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.
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.
Bound 15 tampons into a 46-page book about menstruation and the tax, legally reclassifying the product as a book under German tax law and dropping the rate to 7%.
Germany's reduced tax rate applied to books as a physical form, not to tampons as a category.
Binding tampons into a real book made the product legally qualify for the 7% rate without any rule change.
The product itself demonstrated the tax's absurdity, generating viral attention and political pressure.
The parallel petition campaign forced a parliamentary hearing, which the product's visibility amplified.
When facing an unfavorable rule, check if your product can be repackaged to fit a more favorable existing category before lobbying to change the rule.
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.
FOLLOW THE EVIDENCE