A radio-kit firm, a rubber plant and a slogan.

totes did not start with umbrellas. English Wikipedia, citing Ohio’s Secretary of State, traces the company to the Roll-O-Radio Company, a mail-order radio-kit supplier incorporated in Cincinnati on 9 April 1924. In 1941, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported, the firm bought a plant in Loveland, Ohio, from a candy maker, and it moved there in 1942; by charter amendment it became So-Lo Works in 1943.

The name came from rubber. After the Second World War, Wikipedia says, the firm turned rubber protectors made for anti-aircraft gun handles into women’s slip-on overshoes, and in 1949 that led to foldable latex-rubber overshoes called “totes,” sold, The Atlanta Constitution reported that March, with the line “tote ’em in your pocket.” Demand ran ahead of the Loveland plant that year: The Cincinnati Enquirer reported in March 1949 that the firm could not fill all its orders. The company’s president was Joe J. Marx, and in 1950 it became So-Lo Marx Rubber Co. of Loveland. Between 1945 and 1954, Wikipedia notes, the firm’s prototypes earned six patents and registered designs.

The overshoe’s name eventually became the company’s. Bradford E. Phillips bought all of So-Lo Marx’s stock in November 1961, according to Wikipedia, and remained its sole stockholder until 1994. The company was renamed Totes Incorporated by charter amendment effective 1 April 1965, Ohio records show — a product name promoted to a corporate one.

An umbrella that folds out of sight.

The product most people now connect with totes arrived in 1970, when Phillips added a collapsible umbrella to the range. According to a 1984 Indianapolis Star account cited on Wikipedia, Phillips twice failed to build a working prototype of his own, then bought L.P. Henryson & Co. of New York to obtain its 1968 patent. The selling point matched the overshoe’s: an umbrella that would fold out of sight when no longer needed. Phillips kept working on the idea: in 1983 he was granted a US patent for an “umbrella with advertising flag,” which acknowledges the earlier Henryson patent.

The making moved abroad early. The Morning Call reported in April 1986 that totes had outsourced umbrella production to Taiwan, which the paper described as one of the world’s main umbrella-making centres. The brand kept adding small, carryable weather goods: in 1988, a Tennessee newspaper reported, it introduced Toasties, one-size-fits-all slipper socks, which survive as a sub-brand alongside Cirrus, SolBounce and Zenz.

In 1997 Totes merged with ARIS Isotoner, the leather-glove maker whose roots Wikipedia dates to the Aris Glove Company, founded in 1918 by the French glovemaker Paul Chanut and the American glove reseller Larry Stanton; the Isotoner name, Wikipedia says, citing the company’s European site, joins “isometric” and “toning,” and the business was renamed Totes Isotoner Corporation on 1 August 1997. The combined company kept two consumer names — totes for umbrellas, rainwear and footwear, and Isotoner for gloves and slippers — and by late 1998, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported, it had moved into a new headquarters in West Chester Township, in Butler County, Ohio. By December 2001, the Enquirer reported, it kept offices in New York, Toronto, London, Paris and Hong Kong; in 2006 it added the ESNY brand, and Wikipedia lists divisions today in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and France.

A product name as the brand.

The seven brands in this group are all umbrella names: James Smith & Sons, totes, Knirps, London Undercover, Il Marchesato, GustBuster and ShedRain. Umbrella brands sit at many different points in the trade, from a single London shop to names sold in department stores and supermarkets around the world, and from makers that still sew in their own workrooms to brands whose umbrellas are designed in one country and made in another.

An umbrella brand’s identity is usually carried by a handful of things — a name, a handle, a canopy colour or print, a label sewn into the cover — rather than by any one product, because the company behind the name may have changed hands or moved its production since it began. Some names are very old: James Smith & Sons, which English Wikipedia says was founded in 1830, still trades from a Grade II* listed shop on New Oxford Street in London. Others have moved country: the Knirps name, which German Wikipedia traces to Hans Haupt’s folding umbrella of 1928 in Solingen, is now run from Braunau am Inn in Austria.

That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its umbrellas are actually designed and made. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its umbrellas are made and how its products and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Private equity, then a brand owner.

Ownership has changed hands repeatedly since Phillips, whose more than three decades as sole stockholder ended in June 1994, when, The New York Times reported, the Boston investment firm Bain Capital bought Totes. Three years later the same paper reported the merger with ARIS Isotoner, in June 1997, and Bain remained the owner until it sold the company to Swander Pace Capital of San Francisco in July 2001, the Enquirer reported; MidOcean Partners acquired it in January 2007; and in 2014 MidOcean agreed to sell to Investcorp and Freeman Spogli & Co.; Wikipedia records that Freeman Spogli fully exited its investment in 2019.

Since June 2024 the brands have had a different kind of owner. A release dated 4 June 2024 announced that Marquee Brands — a brand owner established in 2014 by Neuberger Berman — had acquired totes Isotoner Corporation and become the global owner of the totes and Isotoner brands, with Randa Apparel & Accessories joining as its core operating partner. The release described the company’s core categories as umbrellas, gloves and seasonal footwear. That release writes the brand in lowercase as “totes,” and the corporate name has been styled “totes»ISOTONER,” echoing the earlier glove company’s “ARIS»ISOTONER.”

For a design guide, totes shows how a single, plain product word — chosen in 1949 to say “you can carry this” — can stretch from overshoes to umbrellas to slipper socks without changing. Compare Fulton, a British everyday umbrella name, and Davek, another American umbrella brand. For this guide we use storm navy, canopy red and rain blue with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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