A family rubber company and a new kind of bottle.

Philips Avent is a brand of baby bottles, breast pumps, sterilisers and other feeding and baby-care products, and it began as an English business. The private equity firm Charterhouse, which once owned it, describes Avent on its portfolio page as a designer and manufacturer of baby bottles, breast pumps, sterilisers and dummies that was “founded in 1984.”

The brand grew out of a family company. English Wikipedia’s article on the businessman Edward Atkin says he joined his father’s company, which made a range of rubber products, in 1965, and took control of it in 1972, deciding to concentrate on baby products and car mats. Avent, the same article says, was created after the birth of Atkin’s first child in 1982. English Wikipedia’s article on Philips Avent names the family firm as Cannon Rubber, which it dates to 1936, and says the Avent name came from a sub-brand, “Avent Naturally,” launched by that company.

That article says the brand was created in 1984 to launch a new type of baby bottle that was short with a wide neck, made with a soft, flared silicone teat. The same article says Atkin had set out to rethink the bottles of the day, whose teats it describes as hard and narrow and whose containers it calls unstable and difficult to fill; English Wikipedia’s article on Atkin describes him as a businessman, investor and entrepreneur who served as chief executive of Avent. That shape — a squat bottle and a broad teat — became the brand’s signature form, and it is the product the brand was built around.

Avent was an English manufacturer for most of its history. Charterhouse’s page says its production facilities were in the UK and that its products were “Made in England” and exported internationally; the company was, in Charterhouse’s words, “UK headquartered.” For many years the business traded as Cannon Avent, the name English Wikipedia uses for the company at the time Charterhouse bought it.

From Cannon Avent to Philips.

The business changed owners twice in two years. Charterhouse’s portfolio page gives 2005 as the year it invested in Avent and 2006 as the year it sold, adding that “Charterhouse sold Avent to Philips in 2006.” During its ownership, the firm says, it worked with management to grow the business through new products and manufacturing improvements. English Wikipedia’s article on Philips Avent likewise records that Charterhouse acquired the company, then known as Cannon Avent, in 2005.

The sale to the Dutch electronics group was announced in May 2006. English Wikipedia’s article on Edward Atkin cites reports in the Financial Times and The New York Times, both dated 23 May 2006, headlined “Philips to acquire Avent” and “Philips to buy maker of baby-feeding products.” After the purchase the brand was renamed Philips Avent, which English Wikipedia says is stylised as Philips AVENT. Philips has owned Avent since 2006.

Under Philips the range spread beyond bottles. English Wikipedia describes Philips Avent as a child-care brand making baby bottles, breast pumps and other baby feeding and health accessories, and says it is based in Amsterdam; it gives the brand’s tagline as “Share the care.” Philips presents the brand on its own website, at philips.com/avent.

Charterhouse’s page, written after the sale, describes the business it sold as one with markets in the UK, the US and continental Europe, and lists its products as baby bottles, breast pumps, sterilisers and dummies — the same core range that carries the Philips Avent name today. English Wikipedia’s article on Philips Avent lists the brand among the current divisions and subsidiaries of Philips.

Design and documentation.

Baby-feeding brands sell some of the most closely handled objects in a household: bottles, teats, cups, soothers and the containers and pails that sit beside them. Some of these names began as small family firms or around a single product, and some now belong to much larger consumer-goods or electronics groups, so the name on the pack and the company behind it are often not the same.

A feeding brand’s identity can rest on a short name, a recognisable product shape and its packaging as much as on any single logo, and the same name may pass through several owners while the products on the shelf look much the same. That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and where it makes its products — and makes no claims about what any product does.

From Glemsford to Drachten.

For most of its life Avent’s bottles were made in Suffolk. BBC News reported on 17 January 2019 that Philips would close its only UK factory, at Glemsford near Sudbury in south Suffolk — a site that made baby bottles — in 2020, and that production of the baby feeding bottles would move to Drachten in the Netherlands. Philips said the closure was part of a plan to consolidate its factories into larger regional hubs; Neil Mesher, chief executive of Philips UK & Ireland, told the BBC that Britain’s exit from the European Union was not a deciding factor.

The BBC added that Philips said it had begun consolidating its manufacturing sites more than two years earlier, and quoted the South Suffolk MP, James Cartlidge, calling the news “a massive blow.” The founder, Edward Atkin, remained a public figure after the sale; English Wikipedia says he was appointed CBE in 2011 and established the Atkin Foundation in 2005.

The Philips Avent name today joins the Philips company name to the Avent brand, which English Wikipedia says is stylised as Philips AVENT, and the range is presented on Philips’s own website.

For a design guide, Philips Avent shows how a founder’s product brand can be folded into a larger corporate name while keeping its own word. Compare NUK, a German bottle and soother brand that also passed to a larger group, and Chicco, the Italian baby brand. For this guide we use a bottle blue, a deep navy and a milk white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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