A Denver physician’s patent and the businesswoman who bought it.

Tampax began with a patent. English Wikipedia’s article on Earle Haas describes him as an osteopathic physician who practised as a country doctor in Wray, Colorado, before moving to Denver in 1928. The patent record held by Google Patents shows that Haas applied for a patent on a “catamenial device” on 19 November 1931 and that it was issued on 12 September 1933, in Haas’s name. The company history that Tampax published on its own website, preserved in an archived copy from May 2013, says Haas began work on the idea in 1929 and developed the details in his basement workshop in Denver.

That same company history describes the design in some detail. Haas started with a strip of cotton, sewed a cord along its length so that it extended beyond the end, and built a hand-operated device to compress the strip into a small cylinder. He wanted the user not to have to touch the cotton, the history says, so he considered a metal applicator before settling on a telescoping pair of paper-wound tubes, one slightly larger than the other, with the smaller one used to push the tampon into place. Wikipedia’s article on Haas gives the same outline: a plug of cotton placed by means of two cardboard tubes.

The name is a compound. Wikipedia’s Tampax article describes it as a portmanteau of “tampon” and “packs”, and its infobox dates the brand to 1931, as the Tampax Sales Corporation, citing the 2004 Procter & Gamble history Rising Tide.

The business passed from the doctor to an entrepreneur. According to Wikipedia’s Haas article, Haas could not interest buyers in the idea, Johnson & Johnson among them, and on 16 October 1933 he sold the patent and the trademark to a Denver businesswoman, Gertrude Tendrich, a German immigrant who started the Tampax company, served as its president and made early tampons at home with a sewing machine and Haas’s compression machine. The archived Tampax company history spells her name Gertrude Tenderich and refers to “her Tampax Sales Corporation” as the business that marketed Haas’s design before the company that followed. Wikipedia says tampons based on Haas’s design went on sale in the United States in 1936.

Tampax Incorporated, Tambrands and P&G.

The company that carried the brand for six decades was formed in 1936. The archived Tampax history says Tampax Incorporated was chartered under the laws of the State of Delaware on Saturday 7 March 1936, under Ellery Mann, who had come from the antiseptics firm Zonite. Mann recruited two colleagues from Zonite: Thomas F. Casey as vice president and treasurer, and Earle A. Griswold, Zonite’s production manager, as vice president in charge of manufacturing. The history says the three of them led the company for the next two decades, with Mann taking charge of marketing, advertising and distribution.

Manufacturing moved to Massachusetts in the early 1940s. According to the same company history, the New Jersey factory that Tampax leased was sold in 1941 to Johnson & Johnson, and the company set up a plant in a former textile mill in the village of Three Rivers, which came to be known as Palmer after the Massachusetts town of which the village is part. J. Ralph McLaughlin, a mechanical engineer, set up a machine shop there to repair and build compressing machines. Wikipedia describes Tampax as an independent company based in Palmer and headquartered in New York City for more than fifty years.

The corporate name changed before the ownership did. Wikipedia says the company was renamed Tambrands, Inc. in 1984, and that it was based in White Plains, New York, until its sale. On 10 April 1997 the Los Angeles Times, carrying a wire report, wrote that Procter & Gamble had said the previous day that it would acquire Tambrands and its Tampax brand, as part of a strategy to sell more products in expanding overseas markets. Tambrands’ chairman, Edward Fogarty, said in a statement quoted by the paper that joining P&G would “accelerate the global growth of Tampax”.

Procter & Gamble has owned Tampax since 1997. The purchase put the brand alongside Always, the pad brand P&G had introduced in 1983, and Wikipedia’s Tampax article now describes the tampon brand as sitting within P&G’s Always business. P&G’s portfolio also includes the nappy brands Pampers and Luvs.

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.

Magazine pages, store demonstrators and a 1985 commercial.

Advertising was part of the brand from the start of Tampax Incorporated. The archived company history says Ellery Mann aimed his marketing at three audiences — physicians, the drug trade and consumers — and placed different kinds of advertising for each: trade-magazine pages for retailers, anatomical drawings and technical descriptions in medical and nursing journals, and consumer advertising in newspapers and national magazines. It dates a consumer advertisement in The American Weekly, the Sunday supplement inserted into many newspapers, to 26 July 1936. Wikipedia’s Tampax article says that in 1937 the company worked with the agency McCann Erickson on its campaigns.

The brand also used people as well as pages. The company history says that in 1937 Tampax hired women to act as consultants in department stores in Chicago, Cincinnati and other cities, explaining the product and answering questions, and that in March 1941 Mabel Mathews set up a formal educational department, training consultants — the “Tampax ladies” — to visit colleges, schools, trade shows and conventions. Wikipedia, citing Jaime Schultz’s 2014 book Qualifying Times: Points of Change in U.S. Women’s Sport, adds that from the 1930s to the 1940s Tampax chose sportswomen as brand ambassadors.

Television brought a different register. Wikipedia records a 1985 Tampax commercial featuring the actor Courteney Cox. On 20 September 2022 BBC News reported that Cox had posted an updated version of that 1985 advert on Instagram, recreating its locker-room scene and rewriting its lines as a parody about the menopause.

The name has carried the identity through every change of owner. It joins two plain words, and it has stayed on the product through Tampax Sales Corporation, Tampax Incorporated, Tambrands and Procter & Gamble. The corporate name changed in 1984 to a coinage built on the brand itself, the company took a name derived from the product.

For a design guide, Tampax shows how a name built from two ordinary words can outlast a patent holder, an independent company and its successor, from a Denver basement to a Cincinnati portfolio. Compare it with Always, its sister brand at Procter & Gamble, and Pampers, another P&G household name. For this guide we use Tampax blue and deep navy with rose and cotton white and a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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