Unigloves Brand Guidelines: A 1989 Glove Brand With Sales Companies From Kent to Lagos

A Malaysian maker with sales companies abroad.

Unigloves dates itself to 1989. A company history published by Unigloves UK in 2022 says the business was founded that year by Mr Lee, who still ran the group, and Mr Ang, and that it made its first gloves the same year. Its brochures carry the line “Keeping you safe since 1989.” The manufacturing side is Malaysian: the group’s 2026 results statement says it makes natural latex and nitrile disposable gloves, under its own name and for third-party labels, at factories in Malaysia.

From the start the model paired factories with sales companies of its own. The 2022 history lists a US company, now UG Healthcare USA, set up in 1989 in Costa Mesa, California, to sell disposable and cleanroom products; Unigloves Germany, founded in 1990 by Klaus Jöriskes and built around dental, hygiene and specialist customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland; and a TÜV certificate in 1997 for the quality system behind its latex examination gloves.

The British company came later. According to the same history, Unigloves UK Ltd was founded in 2002 by Kevin Onah, who had worked at Unigloves Germany and began trading in the UK with a focus on dentists. A China company followed in Shanghai in 2002, a Nigerian business, Uni-medical Healthcare, with its head office in Lagos, in 2012, and a Brazilian company in 2014. Each, the history says, was built around local trades: the Chinese team, from Shanghai and offices in Baoding, Chengdu and Suzhou, sells mainly to dental practices and laboratories, while the Brazilian team serves dentists, hospitals and cosmetic clinics with coloured latex, nitrile and vinyl gloves. That same year, the history says, the parent, UG Healthcare Corporation, listed its shares on the Singapore Exchange.

Colour as a product line.

Unigloves sells gloves as named ranges rather than as a single product. Its UK website groups them into lines including Pearl, Vitality, Select Black, Unicare, Fortified, Premium and PRO.TECT, and by sector, from dentistry and healthcare to food, automotive and tattooing. The 2022 history dates several of them: a patent granted in 2008 for its Vitality moisturising gloves, and in 2010 the launch of Pearl, a range of coloured nitrile gloves. It also records zinc- and sulphur-free gloves made for the Japanese food market in 2014 and coloured latex gloves introduced in Brazil in 2015.

Capacity grew with new plants in Seremban, in the Malaysian state of Negeri Sembilan. The company says a factory there opened in 2018 raised its monthly output from 50 million to 200 million gloves, and its 2022 history spoke of a fourth Seremban factory. UG Healthcare said in August 2026 that its third manufacturing facility had begun trial production, with commercial production expected in the first quarter of 2027. The same statement names British Standards Institution certification of the upstream plants to ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 13485:2016 for making latex and nitrile examination gloves.

The work glove business is newer. In 2021, the history says, Unigloves doubled its protective range to more than 100 gloves with a new industrial line. In February 2023 the trade magazine Health & Safety Matters reported that Unigloves had bought the Derma Shield skincare business after an 18-month commercial partnership, with Derma Shield’s former managing director staying on for three years to work with the Unigloves team.

How glove makers present themselves.

Disposable gloves are among the most anonymous products in healthcare. They arrive in plain dispenser boxes, are worn for minutes and are thrown away, and most of the companies that make them sell to distributors, hospital buyers and other brands rather than to the public. Their visual identities are therefore built less around the product in use and more around the factory, the material and the scale of output.

The pictures repeat across the category. A gloved hand in blue or purple nitrile is held against a white ground; long dipping lines carry rows of ceramic hand-shaped formers through tanks of latex or nitrile; finished gloves are stripped, stacked and boxed; and dispenser boxes are piled into walls of colour, each size and material given its own shade. Cleanroom and hospital scenes supply the setting, with gowned staff, stainless steel and soft, even light.

Geography is part of the story. Malaysia and Thailand, both rubber-growing countries, are home to many of the makers in this series, and corporate material from the region often opens with aerial views of factory complexes, rows of long white sheds, alongside figures for lines, plants and annual capacity. Makers in China, Europe and elsewhere use the same vocabulary of automation, testing laboratories and certificates.

Trade fairs are where many of these brands meet their buyers. Stands at MEDICA in Düsseldorf and at the Dubai healthcare show long known as Arab Health tend to show stacked boxes, glove samples and product walls, with a company name in a clean sans and a colour that can carry from carton to booth. The guides in this series look at how individual makers handle that shared language.

One brand across five continents.

The identity was unified in 2020. The 2022 history says Unigloves launched “a new unified brand identity across the Group” that year to align its companies across five continents. That brochure shows the result: a turquoise U-shaped mark beside a dark grey UNIGLOVES wordmark, with the first syllable in heavier type and the line “Keeping you safe” set in spaced capitals underneath.

Expansion has continued through partners. On 24 June 2024 Unigloves announced that it had acquired a 50% equity interest in the Spanish industrial glove maker Nitrex, with options to buy the rest later; the business was renamed UG Nitrex, giving Unigloves a sales presence in Spain, Portugal and France, according to the company’s announcement. The deal brought a catalogue of more than 100 industrial gloves, together with Nitrex’s local warehousing and logistics, and the company said the business would continue to be run day to day by its existing management. Nitrex and Derma Shield now sit among the ranges on the Unigloves website.

Ownership has stayed with the listed parent. In its results statement of 26 August 2026, UG Healthcare Corporation, listed on the Singapore Exchange’s Catalist board, described itself as an own-brand manufacturer selling UNIGLOVES-branded products through its own distribution companies in Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, China, Africa and South America, and said its joint chief executive was Lee Jun Yih. The same statement says the group also works with outside manufacturers to widen the range sold under the Unigloves name.

For a design guide, Unigloves shows how a Malaysian factory group can build one consumer-facing name through its own sales companies abroad. Compare Ansell, another glove brand, and Supermax, another Malaysian glove maker. For this guide we use slate, a lagoon teal and a pale grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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