In their campaign, Scholz & Friends and The Female Company stealthily navigated Germany's tax laws that classified tampons as a luxury good to be taxed at 19%. By creating a book that included tampons, they were able to tax it at the 7% applied to books. The illustrated book of tampons included information that addressed issues surrounding periods.

“After some research we found out about this ‘sexism tax’,” explains Max Marohn, one half of the creative director duo who conceived the project. He found out about the issue while listening to the news one morning. “We thought 'why don’t we combine a kind of selling campaign with a creative approach'?”

Marohn and his creative partner Sebastian Stelzer innovatively combined posters with online activism, influencer power and product placement to connect to traditional political channels. It channeled growing and global calls to address laws that appeared to unfairly penalise women.

Through harnessing the people power of the internet via a social media campaign and combining this with lobbying tactics, the team leveraged a legal grey area to highlight the unfairness of the tax law. A passion project for the agency and a leap of faith from an adventurous client created a campaign that fixed a broken system and made history.

“The Female Company are just bold people and they said, ‘Yes, we want to make our name big’, so if anything negative had happened it would have been ok… It didn’t because it was the right thing to do and the tampon tax was stupid,” says Stelzer.

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