Absorbent underwear wash durability: A guide for brands
Opportunities for growth in the feminine hygiene category
Outline
- Growth in the German feminine hygiene category has slowed to around 4% a year
- Tampon revenue is down 11%, period underwear revenue is up 39%
- Period underwear is growing at 17.7% a year, with Germany forecast to lead Europe
- Reusables need a different sourcing and testing approach from disposables
- Audit category exposure ahead of the next range review
Key takeaways
Growth in Germany’s feminine hygiene category is increasingly coming from reusable period products rather than legacy single-use absorbent hygiene products (AHPs). Period underwear is growing at 17.7% a year against roughly 4% for the category overall.
Germany is forecast to lead the European reusables market by 2030, with period underwear alone projected to grow from EUR 6.9m in 2022 to over EUR 25m by 2030.
Evaluating potential suppliers of reusables, such as period underwear, requires a different approach from the model used for sourcing disposable nonwoven AHPs.
Now is the time to review your portfolio and make sure you are positioned for future growth.
An introduction
Germany’s feminine hygiene category is worth roughly USD 1.4 billion and projected to grow at around 4% a year between now and 2034. This is a stable figure for a mature consumer staple, and one that’s been enough to fund shelf space, promotion and range planning for most of the past decade without close scrutiny of where the growth sits within the category.
But scrutiny is overdue. Retail panel data for the year to July 2025 shows that German tampon revenue is down 11%, while period underwear revenue over the same period grew 39%. The category total holds up only because growth in one format is offsetting decline in another, which is a detail the aggregate number doesn’t show. Category managers working from the headline growth figure alone are likely to be underestimating how much of their menstrual care range is already losing share to a format that most haven’t sourced before.
Period underwear accounts for most of that shift. Although it remains a small share of category value today, it’s growing at 17.7% a year in Germany. The country is forecast to lead the European reusables market by 2030, with the domestic segment projected to grow from EUR 6.9 million in 2022 to over EUR 25 million by 2030.
The margin squeeze facing single-use AHPs
The German feminine hygiene market’s 4% forecast growth rate leaves little room to fund shelf space, promotion and range extension once volume and price are both close to their ceiling.
Disposables are a price-led commodity with near-universal household penetration, which limits how much premiumisation the format can support. When unit volume and price are already close to saturated, additional category value would ideally come from changing the assortment mix, but the more common response is to compete on price within the existing assortment instead. That defends share for a quarter, but it resets the category’s reference price downward, and gross margin doesn’t recover once that reset has happened.
How consumer behaviour is shifting
YouGov’s September 2025 German market report shows tampon revenue falling from EUR 92.4 million to EUR 82.2 million between August 2024 and July 2025, an 11% decline, while period underwear revenue rose from EUR 11.8 million to EUR 16.4 million, up 39% over the same period. Unit volumes follow the same pattern, with tampon packs down 9%, and period underwear packs up 37%.
Germany’s domestic reusable period underwear segment was worth EUR 6.9 million in 2022 and is projected to surpass EUR 25 million by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 17.7%, with Germany forecast to be the largest reusables market in Europe by the end of the decade.
Age and motivation data from the same research help explain who is driving this. Nineteen percent of women aged 18 to 34 have already used period underwear, against 6% of women aged 55 and over. Among the stated reasons for switching, 72% of German women say it matters that period products are free of harmful substances, and 43% want them to be environmentally friendly.
For a category manager, the practical reading of this data is that the shopper buying period underwear today is likely to be a tampon shopper who has switched format, rather than a new customer added to the category. Category value is moving between formats rather than growing across all of them, which is why the range decision here carries more weight than a typical new product trial.
What to consider when sourcing period underwear
Sourcing period underwear calls for a supplier evaluation model distinct from the model most buying teams have refined over two decades of disposables tendering.
The technical textile absorbent gusset of reusable period underwear invariably has a multi-layered construction: a wicking top sheet, an absorbent core and a leakproof barrier, cut and sewn or bonded to withstand repeated domestic laundering. The technology behind this gusset and the quality of the underwear’s construction (including whether production is manual or automated) will determine the absorbent and leakproof performance of your product line.
Absorbency claims are also difficult to compare across suppliers at present, because no single industry-standard test method has been adopted for the category. Testing houses including Intertek and Bureau Veritas have developed their own absorbency protocols to support individual brand claims, which means two suppliers can report different absorbency figures from different test conditions and both be reporting accurately. An RFQ that doesn’t specify the test method and conditions produces numbers that can’t be compared on a tender sheet.
The next two instalments in this blog series cover the cost implications of manual assembly in more detail, and the full testing specification an RFP needs to put in place.
Next steps
Before your next range review, three questions are worth answering. What proportion of current menstrual care value sits in formats that are flat or declining, and how much of that decline maps to growth in period underwear? For any reusable line already on shelf or in development, what are the considerations around sourcing period underwear that will deliver an excellent consumer experience while protecting your margins.
Answering these questions now, while reusables still make up a small share of most private label ranges, gives buying teams time to build the sourcing model this format needs before it becomes a larger part of the category plan.
The next blog in this series discusses the questions to ask when choosing a period underwear manufacturer and how to build a defensible business case around the inclusion of reusable AHPs in your portfolio.
About the author
Frantisek Riha-Scott, Founder and CEO, Confitex Technology
As the tech leader in reusable personal hygiene since 2013, Confitex designs and manufactures award-winning washable period and incontinence products for leading retail, pharmacy and healthcare brands worldwide. Frantisek has spent more than a decade working at the intersection of fashion design, textile engineering and absorbent hygiene manufacturing, and has worked directly with independent laboratories to shape emerging industry performance standards for reusable absorbent hygiene. His perspective on the French menstrual equity and waste reduction scheme is grounded in detailed working knowledge of the certifications required to trade under Decree 2026-288 and in active conversations with organisations preparing for the September 2026 launch. He writes to help pharmacy category managers, hygiene buyers, purchasing directors and procurement leaders cut through the regulatory complexity and make supplier decisions with confidence. Connect with Frantisek on LinkedIn.
