The Female Company: The Tampon Book - A book against tax discrimination

The Female Company, an online shop, launched a campaign in Germany to outsmart the sexist law that meant tampons were taxed at a higher rate than luxury goods and books.

Objectives

Until 2020, many luxury goods in Germany were taxed at the reduced rate of only seven percent while tampons were taxed at the highest rate of 19 percent. But German politicians refused to take notice of this. The Female Company decided to outsmart this sexist law – with the law itself. Books are taxed at seven percent, therefore, we sold tampons hidden inside a book in order to avoid the higher tax. We sold the tampons inside the book for a lower-than-average price (compared to high-taxed regular packaging).

More than 10,000 books were sold, but more importantly, the book...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands