West Pharmaceutical Services Brand Guidelines: Philadelphia 1923, Stoppers & Seals

Four partners and a Philadelphia rubber works.

West Pharmaceutical Services began in Philadelphia in 1923 as The West Company. The International Directory of Company Histories names its founders as Herman O. West, Frank Mancill and two of West’s former university classmates, Jesse R. Wike and Norman F. Wiss; English Wikipedia names Herman O. West and J.R. Wike. Herman West had worked at a dental supply house before setting up on his own, and the first works, on Shackamaxon Street, made rubber “Burlew” grinding wheels for the dental trade alongside droppers, plungers and stoppers for drug companies, the Directory says. The company’s own centenary story, published in January 2023, says he began by making rubber plungers for dental cartridges.

The link with medicine deepened in the 1930s. In 1930, according to the Directory, the founder of Cook-Waite Laboratories took a stake in West and began working with it on rubber closures suited to solutions such as Novocain and insulin. In 1931 West bought the Simonds Abrasive Company, which made grinding wheels and a cut-off machine for foundries.

The Second World War shaped the business. The Directory says a joint effort between West, Alcoa and Owens-Illinois produced packaging that let penicillin be supplied at the speed and in the quantity the U.S. government required, with West providing the rubber stopper for the bottle, while its abrasive division supplied wheels used in making tanks, planes and ships. The company says Herman West worked with Eli Lilly on the penicillin supply problem and that the Lilly relationship became an important one. After the war West added aluminium closures, and an engineer recruited from Alcoa designed an automatic capping machine, the Westcapper, in 1946.

Stoppers, seals and a new name.

Growth after the war came through new plants and new markets. The Directory records a factory at Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, completed in 1948, a plant at Millville, New Jersey, in 1951 whose presses trimmed rubber parts by machine instead of by hand, and a third plant at Kearney, Nebraska, in 1962. By 1947, it says, West was producing more than 200 million rubber items a year, from penicillin and insulin stoppers to syringe plungers and dropper bulbs. An international division began in 1952 with a Mexican subsidiary and spread over the following 15 years to countries including Argentina, Brazil, Spain, England, Italy, Australia and India.

West became a public company in 1970 and joined the New York Stock Exchange in 1980 under the symbol WST, the Directory says; plastics came with the purchase of Mack-Wayne Plastics, a maker of threaded closures, in 1978, and in 1985 West appointed its first chief executive from outside the founding family. In 1994 it bought Senetics, a Boulder, Colorado, company working on delivery systems for oral and inhaled drugs. In 1999 The West Company renamed itself West Pharmaceutical Services, marking a move from making packaging components toward a wider set of products and services for drug developers. The Directory also lists a 25 per cent holding in the Japanese maker Daikyo Seiko among its interests. English Wikipedia records that in 2005 West bought The Tech Group, of Scottsdale, Arizona, and Medimop Medical Projects, of Ra’anana, Israel.

Today West describes itself as a maker of containment and delivery systems for injectable medicines, and says its customers are pharmaceutical, biotechnology, generic and medical device companies. Its website groups the range into stoppers and seals for injectable packaging, syringe and cartridge components, self-injection devices, and containment systems including Daikyo Crystal Zenith, which it describes as a polymer alternative to glass. It also runs a contract manufacturing business offering injection moulding, assembly and packaging from eight locations in North America and Europe, the company says.

Design and documentation.

Drug-delivery device makers sell mostly to other companies. Their customers are pharmaceutical and biotech firms that fill a pen, an autoinjector or a prefilled syringe with their own medicine and put their own name on the box, so the device maker’s brand often lives one step back from the patient. That shapes how these companies present themselves: less as consumer brands, more as engineering partners that can be trusted with a drug company’s product.

The pictures follow from that. The typical image is a clean render of a pen or autoinjector on a white or pale ground, often shown from several angles or in a technical cutaway that reveals the spring, the plunger and the syringe inside. Product families are usually named as platforms, with one prefix running across a range, and shown in neutral greys and whites so that a customer can imagine its own colours on the device.

Production is the other recurring theme. Websites and brochures show cleanroom assembly lines, injection-moulding machines, operators in gowns and hairnets, and gloved hands holding glass syringes, cartridges and vials. These images carry the message that the work is precise and controlled, and they sit beside pages on quality systems, regulatory support and human-factors testing with patients.

Much of the industry’s public face is seen at trade shows. Makers book stands at events such as CPHI, the pharmaceutical ingredients and packaging fair, Pharmapack in Paris, and the conferences of the Parenteral Drug Association, where they show new platforms to drug companies. The visual language there is the same: white stands, large product renders, cutaway models and short films of devices being assembled and used.

Kinston, Exton and a new chief executive.

On 29 January 2003 an explosion and fire destroyed its plant in Kinston, North Carolina, which made rubber stoppers and other products for medical use. The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, which approved its final report in September 2004, found that the fuel was a fine plastic powder that had built up above a suspended ceiling over a manufacturing area; the board recorded six deaths, dozens of injuries and hundreds of lost jobs. Its recommendations went to bodies including the North Carolina Building Code Council, which it later marked as closed with acceptable action.

West is headquartered in Exton, Pennsylvania, English Wikipedia says. In June 2026 Reuters, as carried by Medical Dialogues, reported that West had appointed Michel Lagarde, previously chief operating officer of Thermo Fisher Scientific, as its chief executive from 31 August 2026, succeeding Eric Green, who had led the company since 2015 and become board chair in 2022; lead independent director Robert Friel was to become chair. The same report said West had restored operations across its sites after a cybersecurity attack the previous month.

For a design guide, West Pharmaceutical Services shows how a company can build a name on components that sit inside other companies’ medicines: stoppers, seals, plungers and cartridge parts. Compare Stevanato Group, the Italian maker of glass vials, cartridges and syringes, and BD, another American maker of injection products. For this guide we use a deep navy, a slate grey and a steel blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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