Drop Modesty Protections For Now

If your store carries feminine hygiene products, then blasting onto your shelves of floral designs in gentle pastels—all seeming to want to shyly fade into the background—you’ll probably be featuring tampon packages yelling out to be noticed. Kimberly-Clark’s “U by Kotex Click” are packed in reusable tin containers, each carrying one of 56 patterns, and the brand name appears on shelves in strikingly bold colors over a black background. Along with this, K-C products for incontinence and urine leakage are coming out from the shadows.

      All this reflects a trend toward decreases in personal modesty. It’s a trend that affects all sorts of product and service retailers. Clothing. Physical fitness. Residential construction. Even furniture. It influences what you offer and how you display the alternatives.

      But recognize this as a trend, and realize the pendulum does swing both ways. Kimberly-Clark has been there before with results which were not positive. In late 2001, K-C announced “the most significant category innovation since toilet paper first appeared in roll form in 1890.” Moist Cottonelle Fresh Rollwipes came in a plastic dispenser which clipped onto a regular toilet paper holder. Although market research said that almost two-thirds of adults were in the habit of wetting toilet paper or using a moist wipe, the product failed to sell well. A post-mortem concluded that shoppers had absolutely no interest in making their store purchases of this sort of body maintenance product any more noticeable by going for innovation.

      As for the pendulum’s swing back? Researchers at Bilkent University in Turkey report that young woman are increasingly wearing the veil to declare their rebellion against their mothers’ generation, which the younger woman view as having abdicated proper standards of personal modesty.