Kimberly-Clark Corporation

What does Kimberly-Clark own?
Kimberly-Clark owns Kleenex, Huggies, Scott, Cottonelle, Viva, Pull-Ups, GoodNites, Depend, and Poise among its major consumer brands. The company is the world's largest tissue manufacturer and one of the top two makers of baby diapers in the United States.

Is Kimberly-Clark publicly traded?
Yes. Kimberly-Clark trades on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker KMB. The company is a component of the S&P 500 index and a widely held consumer staples stock.

Who owns Kleenex?
Kleenex is owned by Kimberly-Clark Corporation. Kimberly-Clark introduced Kleenex in 1924 and the brand has grown to become the world's most recognised facial tissue, with the brand name genericised in many countries.

Who owns Huggies diapers?
Huggies is owned by Kimberly-Clark Corporation. The brand was launched in 1978 and competes directly with Procter and Gamble's Pampers as one of the two dominant diaper brands in the United States.

Kimberly-Clark was founded in 1872 in Neenah, Wisconsin, by John A. Kimberly, Havilah Babcock, Charles B. Clark, and Frank C. Shattuck as a paper manufacturing company. The company's early business centred on producing newsprint and wrapping paper from rags and other fibrous materials at mills along the Fox River in Wisconsin.

The company's first major innovation came in 1914, when it developed Cellucotton, a creped cellulose wadding with five times the absorbency of cotton, produced from wood pulp. During World War I, the US military used Cellucotton as a surgical dressing material. After the war, Kimberly-Clark needed to find a consumer application for its Cellucotton manufacturing capacity. The company launched Kotex sanitary napkins in 1920, creating one of the first modern feminine hygiene products.

In 1924, Kimberly-Clark introduced Kleenex Kerchiefs, originally marketed as a cold cream remover. Consumer research in the early 1930s revealed that most purchasers were using Kleenex to blow their noses rather than remove cold cream. The company repositioned the product as a disposable handkerchief, an insight that transformed both the product and the category. Kleenex became one of the best-selling tissue products in the world and eventually a genericised brand name.

The company entered the diaper market in 1978 with the launch of Huggies, competing directly with Procter and Gamble's Pampers, which had launched in 1961. Huggies differentiated through a fitted waistband design and has maintained a top-two position in the US diaper market ever since. The brand's Pull-Ups training pants, launched in 1989, created the training pants subcategory and remain market leaders.

Kimberly-Clark acquired Scott Paper Company in 1995 for approximately $9.4 billion, one of the largest consumer goods mergers of the 1990s. The deal brought the Scott, Cottonelle, and Viva brands into the portfolio and made Kimberly-Clark the largest tissue company in the world. Antitrust regulators required the divestiture of several tissue brands in various markets as a condition of approval.

The company has been headquartered in Irving, Texas since relocating its corporate offices from Wisconsin in the 1980s.

Kimberly-Clark is a signatory to the Science Based Targets initiative and has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions aligned with a 1.5 degree Celsius pathway. The company's tissue products are manufactured primarily from wood pulp, making responsible forest sourcing a central sustainability consideration.

The company has committed to sourcing 100% of its fibre from certified or responsible sources and participates in the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) chain-of-custody certification frameworks.

Kimberly-Clark has faced consumer activist pressure regarding the use of old-growth forest fibre in tissue production, including campaigns from environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council. The company has responded with commitments to increased recycled content in some product lines.