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Kotex, Kleenex, Huggies: Kimberly-Clark and the Consumer Revolution in American Business. By Thomas Heinrich and Bob Batchelor. Columbus: University of Ohio Press, 2005. xiv + 263 pp. Index, notes, bibliography, figures, illustrations, tables. Cloth, $48.95. ISBN: 0-814-20976-9.
If Kimberly-Clark had stuck to its original industry-papermaking-it would today be of far less interest to business, let alone cultural, historians. But World War I steered the papermaker into developing Cellucotton, a cellulose-based product used for bandages. Cellucotton, in turn, led to the development of Kotex, the first successfully mass-produced, mass-distributed feminine-hygiene product. Kotex transformed Kimberly-Clark into a diversified manufacturer of industrial and consumer paper goods. The company would eventually claim three entrants in the pantheon of consumer megabrands: Kotex, Kleenex, and Huggies.
Thomas Heinrich and Bob Batchelor use the three brands to structure the book's narrative. Kotex began Kimberly-Clark's transformation. Then, in 1923, a lab assistant suggested using Cellucotton as the base for a makeup-removal tissue, and Kleenex was born. The company later repositioned Kleenex as a disposable handkerchief, when it found that consumers used the tissue that way. It worked, and by the 19303, 78 percent of consumers said they preferred Kleenex tissues to competitors' brands. Heinrich and Bachelor draw two lessons here. First, because Kotex and Kleenex drew on extant capabilities, Kimberly-Clark was spared the massive costs of investing in wholly new technologies. second, during the interwar period the manufacturers of consumer products were well placed to improve their competitive position, whereas those in older industries (such as papermaking) had no option but to cartelize. Diversification into consumer products thus allowed Kimberly-Clark, still primarily a manufacturer of printing papers, to survive the cyclical dips in newsprint prices and ride out the Great...