Scholz & Friends | Work | The Female Company

Outsmart the tax system with tampons, legally.

How The Female Company became a political player with a tampon book.

Caviar, truffles and even oil paintings: In Germany, many luxury goods were taxed at the reduced rate of 7 percent until the end of 2019. Tampons, on the other hand, were subject to the highest VAT rate of 19 percent. The founders of the online store The Female Company not only sell menstrual hygiene products, but also wanted to draw attention to this discriminatory taxation.

In doing so, they triggered a social debate, which we as an agency brought to attention in order to enable social rethinking.

Client The Female Company
Agency Scholz & Friends
Year 2019
Awards Meist ausgezeichnete Kampagne des Jahres 2019 und 2020: 14 Grands Prix und über 100 Awards

Outsmarting the law with the law

Our idea: sell organic tampons packaged in a book - and thus outsmart the tax law with itself. Because the lower tax rate is due only for books, we can tax the tampons for 7 percent. But with 45 pages of provocative illustrations and empowering content about menstruation, taboos and feminism, the book is more than just smart packaging. And: it has supported the petition "Periods are not a luxury." With success: the goal of the initiators to ask the Bundestag to discuss the abolition of the tampon tax has been successful after significantly more than the necessary 150,000 signatures. Since 2020, the tax rate of 7% applies to menstrual products.

First edition out of stock

The first edition of 1,000 The Tampon Book was sold out immediately. Originally planned as a one-off campaign, The Tampon Book became so successful that The Female Company had further editions produced. The case film reached more than ten million views on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. German mainstream media like RTL and Pro7/Sat1 picked up the story, national newspapers like Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and almost every feminist blog in the German language reported on the Tampon Book.