#158 2019 · The Female Company (with agency Scholz & Friends Berlin) · Consumer productswrong-door
The Female Company bound its tampons into an actual book, so Germany's own tax code taxed its product at the 7% rate for necessities instead of the 19% rate for luxuries
the problem
Tampons taxed as a luxury at 19% instead of 7%
background
In Germany, VAT law sets a reduced 7% rate for goods classified as daily necessities — including books — while menstrual products were taxed at the standard 19% rate reserved for non-essential 'luxury' goods, alongside items like truffles and caviar. Menstrual-equity activists had been pushing to reclassify tampons and pads as necessities for years, mostly through the conventional route of petitions aimed at lawmakers.
In 2019, German direct-to-consumer startup The Female Company, working with Berlin agency Scholz & Friends, noticed that the tax code's boundary wasn't drawn around 'tampons' as a category — it was drawn around 'books' as a physical object. A product could cross from one tax bracket to the other simply by qualifying as a book, regardless of what was inside it.
the move
They produced a 46-page book — containing essays and illustrations about menstruation and the tax itself — with 15 organic tampons bound into a pocket at the back, making the product legally a book under German tax classification and taxable at 7% instead of 19%. The first print run sold out in a day, the second in a week, and the campaign was widely shared by German lawmakers and press as a literal demonstration of the tax's absurdity.
the payoff
The Tampon Book sold out twice and won the PR Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2019, generating outsized earned media relative to its production cost. Credit for the actual law change should be shared honestly: Germany's Bundestag voted in November 2019 to cut the tampon VAT from 19% to 7% effective January 2020, but that vote followed formal Bundestag petitions led by activists that gathered close to 200,000 and 80,000 signatures respectively, which is what forced the mandatory parliamentary committee hearing. The Tampon Book ran in parallel to that petition campaign and amplified it enormously in press and among politicians, but it was a vivid illustration of the argument, not the sole legislative mechanism.
what came after
The Tampon Book is now a standard reference case in PR and Cannes Lions case libraries for 'protest through product design' — turning the letter of a rule into the argument against its spirit, rather than only arguing in words.
filed under
references
- [1]The Tampon Book, Which Protests Taxes on Menstrual Products, Wins PR Grand Prix at CannesAdweek, 2019adweek.com
- [2]Tampons will no longer be taxed as luxury items, after landmark German voteCNN, 2019cnn.com