The secret of half the sky
On October 1, 1985, the "Inheritance Law of the People's Republic of China" came into effect.
Article 9 has only 7 words: equality between men and women in inheritance rights.
In the same year, a factory in Quanzhou, Fujian ran a machine from Taiwan to produce the first white sanitary napkins.
The workers set off firecrackers to celebrate, and red debris fell on the red mud road.
In the next few years, the salesperson of the company took one month to sell the machine's production volume per day.
In China at that time, the vast majority of menstruating women were still used to using menstrual pads, cloth, and straw paper.
One day in 2020, a pretty girl poured 6 cups of pink liquid on a piece of sanitary napkin, then cut it with scissors to verify the thickness after water absorption, and then said to the camera: "You really have you!" this Weibo The video has been viewed 121,000 times.
This is a scene that no one has taken a long time to blame.
TV advertisements, e-commerce platforms, and supermarket shelves all convey a message: There are many varieties of sanitary napkins to choose from.
"Are sanitary napkins in my country really expensive?" According to the question and answer on Zhihu's website, more than 3,000 netizens shared their experiences of buying sanitary napkins.
These voices were submerged in the shouts of the top products of "Planting Grass" and "Amway", even many practitioners in the sanitary napkin industry have not noticed.
"That thing is expensive"
Xu Min didn't know how much corn and vegetables his mother had sold, and how many times she had borrowed money with someone to ensure that her little daughter would have sanitary napkins for three years in junior high school.
One day in 1999, Xu Min, who had just entered junior high school, and a senior from the same village hid in the school toilet cubicle and communicated at a volume that only two of them could hear.
The senior sister took a white sanitary napkin without wings, pointed to the back and said, "Put it on the underwear." This was the first sanitary napkin Xu Min used.
Now at 34 years old, she is the workshop leader in the sanitary napkin manufacturer with the largest market share in China.
The annual sales of all brands of sanitary napkins in this company are about 8 billion yuan.
Xu Min can't remember the brand and packaging of the small white piece used for the first time.
But she clearly remembered the price, 13 pieces for 5 yuan.
Xu Min's father and sister work outside all year round, and his mother works in farming at home to take care of her and younger brother. The living expenses depend on the harvest of several acres of crops.
At that time, 5 yuan was a considerable expense for this rural family in Guizhou.
"Is it easy to use?" the mother asked her daughter.
"Of course it is easy to use what the teacher allows." During physical education classes, the female teacher would tell the female students to use sanitary napkins and change them in time if they found the body was "not clean".
Sometimes Xu Min couldn't bear it and also used straw paper.
What the mother said next surprised Xu Min, "Buy me a bag".
She recalled that the mother during menstruation seemed to use cloth, but the cloth never appeared, and she did not know where it was hidden.
She understood this mentality, and out of shyness, she hid her underwear and panties under her coat to dry herself.
She went to the commissary to buy sanitary napkins. She couldn't understand the brand and couldn't distinguish between "daily use" and "night use" on the package.
Her eyes only wandered in quantity and price.
The daughter bought back the first pack of sanitary napkins for her mother.
"It needs to be changed every 4 hours." "It needs to be attached to the underwear." Xu Min repeated what the teacher said.
Then one night, she was in her menstrual period, sitting on a bench doing homework, and couldn't help complaining to her mother: "It's troublesome, there is blood everywhere." Her mother comforted her: "This is something every woman has to go through."
In most contemporary sanitary napkin advertisements, girls as models are always free to move and smile, advertising that using a certain product will be "comfortable".
As early as 1930, Shanghai Women’s Magazine also recommended an imported sanitary napkin made of gauze and cotton with the advertisement of liberating women, comfort and freedom: no water absorption on one side, no leakage, and great water absorption on the other side. The intimidation of "
An industry insider who has done brand planning for a number of sanitary napkin companies said that older women are highly loyal to sanitary napkin brands and will not easily change brands. Therefore, most sanitary napkin advertisements will choose young spokespersons to attract girls buy.
Before the implementation of the new advertising law in 2015, some male stars also appeared in sanitary napkin advertisements as "big uncles" and "good friends".
When Xu Min again asked her mother for money to buy sanitary napkins, her mother said the difficulty, "That thing is expensive."
In order for the little daughter to use sanitary napkins, the mother went out to borrow money from neighbors.
Sometimes, Xu Min would also ask his mother, "Is it used up?" The answer is almost always not used up.
Many people write about their experiences on the Internet: Some girls can't use sanitary napkins, but only use cloth strips; middle-aged women who are seriously ill want to save some money to buy sanitary napkins in bulk.
Some netizens also said that the happiest thing after work is to realize the freedom of sanitary napkins. They want to use the best sanitary napkins and do not want to wrong themselves.
After graduating from junior high school, Xu Min left his hometown in Guizhou to work in Fujian.
Her hands washed abalone in a cannery and brushed the glue on the soles of a shoe factory.
After becoming a mother, she went to a sanitary napkin business.
Initially in the production workshop, she was a product packer on the assembly line, and each pack of sanitary napkins only stayed in her hands for 3 seconds.
She sits on a plastic chair and works 11 hours a day, repeating the same action: pinch the sides of the packaging bag with both hands, step on the pedal with her right foot, and the machine will seal the sanitary napkin packaging.
Long-term work has deformed her right middle finger.
She put the sealed sanitary napkin back on the conveyor belt.
These sanitary napkins with cartoon images on the outer packaging will go into cartons and be delivered by trucks to supermarkets and canteens across the country, including her home in Guizhou.
She used it herself, and went home during the New Year. She also gave sanitary napkins to relatives and friends.
One day 11 years ago, Xu Min called and told her mother that he had a new job.
The mother said, "Is that an endless sanitary napkin?"
The bosses all want to make high-end products
It looked like a ball of cotton, white and light floating on the conveyor belt.
Only one-sixth of the hair-thick fiber layers are intertwined in layers and become the surface layer of the sanitary napkin closest to the skin.
When the early sanitary napkin production technology was introduced to China, the soft-textured non-woven fabric can ensure the sanitary napkin surface is dry and water-permeable, which is the first choice for factories to purchase materials.
It is only in recent years that surface layers made of materials such as cotton, silk, and bamboo fibers have entered the market.
"All the silk used for facial masks is used." Lin Jia, who runs a sanitary napkin processing company, said with emotion that in order to give women a better experience, the materials used to make the skin-friendly layer of sanitary napkins are becoming more and more expensive.
Lin Jia was born in 1980. Her first experience of using sanitary napkins was: butt pain.
In addition, she can also name a large list, including too thick, sultry, weak adhesive, and wrinkles after a long time. These are related to the early production process of sanitary napkins.
Lin Jia's mother has always used menstrual pads. When her daughter had menarche, she tried to teach her daughter: Put a sanitary napkin on her underwear, and put a few layers of paper on the sanitary napkin.
One day Lin Jia realized by herself that her mother was trying to save.
On social media, netizens shared stories about sanitary napkins related to their mothers: the panties are too old and loose, and the sanitary napkins don't work if they are attached; use the sanitary napkins that the mother has collected for many years and have hardened adhesives, and then attach some double-sided tape to fix them.
After Lin Jia worked, she switched to imported brands. Because the advertisement said "No side leakage", she didn't have to scrub the blood on her underwear.
The needs of a new generation of women have promoted the advancement of sanitary napkin production technology.
The most obvious change is that the sanitary napkins began to add two wings, which can be folded to the outside of the underwear and fixed to prevent menstrual blood from leaking out.
After Lin Jia inherited her father's business, she has been processing sanitary napkins for foreign brands for a long time.
When Lin Jia had a meal with a foreign customer, they put the latest products on the table to introduce. Once the waitress in a restaurant was shocked when she saw a table full of sanitary napkins.
She recalled that in recent years, the bosses of sanitary napkin companies gathered together to discuss consumption upgrades and high-end products, including research on more advanced surface materials.
"You think of it as a sandwich." Lin Jian skillfully tore off the edge of a piece of sanitary napkin. The surface layer closest to the skin and the isolation layer with adhesive are the two slices of bread of the sandwich. The absorbent layer between them bears the burden. The main function of sanitary napkins.
The production team leader stood up the sanitary napkin and shook it. The white and delicate polymer absorbent resin like fine salt fell on his palm.
After they absorb water, they become elastic transparent balls.
Lin Jian, who has been in the industry for 12 years, has produced at least one billion sanitary napkins.
The machine he operates is 15 meters long and produces 780 pieces of sanitary napkins with a length of 275 mm per minute.
The greatest source of his sense of accomplishment in his work is that when he went to the supermarket, he picked up a pack of sanitary napkins. The anti-counterfeiting code would reveal that this pack of sanitary napkins was produced by him.
Lin Jian recalled that in the past, problems such as stains, broken wings, and surface pattern shifts were manually detected.
Right now, after the imaging equipment automatically detects, the inferior products will be picked out and thrown into the inferior product box.
Manual packaging is gradually being replaced by machines.
The online weighing device can accurately count 10 pieces of sanitary napkins and put them into the packaging bag for sealing. The mechanical gripper grabs 8 packs of sanitary napkins at a time and puts them into the carton. After 3 times of grabbing, the carton will be sealed with tape and transported by the conveyor belt. go.
These tasks used to be done by about 20 female workers sitting on either side of a production line.
This is different from the scene where Xu Zidan produced the first sanitary napkin in 1985.
After the sound of firecrackers on the red mud floor, his greatest expectation for participating in production was to reduce the scrap rate.
35 years later, in the office, the president of Hengan Group’s Women’s Health Industry Development Department excitedly picked up a pen and drew a cross-section of the sanitary napkin in 1985 on the whiteboard, “non-woven fabric, two-layer toilet paper, wood pulp, Toilet paper, release film", there are 6 layers.
At that time, polymer absorbent resin had not yet entered the domestic sanitary napkin production process.
Why fakes sell well
From the perspective of the outer packaging, there is no difference between this pack of sanitary napkins and the "best period" sanitary napkins sold through official channels: the 20-year-old design has been criticized by consumers for "aging" and "old-fashioned". The packaging is printed with the production date and "Qualified".
It was packed into a cardboard box with the words "Duo Smooth Hygienic Mattress" and sent to a wholesale market in Yunnan Province. When it waited for the store owner to purchase it, it was sold at a price 10% lower than the retail price.
It is a fake, from a small workshop with only one production machine.
There, piles of wrapping paper imitating the "Jiaqi" brand were stuffed in burlap bags, the walls were dirty, and the ground was littered with garbage and waste.
When the police and corporate staff arrived, the counterfeiting gang had already escaped, leaving behind a piece of wrapping paper and finished products waiting to be sold.
In some remote areas of China, Jiaqi sanitary napkins attract low- and middle-income people.
Marketing manager Miao Yihao recalled that they had to deal with an average of 3 times a year for this kind of counterfeit production and sale incidents.
In addition, infringing products that counterfeit other brands also give them a headache.
"ADE" with a letter similar to "ABC" brand, and "octave space" with a name similar to "seven degrees space" will compete for the market in regions where purchasing power is not high, and the price is only half that of competitors.
This part of the market is mostly concentrated in the urban-rural junction, mountainous areas or ethnic minority settlements.
Miao Yihao believes that these women who buy counterfeit and infringing goods will not easily change their consumption habits and will not buy high-priced branded products because they "use whichever is cheaper, and don't use it if you don't need it."
These women who need low-priced sanitary napkins are in a long-term "aphasia" state.
Lin Jia found that there is a difficult problem: companies are more willing to fight for high-end, unwilling to produce cheap sanitary napkins, but some women have limited spending power and cannot afford the cost of brand sanitary napkins.
Menstrual poverty is widespread all over the world.
In Africa, some poor women have to sell their bodies in exchange for the money to buy sanitary napkins.
In the UK, 137,000 girls drop out of school every year because they cannot afford sanitary products.
Before producing the first piece of sanitary napkins, the 18-year-old Xu Zidan didn't know what sanitary napkins were. He only knew that this job was to hang materials on the machine and earn 2.5 yuan a day.
The boss taught him that it is more convenient and clean to use sanitary napkins when women come on menstrual holidays, instead of washing menstrual pads.
At the class reunion, someone made a mistake about sanitary napkins and napkins. He followed the boss's words and explained to the other party.
Some classmates teased him, "Why do big men want to do that", he said this is my profession.
He is rarely shy.
Working in the workshop, sweating on his forehead, he stuffed the non-woven fabric for sanitary napkins under his hat to absorb sweat.
In the mid-1990s, he went to Jiangxi to sell sanitary napkins.
The young girl at the commissary heard "sanitary napkins" and did not answer.
The older proprietress asked "Why did you sell this young man", and he replied, "Personal occupation, I have been doing this for 10 years".
Because it is closely related to sexual characteristics, fertility, and privacy, this female-specific physiological phenomenon has many hidden names.
The Chinese coded words are "unlucky" and "something is coming", and the Dutch like to say "the red Ferrari is here".
The Spaniard said, "The tomatoes have fallen."
The French woman said, "Britain has landed."
It does not seem to be a topic that can be discussed publicly, and there is a deeper gap between the sexes.
In the classroom, Xu Min could say "relatives here" aloud because the male classmate did not understand.
Elderly people in the rural areas of Guizhou’s hometown would occasionally remind girls that other people’s homes hold weddings and that girls are not clean and cannot go to other people’s living rooms.
In 2002, the grandmother who was over 60 heard that Zhu Limin was going to make sanitary napkins, and asked her, "How can that thing be absorbed? Why doesn't it leak?" Relatives asked Zhu Limin about her career. She went back to "daily necessities". She suffocated her to say the word "sanitary napkin".
Today, she is the head of the workshop.
Times are different.
When Lin Jia's son was in the fifth grade of elementary school, he gave away sanitary napkins made by his mother's company to female classmates. He also planned to help his mother put the advertisement on the back of the high-speed rail seat.
When Xu Zidan drove to pick up a female customer, the other party actively asked for sanitary napkins. He could immediately take out a piece of the product and ask the other party to try it.
He once gave cool sanitary napkins to his daughter’s classmates. The little girl said the next day: "Uncle, you cheated me. I woke up in the middle of the night."
The knowledge that women's menstrual period affect the mood swings of hormones is popular among the public.
Xu Min's voice was loud and nagging, and her husband complained: "Is your aunt here, so aggressively!" The daughter who was going through adolescence laughed.
Some men will tease in public that they came to the "big uncle" and feel bad.
However, when mentioning the past of Girls’ Generation, Xu Min hopes not to reveal his real name, as if it were an unspeakable secret.
She knows her career "ceiling"
In Hengan, Xu Zidan has developed a sanitary napkin with a convex design, the convex part can better fit the structure of the female private parts.
To this end, he consulted a gynecologist specifically to understand the characteristics of female private parts, and determined the length, width, and thickness of the convex part of a sanitary napkin one by one, and then distributed the trial products to female colleagues and asked them to share the experience.
"Chinese women's butts are getting more and more tricky." The most obvious change is that early women chose to endure the same crude material, but now they will complain.
The transformation of supply and demand has promoted product improvement.
Xu Zidan recalled that after the demand for sanitary napkins rose in the early 1990s, many supermarkets and commissary owners drove to the factory gate to line up, pulling at least two carts of sanitary napkins each time.
In 1998, more sanitary napkin factories were established in China and the output increased, and his sanitary napkins had to be promoted.
The presence of foreign-funded enterprises has also impacted the development of domestic sanitary napkin brands.
Also starting in the 1990s, foreign-funded companies have introduced advanced technology and equipment to compete with domestic sanitary napkin brands for supermarket shelves in first- and second-tier cities.
Jin Beibei, director of sanitary napkin category of Hengan Group, said that nowadays, more women buy foreign brands in first- and second-tier cities, while domestic brands have a higher market share in third- and fourth-tier cities.
The advantages of both parties are that multinational brands are good at marketing and promotion, focusing on telling brand stories, while domestic brands have a wider coverage of offline sales channels, and the product layout takes into account the mid-to-high-end market and people with limited spending power.
For example, "An'erle", which was once positioned in the mid-to-high-end market, is now more favored by middle-aged women and young people born in small towns born in 1995.
In the past 20 years, China's sanitary napkin market has expanded and production capacity has increased year by year, but the price of a single piece of sanitary napkin has risen every year.
Miao Yihao, the best market manager, clearly feels that because online channels have robbed part of the offline market, some physical stores are charging more and more suppliers to survive, driving up the price of sanitary napkins.
Another factor is advertising.
Compared with other domestic brands that were also created in the 1990s, Jiaqi sanitary napkins did not find a position in the segment in time, the price rose slowly, and the target consumers gradually migrated to the low-income groups.
In contrast, other first-tier brands have invested a lot of advertising on product innovation, opened up visibility, and prices have increased accordingly.
According to Guo Huibin, executive secretary of the Fujian Sanitary Products Chamber of Commerce, in 2006, the number of sanitary napkin companies in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province reached a peak of nearly 400.
Many companies are also responsible for the research and development of machinery and materials for sanitary napkins.
After many "shuffles", companies producing low-quality sanitary napkins were eliminated.
The surviving small and medium-sized enterprises find a way out by relying on foreign trade, providing processing services for micro-business, e-commerce, and live broadcast merchants, and pursuing differentiated products.
Pan Ru is willing to take over a sanitary napkin manufacturer from his father.
The experience his father left for him is to make innovative products and serve high-end people.
In the past five years, his company has received more complaints about underpants being torn by the backing tape of sanitary napkins. After inquiries, they found that more and more women no longer wear cotton underwear and choose silk underwear instead.
He had to re-adjust the width and strength of the adhesive on the sanitary napkins to ensure that they were adhered firmly without tearing the underwear of the new material.
According to a salesperson from a sanitary napkin manufacturer, they produce about 100 million sanitary napkins every year, and about 70% of their productivity is to provide processing services for more than 100 micro-businesses.
Merchants can personally customize the most suitable sanitary napkins with materials and packaging of different textures according to the positioning of target consumers.
Just the antibacterial chip in the middle of the sanitary napkin has various names such as negative ion chip, chitin chip, warm palace chip, and Chinese medicine composite chip.
Zhu Limin is from Anhai Town, Jinjiang City, Quanzhou City. It only takes 15 minutes to ride a motorcycle to work in Hengan.
She is always reluctant to take annual leave, hoping to save a house for each of her two sons.
Xu Min's husband is an electric welder, and the couple brought a pair of children from Guizhou to Fujian for school.
These two women are now workshop leaders.
Zhu Limin clearly knows her career ceiling, "I can only go here after graduating from junior high school, and I can't go up." She pointed upwards, sitting in the office doing management work.
The recruitment brochure posted outside the factory clearly indicates the needs of the employees of the automated production line: equipment technicians are required to be male, with technical secondary school education or above, responsible for the operation and maintenance and simple maintenance of the automated production line; product packers are required to be female, with no qualifications, and are responsible Product packaging.
Only the equipment technician listed a clear promotion mechanism.
In this industry that meets the rigid needs of women, men are involved in multiple links.
In the 1980s, Hengan Group’s sanitary napkin salesmen were all men.
In the journal of the Fujian Hygiene Products Chamber of Commerce, most of the articles on the development of enterprises are accompanied by photos of male leaders.
In the production workshop of an agent processing company, a man with white temples puts his eyes on a piece of sanitary napkin to check the quality of the product.
In the context of the oversupply industry, there are still hidden corners.
In September 2020, in a small shop near a mountainous elementary school in Zhaotong City, Yunnan, the proprietress introduced to Zhang Ruwei, secretary general of the Ai Xiaoya Fund of the China Social Welfare Foundation, that the best-selling sanitary napkin is priced at 5 yuan and has 30 pieces. .
Zhang Ruwei tore the outer packaging, each sanitary napkin was not individually wrapped, and the release paper behind it was printed with the trademarks of different brands.
Zhang Ruwei remembers a little girl who grew up in a single-parent family in the mountains of Chongqing.
Her mother ran away, and her father brought her up. She was ashamed to ask for more than ten yuan to buy sanitary napkins.
In Zhaotong, Yunnan, a few girls faced the camera of the staff of Ai Xiaoya Fund and smiled and said their difficulties, "I didn't wear panties, I am not used to them" "No one told me the benefits of wearing panties" .
A netizen commented, "True civilization should be the tolerance of society towards the bottom and those who cannot keep up with the times."
(At the request of the interviewee, Xu Min and Lin Jia are pseudonyms)
China Youth Daily·China Youth Daily reporter Wei Xi Source: China Youth Daily