At the end of the First World War, Kimberly-Clark had a surplus problem. During the war it had made Cellucotton, a cotton substitute of creped wood pulp, for surgical dressings, and a thin flattened form of it that the army was interested in as a gas mask filter. The war ended in 1918, and with it, the gas mask project. The company was left with a surplus and needed something to do with it.
The answer, in the company’s telling, came from ironing the material flat and soft. In 1924 it went on sale as Kleenex. Women were wearing more makeup, and Kimberly-Clark positioned the tissue as a clean replacement for the “cold cream towel” that hung in many bathrooms. A box of one hundred sheets, six inches by seven, cost 65 cents. Its first advertised function, according to the brand’s history page, was a “marvelous new way to remove cold cream.”
The first ad, in the Ladies Home Journal in 1925, offered “the new secret of keeping a pretty skin as used by famous movie stars.” From 1927 the ads carried testimonials from stars of stage and screen, Jean Harlow and Helen Hayes among them.
Inside the company, at least one man was using it differently. Ernst Mahler, head of research, suffered from hay fever and had been using the tissues in place of a handkerchief. He persuaded the advertising group to pitch them, too, as a way to avoid spreading germs. In 1927, the brand page says, Kimberly-Clark proposed a new use: “absorbent kerchiefs.” In 1929 came a box that popped up one tissue at a time.
Then, in 1930, by the company’s account, Kimberly-Clark was swamped by letters from customers. The letters backed the tissue’s use as a handkerchief; the brand page says they advocated it for colds.
After more research, the company changed its advertising to “the handkerchief you can throw away.” Kleenex was no longer a product mainly for women, its history sheet says; it now served “men, women, young and old alike.”
Sales of Kleenex, according to the company, doubled in the first year of the new campaign.