Inside the Kotex brand overhaul

Kotex is in the midst of a makeover.

Or, rather, it’s in the process of “a complete brand overhaul” of everything from innovation to marketing to activation, Katie Moran, president of the adult and feminine care business unit at Kotex parent company Kimberly-Clark in North America, told us.

The impetus for the change is simple: In the last decade, the Kotex brand, which was founded more than a hundred years ago, has been “losing relevance” with its customers, Moran explained, all while broader category innovation has stagnated to a point where consumers are unhappy—and saying so in market research, on social channels like Reddit.

Rather than ignoring the feedback, Kotex is taking it head-on in its latest campaign, called “You Asked. We Heard.”

The 60-second hero spot, from GUT Miami and directed by Camila Zapiola, pans across women in bathroom stalls who voice their complaints about pads. “Girl, it feels like someone stuffed a kitchen sponge in my underwear,” one woman says. Finally, the ever-increasing crescendo of voices is silenced when someone offers up a redesigned Kotex pad under the stall divider.

The spot continues with a new tagline for the brand first introduced in February of this year: “Own your flow.”

Destigmatize the period: Setting the spot in bathroom stalls allowed for honest conversation and “just feels less preachy and more authentic because that is how the conversation happens with women,” Moran said.

While it may seem like taboos of talking about period care are a thing of the past, some 55% of women say they’ve felt embarrassed about their periods, according to YouGov data, and the setting can offer a safe space for those conversations.

“When it comes to women’s health overall, I think the conversation has gotten a little bit louder, and people are a little bit more bold,” Eunice Shin, founder and CEO of brand consultancy The Elume Group said, adding that while the conversation is happening, it’s rare to see it reflected in marketing. Being more “expressive about it, making it sound like it’s not taboo,” Shin said, could be a way for Kotex to stand out.

As Kotex retools its portfolio of products to address consumer wants, the brand is also working to destigmatize periods in its new marketing and advertising campaigns, which Moran said is a matter of brand purpose.

“Our purpose is to break down the stigma associated with periods so that women can be comfortable at this stage of their lives and what is going on with their bodies,” she said.

It’s also looking to spread the message through sports and athlete partnerships. During the 2026 Winter Olympics, figure skater Amber Glenn said in a TV interview that she was competing while on her period, after which Kotex reached out to Glenn to ink a brand partnership that could continue normalizing talking about periods. In February, Kotex introduced its new tagline with a sports-centric spot featuring tennis imagery (and a cover of Tears for Fears’s “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” to boot).

Kotex again: There has been some innovation in period care over the last decade or so with the rise of menstrual cups and the release of period-underwear brands throughout the 2010s. (Kimberly-Clark, it may be worth mentioning here, acquired period-underwear brand Thinx in 2022.) But pads and tampons are still overwhelmingly popular, according to data from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Focusing messaging and innovation around pads as part of Kotex’s new campaign is a matter of reflecting the reality that “pads are still a very substantial part of the fem-care category, and we need to make sure that that solution that most women in America are using is really delivering on their needs,” Moran said.

The brand is aiming to deliver that message not only with new pads and liners but also with a social strategy to push the message out there all while leaning on the long-running Kotex brand name. To do it, the brand is working with 80 different influencers, a major increase in creator marketing for the brand.

“We have double the social content, double the influencers and everything like that as we really reignite the Kotex brand,” Moran said. “Kotex is an [over] 100-year-old brand in the US, and over the last 15 years, we have been repositioned as U by Kotex. And so I really look at this launch as…coming back and bringing Kotex back to the US.”