An engineer, a lawyer and a gynaecologist in post-war Germany.

o.b. began in post-war Germany. In 2010 the Austrian newspaper Die Presse retold the brand’s origin: in 1947 two men without work, the automotive engineer Carl Hahn and the lawyer Heinz Mittag, found an American magazine on the bank of the Rhine, saw an advertisement for tampons and decided to make them in Germany. The American product used a cardboard applicator, and in Germany at the end of the 1940s there was no cardboard to be had, the paper reported, so the pair needed a different design and medical advice.

After one professor turned them down, they went to Karl Julius Anselmino, head of the Landesfrauenklinik, the women’s hospital in Wuppertal. In Die Presse’s account he welcomed the idea but said it was “a job for a woman,” and he proposed one of his assistants, the gynaecologist Judith Esser, who later married Heinz Mittag and became known as Judith Esser-Mittag. She had studied medicine in Cologne and Bonn from 1940 to 1945, the paper said, and had been a competitive swimmer, an experience German Wikipedia says she brought to the project.

English Wikipedia says Esser developed the product and named it. German Wikipedia says Hahn and Mittag developed the tampons and founded the Dr. Carl Hahn KG to sell them, with Esser Mittag advising them on medical questions.

Turning the idea into a product took machinery. Die Presse reported that the partners hired a technician who had worked with cigarette machines, since cigarette making also involves pressing and wrapping a filling, and that adapting the process to cotton wool proved harder than expected. English Wikipedia dates the start of production in Wuppertal to March 1950, and German Wikipedia places the main production site in the city’s Heckinghausen district.

Winning over the medical profession took longer. Esser-Mittag told Die Presse that doctors raised many objections to the new product, while the church received it relatively calmly, and that the team soon realised it would have to do a great deal of explaining.

A name, a thread and a quiet counter display.

The name is plain. o.b. stands for “ohne Binde” — German for “without a pad” — according to both English and German Wikipedia. Die Presse described the name in 2010 as being as simple, unadorned and discreet as the product itself.

The product is a tampon inserted without a separate applicator, which is how English Wikipedia describes the idea Hahn and Mittag started from. One detail of it became part of the brand’s look. Die Presse reported that the retrieval thread was white at first and was soon dyed blue, because the faster the tampons came off the line, the harder it was for inspectors to see that everything was in place, and the coloured thread made that check easier. The paper went on to describe o.b. as running through women’s lives “like a blue thread.”

The brand’s early retail problems were social rather than technical. In the 1950s and 1960s, Die Presse reported, many women found it hard to ask for o.b. over a shop counter, and some waited until other customers had left. The Dr. Carl Hahn KG answered with self-service displays placed beside the till, so a pack could be picked up and paid for without a word. The company also produced a brochure for young readers to answer questions about tampons, the paper said, and Judith Esser-Mittag spent much of her career on adolescent gynaecology and sex education.

The range has grown since then. English Wikipedia lists several tampon lines, among them Original and a Compact Applicator version. German Wikipedia lists four tampon variants, including Original and Organic, together with period underwear.

Discreet by design.

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.

Johnson & Johnson, then two owners on two sides of the Atlantic.

The Dr. Carl Hahn KG did not stay independent. Johnson & Johnson bought it in 1974, according to Die Presse and English Wikipedia, and English Wikipedia says the brand reached the United States two years later with a television and radio campaign, citing The Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising; Judith Esser-Mittag appeared in some of the later American commercials. Johnson & Johnson took o.b. to China in 1993, English Wikipedia says, citing the Los Angeles Times.

The brand was then divided by territory. On 23 October 2013 Energizer Holdings announced that it had closed its purchase of the Stayfree pad, Carefree liner and o.b. tampon brands in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean from members of the Johnson & Johnson family of consumer companies. In 2015 Energizer split in two, and the personal-care side took the name Edgewell Personal Care, based in Shelton, Connecticut.

Edgewell sold on. On 12 November 2025 it announced an agreement to sell its feminine care business — Playtex, Stayfree, Carefree and o.b. — to the Swedish hygiene group Essity, and on 2 February 2026 it announced that the sale was complete. In the 2025 announcement Essity’s chief executive, Ulrika Kolsrud, said the purchase would build a stronger personal care business for the group in North America. Essity has owned o.b. in those markets since 2026.

Outside them, o.b. stayed with Johnson & Johnson’s consumer-health business, which now trades as Kenvue; German Wikipedia describes o.b. as a Kenvue brand. In November 2025 Kimberly-Clark announced an agreement to acquire Kenvue, English Wikipedia says, with completion expected in the second half of 2026.

For a design guide, o.b. shows an identity built on two initials and a blue thread. Compare Tampax, the American applicator brand whose cardboard design o.b. could not copy, and Playtex, now its stablemate under Essity. For this guide we use thread blue, deep navy and cotton white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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