A bandage material looking for a peacetime use.

Kotex began with a material rather than a product. Smithsonian magazine, in an article by Kat Eschner published in August 2017 and updated in November 2018, explains that Kimberly-Clark, a paper company formed in the 1870s, produced bandages during World War I from Cellucotton, a material made from wood pulp. English Wikipedia’s Kimberly-Clark article places the company’s founding in Neenah, Wisconsin, in 1872. When the war ended, the Smithsonian article says, Kimberly-Clark’s executives spent 1919 looking for ways to use Cellucotton in peacetime, when the demand for bandages had gone.

The idea came from the hospitals of the war. Citing the historians Thomas Heinrich and Bob Batchelor, whose book on Kotex, Kleenex and Huggies was published by Ohio State University Press in 2004, Smithsonian says the American Fund for the French Wounded had received letters from Army nurses who had used Cellucotton surgical dressings as makeshift sanitary napkins. A Kimberly-Clark employee, Walter Luecke, had been given the task of finding a new outlet for the material, and he took up the idea. The firms he approached to manufacture the pads turned the work down, the magazine says, on the grounds that such a product was too personal ever to be advertised. Kimberly-Clark’s own executives shared some of those doubts, but they agreed to try, and the company made the pads itself.

Smithsonian says a Woolworth’s store in Chicago was selling boxes of Kotex in October 1919, and that the national magazine campaign for the product began in 1921. English Wikipedia’s Kotex article says Kimberly-Clark launched Kotex in the United States in 1920, to make use of Cellucotton left over from wartime bandages. Kimberly-Clark marked the brand’s centenary in 2020, Wikipedia records, with a programme of support for Plan International under the name “She Can”.

The name was coined from a description. Both Smithsonian and Wikipedia say that an employee remarked on the product’s “cotton-like texture”. The phrase was shortened to “cot-tex”, and the spelling was then changed to the shorter, easier-to-say Kotex. The result is a five-letter word with no descriptive term for what the box contained. Kimberly-Clark’s next consumer brand, according to Wikipedia’s Kimberly-Clark article, was Kleenex, introduced in 1924.

One owner for more than a century, and two names on the box.

Kotex has had a single owner from the start. Kimberly-Clark has owned Kotex since its launch. Metissue reported on 13 October 2026 that, as a condition of EU approval for the Kenvue purchase, Kimberly-Clark was required to sell Kotex, Camelia and Record in the European Economic Area to the Turkish company Dilek. Smithsonian notes that a 1932 patent by W. C. Heitmeyer was assigned to the International Cellucotton Products Company, which it describes as the marketing arm for Kimberly-Clark’s consumer products, and which merged with the parent company in 1955. Wikipedia’s Kimberly-Clark article says the company moved its headquarters from Neenah to the Las Colinas area of Irving, Texas, in 1985.

The early selling of Kotex depended on where the box sat in a shop. English Wikipedia says the pads were originally sold in a hospital blue box, and that acceptance was slow until Montgomery Ward began advertising them in its 1926 catalogue. Wikipedia also says the box was placed on shop counters with a separate payment box, so that a customer could pay without asking a clerk for it.

The range grew around the name. Wikipedia records that Kimberly-Clark introduced New Freedom pads in the early 1970s, a line that is now a former member of the Kotex family, and that in August 2009 it launched a sub-brand called Kotex Luxe in Singapore. A larger change came the following year. A Kimberly-Clark press release issued from Dallas on 16 March 2010 announced the national launch in the United States of U by Kotex, a line of tampons, pads and liners in what the company called bold new packaging and brightly coloured designs. The release said the products would be shipped to major retailers from 28 March.

Wikipedia describes the 2010 change as a platform rebrand covering packaging, product design and the brand’s message, with sub-lines grouped under names such as Click, Sleek, Fitness, Security and Barely There. In 2018, Wikipedia says, U by Kotex became the founding sponsor of the Alliance for Period Supplies, a network working on access to period products. In December 2018, according to Wikipedia, Kimberly-Clark recalled U by Kotex Sleek tampons.

The older name has since returned to the front. English Wikipedia says that in February 2026 the brand took back the Kotex name for its pads and liners, with ranges sold as Kotex, Kotex Teen, Kotex Bamboo and Kotex BioCare, while the compact tampon line keeps the name U by Kotex Click. The parent company may itself change shape: on 3 November 2025, Kimberly-Clark announced an agreement to acquire Kenvue, the consumer-health company behind Tylenol and Listerine, in a deal described at the time as expected to close around the second half of 2026.

Design and documentation.

Pad and tampon packaging is designed to be picked up quickly and carried without attention. Cartons and soft packs tend to use calm colours, rounded type and simple graphic shapes, and many are sized to sit in a bathroom cabinet or slip into a bag. The individual wrapper has become part of the design as well: a small printed sleeve or a twisted paper or film pouch that keeps each item closed, often in a colour that matches the outer pack.

Much of the information on these packs is organised by colour. Sizes and flow levels are commonly coded with a distinct tone or a row of drop symbols, so a shopper can tell variants apart on a crowded shelf without reading every line. Shapes, applicator types and liner lengths are shown with small diagrams rather than photographs.

Packs also carry text that design does not control: usage leaflets, material lists and statutory wording that differ from market to market. Each guide in this group sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its name, packs and advertising have changed, keeping to what dated sources record.

A plain wrapper, a blue box and a brand name to say at the counter.

The advertising was built on discretion. Smithsonian cites a 2010 study by the communications scholar Roseann Mandziuk of the Kotex campaign that ran in Good Housekeeping from 1921. The advertisements, she wrote, showed a woman or a group of women “in active, yet decorative poses”; they described the size of the pad and how to buy it, but never pictured the product. They promised it came “in plain wrapper”. One advertisement, set in an office, told readers that there was “nothing on the blue Kotex package except the name”. English Wikipedia adds that Kimberly-Clark also placed advertisements in the Ladies’ Home Journal during the 1920s, and that it promoted Kotex in Good Housekeeping through the advice columnist Mary Pauline Callender.

The name did the work that a picture could not. “Ask for them by name” became an important Kotex slogan, Mandziuk told Smithsonian: asking for Kotex rather than for sanitary pads spared customers from describing what they wanted to a shop clerk. Over the decade, the magazine says, the women in the advertisements moved from real working settings towards an ideal — a picnicker, a partygoer, a traveller.

Later campaigns changed the tone. The New York Times reported in October 2000 on a new Kotex campaign, and Wikipedia records that the slogan launched that month was “Kotex fits. Period.” Television advertisements shown in 2004 featured an animated red punctuation mark, known as the Red Dot, which dissolved on a pad; Wikipedia says the slogan was dropped in 2005. The U by Kotex launch in 2010 went further. Kimberly-Clark’s release said the brand’s marketing would follow a new tagline, “Break the Cycle”, and named a multi-agency team for the launch: JWT, Marina Maher Communications, Organic and Mindshare. In 2026, Wikipedia says, Kotex introduced a global brand platform called “Own Your Flow”.

The architecture has always come back to the coined word. Sub-brands have been added as prefixes and suffixes — Luxe in Singapore, U by Kotex in North America, Teen, Bamboo and BioCare in 2026 — and the five letters of Kotex stay inside each of them. The blue of this guide’s palette is our reading of the hospital blue box that Wikipedia describes, and the red is our reading of the Red Dot campaign, not a published specification.

For a design guide, Kotex shows how a brand can be carried for a century by a name, a box colour and a line to say at the counter, with packaging once advertised as carrying nothing but the name. Compare it with Kleenex, Kimberly-Clark’s 1924 tissue brand, and Huggies, another Kimberly-Clark brand, or with Tampax and Playtex in the same category. For this guide we use box blue and deep navy with a dot of red on a pale wrapper tone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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