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The Beginning
Tampax Incorporated was formally chartered under the laws
of the State of Delaware on Saturday, March 7, 1936.
The first executive recruit was Thomas F. Casey, the choice
for vice president and treasurer. Casey had spent 10 years
in the accounting department at Ellery Mann's previous
employer, Zonite. Mann's other executive recruit was Earle
A. Griswold, Zonite's production manager, whom he hired as
vice president in charge of manufacturing.
These three, Mann, Casey and Griswold, would guide Tampax
for the next two decades. Mann had the good sense to select
men with the expertise and temperament to complement his
own special talents and personality. He gave them authority
and then left them alone.
A new product had to be efficiently manufactured, of
course, and strict accounting procedures put into place.
Most of all, however, it had to be marketed, advertised,
sold and distributed, and this was Mann's pivotal role.
Mann's marketing plans took aim at three different
audiences: physicians, the drug trade and consumers.
Personal contact, the gift of gab, and careful planning — all
were essential to the Tampax sales effort. Mann knew from
the beginning, however, that without sufficient advertising
the effort was doomed to failure. This insight is
commonplace today, of course, but Mann was one of the
handful of executives during the 1930s who fully grasped
advertising's potential.
In trade magazines such as his old "Drug Store Retailing" he
emphasized the opportunities for profit inherent in
stocking and promoting his new product. By contrast, the
ads in the "AMA Journal" and various nursing magazines
typically featured anatomical drawings and a technical
description of the tampon; they sought to educate the
professionals who were in a position to advise women about
the product. The first ad in the "AMA Journal" asserted that
"over 3,000 physicians have written to us inquiring about
Tampax" and offered to send interested physicians a free
package of tampons and a folder detailing their use.
The most important ads of all were those directed at the
consumer. A few such ads appeared in New York City
newspapers during the first spring. But the central thrust
would be national magazines, and Mann began working on
ideas for his magazine campaign almost immediately after
incorporation. Advertising such a sensitive topic to a
national audience would require just the right touch, a
combination of aggressive selling and delicate good taste.
The first ad appeared on Sunday, July 26, 1936 in the
"American Weekly". A Sunday supplement that was inserted in
many major newspapers, it claimed the greatest circulation
in the world — some 11 million buyers.
These visual themes proudly announced that Tampax
tampons were available in 100 countries. Tampax
literature, he added, was printed in 20 different
languages.
Education
During many trade and professional conventions, Tampax
sponsored a booth featuring promotional displays. The
Tampax booth featured a so-called demonstrator — a woman
hired and trained to talk about the company's tampons.
The demonstrator idea evidently originated in 1937, when
women were hired to serve as Tampax consultants in
department stores in Chicago, Cincinnati and other cities.
The demonstrator explained the benefits of tampons to
customers and answered their questions. She might also give
a series of lectures on sanitary protection to the store's
female employees.
Out of the demonstrator idea grew the notion of hiring
educational consultants — women with a professional medical
background who could command respect at conventions of
physicians or nurses. Tampax's first full-time educational
consultant was Mabel Mathews.
In March 1941, Mathews established the company's first
formal educational department. She began hiring and
training consultants, "Tampax ladies," as they were known, to visit colleges and schools, as well as trade shows
and conventions. Their aim was to dispel myths and
misconceptions about menstruation and sanitary protection.
It was not always an easy task. To illustrate the
difficulties, Mathews later liked to recall the time she
gave a talk to a women's college in Virginia, where Ellery
Mann's older daughter was a student. After the talk, one of
the young women announced to Mathews, "Marian Mann goes to
school here and her father makes Tampax and she told me she
wouldn't be caught dead with them."
A key function of the educational department was
documenting the safety and efficacy of Tampax tampons. Mann
and his colleagues always had felt certain that their new
product was medically safe as well as effective, and said
so. No evidence to the contrary had surfaced during the
previous marketing of Dr. Haas' invention by Gertrude
Tenderich and her Tampax Sales Corporation.
Nonetheless, scientific research into tampons was virtually
nonexistent.Then, in 1939, results from studies by physicians and other
researchers began to appear in the medical journals. One of
the first such studies, which was published in the August
1939 issue of "Clinical Medicine and Surgery", was conducted
by a Brooklyn physician, Harry S. Sackren. In his research,
Sackren echoed questions that women as well as doctors were
asking about tampons: "Are they irritating? Do they block
the flow? Do they cause any changes in the vaginal or
cervical tissues?"
To find some answers, Sackren observed 20 women using
Tampax tampons over a duration of three to five months. He
concluded that these tampons:
- offered complete protection to 90 percent of the women
observed and in 94 per cent of the menstrual periods
studied;
- showed no tendency to block the flow;
- produced no observable changes in the vaginal or
cervical tissues (no irritation);
- caused no infections;
- were easy and comfortable to use and eliminated odor
(because, unlike external pads, the flow is not exposed
to the air, which causes decomposition); and
- were favorably regarded by the patient.
In 1941, Madeline J. Thornton, M.D., of the University of
Wisconsin Medical School, completed a study of 110 subjects
over periods of time ranging from one to two years. Her
results generally confirmed those of Sackren.
An even more intensive study of the effects of using Tampax
tampons was reported in 1943 by Karl J. Karnaky, M.D., a
research gynecologist at the Jefferson Davis Hospital in
Houston.
Over a five-year period he, observed in close detail 42
subjects who were normal in assembly lines were laid out and
the maple floors were so saturated with the lubricating oil
used in the looms that formerly occupied the weave shed
that it took 25 years to get the oil out.
McLaughlin set up a machine shop to repair old compressors
and build new ones from scratch. Though the plant was
situated in the village of Three Rivers, it came to be
known as Palmer, after the town of which the village was a
part.
The Palmer plant had to cope with shortages of raw
materials and machine parts created by the war. In order to
obtain cotton for tampons and paper for the applicator
tubes, the company had to establish that the tampon
constituted an essential health product.
Mann and Griswold traveled to Washington numerous times to
make this case. Their strategy, as Griswold worked it out,
was based on the diminutive size of the tampon compared to
an external pad. Manufacturing tampons required far less
cotton than did pads, and shipping the finished product
required far fewer freight cars. Thus, Griswold pointed
out, the manufacture of tampons actually freed up raw
materials and transportation for other aspects of the war
effort. The company received the lowest level of priority,
but a priority nonetheless.
The plant at Palmer was hard-pressed to keep pace with
explosive growth in sales brought on by the war. One reason
for this growth was the unprecedented wartime prosperity;
after a decade of simply trying to make ends meet, more
people had more money to spend. But sales also soared
because the lives of women changed radically.
Tens of thousands of young women were catapulted out of the
kitchen and into military uniform. Millions of other women
went into factories, where they took over such traditional
male pursuits as welding, operating cranes and running
machines. Still others served in volunteer jobs as nurse's
aides for the Red Cross or as ambulance drivers for
Civilian Defense.
The common ingredient in almost all of the changes in
women's lives was physical activity. Here now were millions
of active women of the kind Tampax long had targeted in
its advertising campaigns. But instead of swimming or
dancing as in the magazine ads, they were welding, marching
or, like the mythical Rosie riveting.
The posters in the Tampax drugstore display now portrayed,
instead of a swimmer, a woman in the uniform of the Women's
Army Corps, along with the slogan, "No time for time-out."
Tampons were much easier to take care of for women who were
working than the pads. Women found they could put them in
their purse and take them along.
Sales soared beyond Ellery Mann's most optimistic dreams.
Now tampons were actually selling faster than Tampax could
make them. Mann had vowed to make Tampax "a household
word," and for many years, in its advertising and
packaging, the company used the word synonymously with
tampon.
Griswold, in a series of memoranda to headquarters, pointed
out the danger that a competitor might appropriate Tampax
on the grounds that it had entered the language as a
generic term. Partly as a result of his alertness, the
company eventually adopted a policy of always referring to
its principal product as Tampax tampons.
In March 1946, the company marked its 10th anniversary. In
his report to stockholders, Mann wrote, "We feel that we
can point with pardonable pride to the fact that Tampax has
in that period become one of the best known names in the
field of intimate feminine hygiene."
In 1984, the company changed its name to Tambrands Inc.
Tambrands has manufactured Tampax tampons for almost 60
years, and today is the worldwide market leader. Tampax
tampons are sold in more than 150 countries and are used with
confidence by more than 100 million women.
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