In Turkey, periods are perceived as «shameful» like every other thing about womanhood. Women were facing with outrage whenever they talked about the period.

As Always, we try to make the world a better place that women can live freely and confidently. In this project, we wanted to break taboos on the menstrual cycle and point out the real problems of women.

Objective: Showing that the periods are nothing to be ashamed of and starting a conversation around this topic while proving Always is the leading brand for women to live in a better world.

Budget: 8.400 USD

The aim behind our project was start a conversation about period and strengthen our brand perception. Thus, we worked towards our goal and placed our specially designed limited number of packages in modern and metropolitan areas of Turkey in which the social media is actively used.

The perception of periods being something to be ashamed of, concretized with our packaging. When women want to buy sanitary pads from the shops, the pads were wrapped with newspaper, as people think that seeing a woman’s sanitary pads is shameful for her. People were covering their sanitary pads with newspapers to hide them in the same country that women face sexism, abuse, violence and various other shameful situations as a part of their everyday life. So we redesigned our packaging with a unique newspaper covered with news on violence against women, sexism and gender inequality. With our new packaging, we have shown that the periods are nothing to be ashamed of in comparison to the inequalities that women are facing within their lives. We protested the way that the newspapers are used to cover something to hide it and used them to expose the everyday misogyny in the society.

The majority of our target audience, women between the ages of 18 and 45, was uncomfortable with the sanitary pads wrapped in newspapers. They were pointing out the weirdness of this habit on platforms like Twitter. They were taking pictures of their newspaper wrapped pads and sharing them with explanatory captions of why this practice is wrong. We took this customer insight and set our goal as protesting newspaper wrapped sanitary pads and demonstrate the periods are nothing to be ashamed of. To reach our goal we used our packaging, which used to be covered with shame, as a medium that spreads the facts which we really need to be ashamed of.

We printed our newspaper packaging covered with news about violence against women and gender inequality, the real shameful stories, as a limited edition. We gathered the news on inequality and summarised them as short news texts. We printed these news so that they would look like a newspaper. As our aim was to start a conversation on why period is seen as something to be ashamed of, we placed our limited edition packages on contracted stores for sale and wanted our voice to be heard rather than increasing our overall sales. Then we collaborated with various women influencers for our project to reach a wider audience.

• Value added to brand

After our campaign, the consumers shared our limited-edition packaging on social media and complimented the project. These positive feedbacks strengthen our image as the leading brand for women which aims them to live in better conditions.

• Value for consumer

We raised awareness about why this widely common practice is wrong. Some of the stores stated they abandoned this practice and they won’t wrap sanitary pads anymore.

• Reach/cultural impact

We started a conversation on social media platforms about period being not something shameful. On Twitter, the users explained why it is wrong to wrap sanitary pads in newspapers with dozens of tweets.

• Sales

Our limited-edition packaging was sold out in 3 days.