A chemist’s formula, a car shop and a salesman with a Jaguar.

The Armor All story starts with a formula rather than a name. The brand’s own history page says that in 1962 the polymer chemist Joe Palcher developed the liquid that would become Armor All Protectant, and that in 1966 a local auto shop owner persuaded him to bottle it and sell it. The product was called Tri-don — “No Dirt” spelled backwards, the company says. English Wikipedia adds that it was first sold from a specialty car shop in Southern California before reaching the Briggs Cunningham Automotive Museum in Costa Mesa and the Parnelli Jones tyre stores.

The name came with a new owner. In 1972, according to the company, the marketer and car enthusiast Alan Rypinski bought the rights to Palcher’s product and renamed it Armor All Protectant. English Wikipedia says Rypinski came across Tri-don while restoring a 1959 Jaguar, that the first test products were labelled RT-10 and GT-10, and that in 1973 he set up Very Important Products Inc. to market the protectant. Its regional sales managers, the article says, worked out of motor homes and travelled to county fairs, shopping malls and trade shows.

The company says Rypinski patented Armor All Protectant in 1976 and received a second patent in 1979 for the way the product is applied to a surface. In the same decade the brand appeared on the race track: English Wikipedia says Armor All sponsored the stock-car driver Neil Bonnett in the 1970s, including at the 1976 Daytona 500.

The early identity also had a character. English Wikipedia says the brand’s Viking mascot was drawn by the illustrator Dave Deal, and that it stayed in use for about 35 years before it was updated.

McKesson, Clorox, Avista, Spectrum, Energizer.

Rypinski did not keep the business for long. In 1979, English Wikipedia says, he sold Very Important Products and the Armor All brand to the San Francisco consumer-products company McKesson Corporation, staying on as a consultant for the following five years. Under McKesson the range widened. The company history dates a car wash, made as an alternative to the dish soap many owners used, to 1982, and English Wikipedia says the brand went on sale in Japan in 1984 and in West Germany in 1985.

In 1986 McKesson floated part of the business as Armor All Products, Inc., keeping a majority stake, English Wikipedia says. Two years later the company added Armor All Car Wax and bought the car-care line of Borden, Inc., which included the Rain Dance, Rally and No. 7 names; The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times reported the purchase in September 1988. Tire Foam Protectant followed in 1992, and English Wikipedia says Rypinski returned that year as chairman emeritus. In October 1996 Armor All bought the German car-care maker Car-Rex from Werner & Mertz, The New York Times reported.

Clorox came next. The company history says Clorox acquired the Armor All Products Company in 1996; English Wikipedia says the deal was announced that November. In October 1998 Clorox bought First Brands, owner of STP, and the car-care business became The Armor All/STP Products Company. Armor All wipes arrived in 2000, the company says. In April 2007 a Clorox press release marking the brand’s 35th anniversary announced an updated logo, new packaging and the replacement of the Viking with what it called “a more modern warrior”.

In 2010 Clorox sold Armor All and STP to the private-equity firm Avista Capital Partners, which named the business Armored AutoGroup and moved its headquarters to Danbury, Connecticut, according to the company history. In 2015 Spectrum Brands agreed to buy Armored AutoGroup, a PR Newswire release from its parent HRG Group said, and the brand became part of Spectrum’s Global Auto Care division. Reuters reported in November 2018 that Spectrum would sell that division, with Armor All, STP and A/C Pro, to Energizer Holdings of St. Louis; Energizer has owned Armor All since 2019, and the brand’s website now credits the trademark to Energizer Auto.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make things people put on, or in, their cars: waxes and polishes, cleaners and detailing products, treatments for glass, and accessories such as floor liners. Car-care and auto-accessory brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from businesses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger industrial or consumer-goods groups, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a petrol-station shelf to a specialist detailing shop.

A car-care brand’s identity is usually carried by a bottle, a label, a colour or a name rather than by the product itself, because what is inside the bottle is rarely seen. The company behind the name may also have changed hands, moved its production or licensed the name to others along the way. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made.

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

From black and gold to orange.

Production has followed the owners. English Wikipedia says the 1996 Clorox deal included two plants, one in Painesville, Ohio, and one in Wales, and that at the time of the 2010 sale to Avista the business still had manufacturing in Painesville and Wales, offices in Danbury and Pleasanton, California, and operations in Canada and Australia.

The packaging has been redrawn more than once. After the 2007 logo update under Clorox, the most visible change came in the 2020s. Retail World, an Australian trade magazine, reported on 7 June 2024 that Armor All was rolling out a brand refresh in Australia “in alignment with its global packaging evolution”: the core range and the Ultra Shine, Extreme and Ultra Shield lines were moving from black and gold packaging to orange, with a label that leads with the logo and colour cues meant to point shoppers to each product’s task. The magazine said the new look would reach Australian shelves from that August.

Sponsorship has carried the name too. English Wikipedia lists sponsorship of the Australian Supercars Championship from 2005, of the NASCAR driver Tony Stewart in 2008 and an advertising campaign with John Cena in April 2018. Energizer announced the racing driver Jenson Button as a global brand ambassador on 31 March 2021 and a partnership with the Red Bull Racing Formula One team that April, and the brand’s website now describes itself as partnered with Oracle Red Bull Racing. The company history also lists car-interior disinfectants and the Extreme Shield + Ceramic line among its 2020 launches.

For a design guide, Armor All shows how a single product name can survive a long run of changes of owner while its packaging, mascot and colours are redrawn around it. Compare Turtle Wax, the Chicago wax company that advertised against Armor All in the 1980s, and Rain-X, another car-care name in the same aisle. For this guide we use a bright orange, black and an old gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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