Five founders, a mistaken mineral and a move to St. Paul.

3M began as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company in Two Harbors, a town on the North Shore of Lake Superior. According to the company’s centennial history, A Century of Innovation (2002), five founders — Henry Bryan, Hermon Cable, Dr. J. Danley Budd, John Dwan and William McGonagle — signed its articles of incorporation on 13 June 1902. English Wikipedia describes them as five businessmen who set out to mine corundum, the crystalline form of aluminium oxide used for grinding. The plan did not work: the mineral on the company’s Crystal Bay property was anorthosite, which 3M’s own history says had been mistaken for corundum.

The company turned to sandpaper. Its timeline records a move to Duluth in 1905, the year the investor Lucius Ordway put money into the business; English Wikipedia says Ordway and Edgar Ober took over the company that year. In 1907 the company hired William L. McKnight as an assistant bookkeeper; Wikipedia calls him a later key executive. 3M’s history dates the move of manufacturing to St. Paul to 1910, when a factory was built there, and says the headquarters stayed in John Dwan’s law office until the company moved to St. Paul in 1916. In 1962, English Wikipedia records, the company moved again, to its current headquarters at 3M Center in Maplewood, a suburb of Saint Paul.

Sandpaper led to tape. The Minnesota Historical Society’s encyclopedia MNopedia, in an entry by Kathryn R. Goetz published in May 2013, tells how Richard Drew, an engineering student who had paid his way by playing banjo in Twin Cities dance bands, answered a 3M call for engineers and was hired to take trial samples of its sandpaper to auto shops. On a delivery in 1923 he watched painters struggle to mask off areas for the two-tone paint jobs then in fashion. Given the use of a laboratory, Drew put an adhesive on a crepe paper backing, and in 1925 3M released it as Scotch-brand masking tape. MNopedia adds that the reason for the Scotch name is uncertain, and that company legend ties it to an auto painter’s complaint about how little adhesive the early samples carried.

Drew then turned to cellophane, which bakeries and grocers used to wrap goods. In 1930 3M released his Scotch-brand cellulose tape, a year the company’s own timeline matches. MNopedia goes on to record the snail-shaped dispenser package by 1939, a tartan design for Scotch tapes in 1945, the mascot Scotty McTape in 1950s print and television advertising, and Scotch Magic Tape in 1961. Those details belong to the Scotch guide; here they show how a mining venture on Lake Superior became a company known for tape.

Consumer brands, a new legal name and a split.

Through the twentieth century 3M added consumer brands alongside its abrasives and industrial lines. Its centennial timeline records the creation of a 3M Consumer Products Group in 1977. The sticky note that became Post-it took a halting route to market: English Wikipedia says 3M tested a sticky bookmark called “Press ’n Peel” in stores in 1977 with disappointing results, handed out free samples of the product as a note in Boise, Idaho, in 1978, introduced it as “Post-Its” in 1979 and sold it across the United States from 6 April 1980. The company’s timeline lists Post-it notes among its 1980 introductions.

The 2002 history names the brands of its Consumer and Office Markets business as Scotch, Post-it, Scotch-Brite, Command, Filtrete and O-Cel-O. Other names joined later. In September 2008, English Wikipedia records, 3M announced an agreement to acquire the car-care company Meguiar’s, which had been family-owned for over a century.

The company also let businesses go. In 1996, English Wikipedia says, its data storage and imaging divisions were spun off as Imation Corporation, a separation the 3M timeline also records. On 8 April 2002, the company’s hundredth anniversary, it changed its legal name from Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company to 3M Company. In December 2022 it announced plans to stop producing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, and in 2023 it reached a settlement with US public water systems over PFAS contamination, English Wikipedia records.

A further structural change came in health care. English Wikipedia records that in July 2022 3M announced it would spin off its health care business as a separate company. A 3M press release dated in St. Paul on 1 April 2024 announced that the spin-off was complete, launching Solventum Corporation as an independent company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, with 3M keeping a minority stake. English Wikipedia records that William Brown, formerly chief executive of L3Harris Technologies, became 3M’s chief executive on 1 May 2024, with Michael Roman remaining as executive chairman.

Design and documentation.

Greeting cards, tape and notebooks are everyday objects that most people buy without much thought, and that is exactly why their packaging and covers have to work hard. A card is usually chosen in a few seconds at a rack, so the back of the card, where the publisher’s name and mark sit, becomes a quiet signature that travels with every one sold. A roll of tape is often bought from a peg or a shelf beside dozens of similar rolls, and the core, the label and the colour of the roll itself carry much of the name.

A notebook brand works differently again: its cover is handled every day for months, so a name printed on that cover is carried in bags, on desks and in classrooms long after it was bought. Across all three categories, the companies behind familiar names may have been bought, merged or renamed several times, and the products may be made far from where the name began.

Each guide in this group separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A red monogram above a family of brands.

3M’s visual identity rests on its name. The company’s centennial timeline records that a red 3M logo was introduced in 1978, the year after the Consumer Products Group was set up. The mark is the company’s abbreviation itself; the abbreviation became the company’s legal name on 8 April 2002.

Advertising and packaging have long done much of the brand work. The 3M timeline records a “monkey business” advertising campaign begun in 1932 and drawn by a British cartoonist, Lawson Wood. For Scotch tape, MNopedia records the snail-shaped dispenser package by 1939, the tartan design introduced in 1945 and Scotty McTape in the 1950s. The tartan reached the company’s own story: MNopedia’s bibliography lists a 1955 history of 3M by Virginia Huck titled Brand of the Tartan: The 3M Story.

The red monogram signs the company, while its product brands — the plaid of Scotch, the canary-yellow note of Post-it, the scouring pads of Scotch-Brite, the hooks and strips of Command — each carry their own look on the shelf. The company’s 2002 history presents those names as the brands of a single Consumer and Office Markets business, and the same book’s timeline places the red logo and the Consumer Products Group within a year of each other.

For a design guide, 3M shows how a short corporate monogram in a single red can sit above product brands that each speak in their own colours and patterns. Compare it with Post-it, 3M’s sticky note sold across the United States from 1980, and Scotch, the tape line that began with Richard Drew’s masking tape in 1925. For this guide we use signal red, ink black and paper white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep 3M’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.