The facial tissue brand Kleenex is soon to be withdrawn from Canadian stores. Brand manufacturer Kimberly-Clark Corporation said the decision had been “incredibly difficult.”
The company’s Canadian vice-president and general manager, Todd Fisher, said in a statement Aug. 24 that the company had been “operating in a highly constrained supply environment,” and despite its best efforts was “faced with some unique complexities on the Kleenex business.”
Kimberly-Clark, which makes many other household-name care products such as Andrex toilet tissue and Huggies diapers, says its decision “is one that will allow us to shift our resources to better focus on other brands in Canada and meet the needs of our consumers with continued innovation and value.”
The Kleenex tissue brand is enormously popular on the American continent and its trademark has become the generic name for facial tissues for millions of Canadians, regardless of manufacturer.
Joanne McNeish, associate professor of marketing at Toronto Metropolitan University, speculated that the brand had been struggling for a while, adding that the news did not come out of the blue.
She said in 2018, Kleenex cut 5,000 jobs, or roughly 12 percent of staff, and closed 10 factories, saying tissue sales accounted for only 1 percent of annual turnover.
“No company pulls out of a market if they’re making money,” Mr. Soberman said. “Whatever they want to say, they could have just said ‘we’re not making any money in Canada, that’s why we’re pulling out of facial tissues.’”
According to Mr. Soberman, it’s possible Kleenex decided to withdraw from the market due to its inability to effectively compete against Scotties, a popular tissue brand produced by the Canadian company Kruger.
The halt of Kleenex tissue sales in Canada follows a series of notable exits by various familiar retail brands.
In February, Nestlé Canada revealed its plans to remove frozen pizzas and meals under various labels from stores throughout this year and Skippy peanut butter exited the market in 2017.
