pulp disposable pads, it meant everything.
The success of its new product represented a giant step in its commercial balance and opened a new path in the use of one of the great natural resources of the United States: forest biomass.
During the first half of the last century, new consumer goods displaced many of the traditional functions that wood had played in American homes.
Modernity meant steel, plastic, glass, and synthetic materials.
However, demand for consumer goods also facilitated the introduction of dozens of new tree-based products.
Perhaps the best example of logging was the invention of the first disposable sanitary napkin, the
Kotex
.
In 1918, when the First World War ended, there were some 900 million women in the world who lived an average of 57 years.
From puberty to menopause, every 28 days they suffered from menstruation disorders, always annoying and often painful.
On average, throughout her life a woman had between 400 and 500 menstrual cycles.
In
The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth Century America
historian Lara Freidenfelds writes that although some disposable cloth towels were offered since the late 1880s they were only available to wealthy ladies before the first compresses hit the market most women relied on homemade cloth handkerchiefs.
With money or no money, controlling menstruation was an uncomfortable affair, because it was difficult to keep the cloths in place and they were not very absorbent.
For women who could afford it, there were options such as the quaint
Hoosier
toilet belt
, which held cloths where it was most convenient, or
Listers
towels
, possibly the first disposable option.
The use of such products did not become popular because they were expensive and difficult to find in conventional stores.
The Hoosier belt in a pre-1925 image.
The disposable sanitary napkin was an invention that changed women's behavior towards menstruation.
It also helped create modern perceptions of how publicity should be managed for a taboo subject, which managed to move forward thanks to the presentation of the product as something to which the emerging stereotype of the 'modern' woman of the 1920s should aspire.
Finding an answer to a crucial question, how to market a product whose function cannot be overtly exposed?
Kotex
pads
paved the way for the wide variety of feminine (and later masculine) hygiene products on the market today. .
Like another series of products that first hit the market in the 1920s,
Kotex
pads
had emerged as a wartime invention.
Founded in 1872, the Kimberly-Clark Company of Wisconsin began marketing disposable paper products after World War I.
During the war, he produced bandages made of a material called
cellucotton
for use in field hospitals.
It was made from wood pulp and was five times more absorbent than cotton bandages and much cheaper.
The idea of military nurses
In 1919, after the war was over, Kimberly-Clark executives were looking for ways to use
cellucotton
in peacetime.
The company developed the idea for sanitary napkins when it heard that military nurses used
cellucotton
surgical dressings
as makeshift sanitary napkins during menstruation.
Walter Luecke, a Kimberly-Clark employee who had been tasked with finding a use for the
Cellucotton
, saw the sky open.
He had a ready-made product that could potentially appeal to nearly half the country's population, creating a demand large enough to replace the slump in dressings sales caused by the end of the war.
No matter how big a war, Luecke thought, there would never be as many wounded as there were women in peacetime.
The Woolworth department store in Chicago sold the first box of sanitary towels manufactured by Kimberly-Clark in 1919.
No one remembers how that first transaction was made, but it quickly became apparent that the sale of the new product could create an embarrassing conversation between a male shop assistant and a
modern
customer
.
To avoid this, and to avoid having to point the finger at it like in Macondo,
Cellucotton's
new pad
became one of the first self-service items in US retail history.
The pads were strategically placed in special dispensers so that women did not have to ask a clerk for them.
At the beginning of the last century, vending machines like this one dispensed a compress at the price of 5 cents.
But things weren't going to be that easy.
Problems immediately arose.
The companies that Kimberly-Clark asked to manufacture and distribute its pads under patents refused to do so.
They argued that they were something too intimate that could never be publicized.
Kimberly-Clark executives weren't over for the job either, but Luecke, who was convinced his proposal was the philosopher's stone, kept pushing until the idea was approved.
In addition, they made a decision that would skyrocket the company's sales balance: they would manufacture them themselves.
Kotex advertisement in 1926.
What seemed very difficult was to market something called "
cellucotton
sanitary
napkins
."
Fools call fate by chance.
The name
Kotex
came from the casual observation of a company employee, who at a meeting said that the product had a "cotton-like texture."
"
Cot-tex
" (Cotton-Texture) became
Kotex
, easier to say, creating a name that, like another Kimberly-Clark flagship product,
Kleenex
, would become a colloquial way of referring to a certain class of products , they will be made by whoever made them.
"Ask for them by name"
It was clear that recognition of the trade name would be vital to the sale of the product.
The manufacturers launched a powerful advertising campaign.
"Ask for them by name" became a repeated motto in all magazines aimed at female audiences, especially in the very popular
Good Housekeeping
, which had a circulation of one million.
Asking for them by their simple, loud name rather than requesting "sanitary pads" prevented women from having to speak publicly about menstruation, especially with employees of the opposite sex.
Even today, American women continue to say
kotex
to refer to compresses, in the same way that
clínex
has become synonymous with tissues.
After much hesitation, the firm that Kimberly-Clark had hired to advertise and launched the "ask them by name" was an extraordinary success.
If we've sold this, we can sell anything, they must have thought.
Although according to John R. Kimberly, president of the company, this product was initially “the target of taboos that bordered on the mystical”, its final acceptance “led to a generation of constant expansion, compulsive growth […], the workforce of the company expanded during the Depression ”.
The first Kleenex were marketed in the 30s of the last century.
Kimberly-Clark's next groundbreaking innovation was the
Kleenex
, introduced during the 1930s. After World War II, the company had a full line of products unknown to the previous generation that quickly became indispensable to everyday life: plates. paper cups, facial tissues, towels, napkins, tablecloths, aprons, even disposable paper diapers.
But that was not all.
Eggs came in paper containers, milk was sold in paper cartons, and countless new appliances arrived in cardboard boxes.
While annual US per capita paper consumption in 1920 was 70 kilograms, by the 1960s it had more than tripled and was the highest in the world.
Like life itself, commercial success had its origin in the menstrual cycle.
Manuel Preciado Lorca
is a university professor.
Department of Life Sciences and Researcher at the Franklin Institute for North American Studies, University of Alcalá.
He is also responsible for the Federal Biodiversity Group of the PSOE.
This article was originally published on
The Conversation.