How Knix Made Leakproof Underwear a Cultural Conversation in Canada
Knix's "Every Body in Leakproof" is a 2021 integrated brand-awareness campaign created by Toronto agency Hard Work Club, launched in Canada in October 2021, that uses a music-video-style film and out-of-home advertising to position leakproof underwear as a confident, everyday solution for menstruation, perspiration, and bladder leakage — reframing bodily functions as unremarkable rather than shameful.
The campaign arrived at a pivotal moment for the brand. According to a University of Toronto Rotman case study, Knix was selling nearly 2 million pairs of leakproof underwear annually by the time the push went live, yet broad consumer awareness of the product category remained limited. Hard Work Club set out to close that gap with Knix's largest brand-awareness spend in its history at the time of launch, as reported by Strategy magazine. The creative tagline, "Blood, Sweat, Pee? No Problem.", distilled the proposition into a single, blunt phrase that deliberately avoided the clinical or euphemistic language that had long dominated intimate-apparel advertising.
The campaign ran on television and online media across Canada and the United States, with a television spot published on October 26, 2021. Digital channels spanned Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Pinterest, ensuring the film reached audiences well beyond the traditional broadcast window. In Canada specifically, the campaign functioned as both a product introduction for uninitiated consumers and a cultural provocation — asking audiences to say out loud the words that period and incontinence-care brands had historically kept off the screen. That willingness to name the problem plainly, and then resolve it confidently, became the campaign's defining strategic and creative signature. The Clapboard Score for "Every Body in Leakproof" is 69 out of 100.
Knix built the "Every Body in Leakproof" campaign on a straightforward consumer truth: bodily leaks — from menstruation, sweat, and bladder activity — are near-universal experiences that existing products address inadequately or with messaging that compounds embarrassment. Hard Work Club's strategic response was to expand the campaign's audience well beyond the menstrual-care segment, framing leakproof underwear as a multi-use functional garment rather than a medicalised or niche solution.
The positioning placed Knix in direct competition with established period-care brands such as Thinx, which had pioneered period underwear in the United States and Canada but concentrated its messaging primarily on menstruation, and with traditional disposable-product manufacturers that controlled the incontinence and period-care shelf. By addressing blood, sweat, and urine within a single product and a single tagline, Knix claimed category ownership across three separate consumer needs simultaneously — a move that differentiated the brand's value proposition in a way that neither Thinx nor conventional intimate-apparel competitors had articulated at that scale in the Canadian market.
The commercial rationale was clear. According to a University of Toronto Rotman case study, Knix reported CAD 133.6 million in net sales in 2021, representing growth of 97 percent year over year. That trajectory created both the financial resource and the strategic imperative to invest in mass brand awareness rather than performance-only digital acquisition. One estimate of the global period-lingerie market, published by Research and Markets, placed its value at USD 120.5 million in 2025, signalling an expanding opportunity that rewarded early brand-building in Canada and beyond. The decision to anchor Knix's biggest-ever awareness spend to a bold, destigmatising proposition reflected a calculated bet that cultural relevance would accelerate both category growth and brand preference among Canadian and US consumers.
The creative centrepiece of "Every Body in Leakproof" is a music-video-style film directed by Kelsey Larkin and shot by director of photography Kris Bonnell for production company Skin and Bones, with post-production handled by editorial house Outsider. The film's energy is deliberate and precise: it rejects the pastel softness conventional to intimate-apparel advertising in favour of a kinetic, celebratory aesthetic that positions the product in the middle of active life rather than at its margins.
The creative team — led by Creative Director and Copywriter Meghan Kraemer and Creative Director of Design and Art Director Christian Buer at Hard Work Club — anchored the film to an original song titled "Blood, Sweat and Pee (Nothing to Hide)" by Toronto rapper Exmiranda. That decision was structurally important. A commissioned track gave the campaign a distinct sonic identity, turned the three-word taboo proposition into something genuinely repeatable and shareable, and ensured the film read as entertainment before it read as advertising. The song's title made the brand's functional promise impossible to mishear or misunderstand.
On screen, diverse women are shown dancing, skipping rope, skateboarding, and drumming — physical activities chosen to embody the confidence that leakproof underwear is meant to provide rather than simply to illustrate it. The casting reflected Knix's established brand platform of inclusive representation, a lineage that traces back to the brand's 2018 campaign "Every Woman Is an Angel", which explicitly included trans women in lingerie advertising, as documented by Clapboard. Out-of-home executions extended the campaign into Canadian public spaces with the direct question "What's a little blood, sweat and pee?", as reported by Strategy magazine, confronting passersby with the same candidness the film delivered on screen. Together, the film and OOH elements formed a coherent creative system in which tone, language, and imagery reinforced one another without repetition.
"Every Body in Leakproof" represented Knix's largest brand-awareness investment to that point in its history, as reported by Strategy magazine. That strategic scale was matched by meaningful commercial context: according to a University of Toronto Rotman case study, Knix achieved CAD 133.6 million in net sales in 2021, a 97 percent year-over-year increase, in the same fiscal period the campaign ran. While no publicly verified attribution study directly links the campaign's media spend to that revenue figure, the correlation between Knix's largest awareness push and its most significant sales growth year on record is structurally notable.
Strategy magazine published positive editorial coverage of the campaign on October 29, 2021, placing it within the wider Canadian advertising conversation as a benchmark example of destigmatising intimate-apparel marketing. According to Clapboard's own editorial records, the campaign accumulated 15,689 views, 104 likes, and 94 comments on the platform, indicating a meaningful level of industry and professional engagement with the work.
No independently verified campaign-specific performance metrics — such as brand-lift studies, reach figures, or conversion data — are publicly available for "Every Body in Leakproof". What the structural evidence does confirm is that the campaign successfully occupied the cultural space it targeted: trade press engaged, the creative concept travelled across television, digital, and out-of-home formats in both Canada and the United States, and the brand's annual sales figures reflected a period of accelerated consumer adoption. For a campaign whose primary objective was brand awareness, that combination of earned media attention, multi-channel reach, and concurrent commercial growth represents a credible measure of effectiveness.
"Every Body in Leakproof" is a 2021 brand-awareness campaign created by Hard Work Club for Knix, launched in Canada in October 2021. It uses a music-video-style film and out-of-home advertising to normalise leakproof underwear for menstruation, sweat, and bladder leakage under the tagline "Blood, Sweat, Pee? No Problem."
Toronto agency Hard Work Club created the campaign for Knix. The film was directed by Kelsey Larkin and shot by cinematographer Kris Bonnell through production company Skin and Bones. Creative direction was led by Meghan Kraemer and Christian Buer, with post-production completed by editorial house Outsider.
The film features an original song titled "Blood, Sweat and Pee (Nothing to Hide)" by Toronto rapper Exmiranda. The commissioned track gave the campaign a distinct sonic identity and transformed Knix's three-word functional proposition into a repeatable, shareable creative element central to the campaign's impact.
The campaign launched in Canada in October 2021 and ran on television and online media across Canada and the United States. Digital channels included Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Pinterest, extending the campaign's reach beyond the broadcast window to connected audiences in both markets.
The 2021 campaign built on Knix's 2018 "Every Woman Is an Angel" campaign, which established the brand's inclusive representation platform by featuring trans women in lingerie advertising. Where the 2018 work challenged representation norms, "Every Body in Leakproof" shifted focus to a direct, function-first product proposition for leakproof underwear.
According to a University of Toronto Rotman case study, Knix reported CAD 133.6 million in net sales in 2021, representing 97 percent year-over-year growth. This was also the year Hard Work Club launched what Strategy magazine described as Knix's largest brand-awareness spend in the brand's history to that point.
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