A doctor, a rubber works and a move west.

BFGoodrich takes its name from Benjamin Franklin Goodrich, the founder of a rubber business that settled in Akron, Ohio, in 1870. English Wikipedia, citing the company history B. F. Goodrich: Tradition and Transformation, 1870–1995 by Mansel G. Blackford and K. Austin Kerr (Ohio State University Press, 1996) among other sources, says Goodrich bought the Hudson River Rubber Company of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, in 1869, and the following year accepted an offer from Akron’s citizens to move the business there. The same article gives the Akron firm’s original name as Goodrich, Tew & Co., says it became the B.F. Goodrich Company in 1880, and says the company was renamed Goodrich Corporation in 2001, by which time it had left the tyre trade altogether.

The tyre brand tells its own early story on its British website. BFGoodrich says that after Dr. Goodrich founded the business in Akron in 1870, the factory made bicycle tyres and then car tyres, and that his son Charles Goodrich set up a tyre research centre in the United States. The company also points to aviation: it says BFGoodrich was involved in a speed record set in 1909 at the international air race held in Reims, on a Curtiss aircraft, and that it supplied the tyres for Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis in 1927. On the road, it says Horatio Nelson Jackson’s coast-to-coast drive across the United States in 1903 was made in a Winton touring car on BFGoodrich tyres.

These are the brand’s own heritage stories, told on the pages it uses to sell tyres today, and the company presents them as a lineage of challenges taken on by the name. The New York Times, reporting in 1989 on the business that carried the name at the time, described the tyre operations of the former B. F. Goodrich Company as one of “two venerable tire names,” and said it had made a tyre for passenger automobiles in 1896. The brand’s British pages add that BFGoodrich tyres were used for the car chase in the 1968 film Bullitt, in which Steve McQueen drove a green Ford Mustang through San Francisco, and on Burt Reynolds’s Pontiac Firebird in Smokey and the Bandit (1977). Those, too, are the company’s own accounts, and they show how much of the brand’s storytelling rests on cars, films and long drives rather than on the rubber factory itself.

From Goodrich to Uniroyal Goodrich to Michelin.

The route from an Akron rubber company to a French-owned brand runs through the 1980s. According to The New York Times of 23 September 1989, the tyre operations of Uniroyal Inc. were acquired by the New York investment firm Clayton & Dubilier in 1985, and those operations were merged with the tyre business of B. F. Goodrich a year later, when Goodrich formed a 50-50 partnership with Clayton & Dubilier. The result was the Uniroyal Goodrich Tire Company, based, the newspaper said, in Akron. English Wikipedia, citing Reuters reporting in the Times archive of June 1988, says B. F. Goodrich sold its half of the venture that month to investors led by Clayton & Dubilier, leaving the tyre business entirely.

The same New York Times report, by Jonathan P. Hicks, said that the Michelin Group of France had agreed the previous day to acquire the Uniroyal Goodrich Tire Company, a deal that, under antitrust rules, needed the approval of American and Canadian regulators. A French television report archived by the Institut national de l’audiovisuel, dated 23 September 1989, covered the same acquisition of “Uniroyal-Goodrich.” The newspaper said that, in recent years, the B. F. Goodrich brand had developed a reputation for high-performance tires, and that Uniroyal was known as a large supplier to the American car industry.

Since then, BFGoodrich has been one of Michelin’s tyre brands. English Wikipedia lists BFGoodrich among Michelin’s brands alongside Kleber and Uniroyal, and the brand’s American website is published under the name MNA, Inc., Michelin North America. The old corporate parent went its own way: English Wikipedia says the renamed Goodrich Corporation built up aerospace businesses, including the 1997 purchase of the nacelle maker Rohr, before itself being acquired by United Technologies. The Goodrich name therefore lives on most visibly where it began, on tyres, while the company that once owned it moved into aircraft parts.

The brand’s current range is organised around off-road and enthusiast driving. Its American website leads with the All-Terrain T/A KO3 and still lists the All-Terrain T/A KO2, and its British site sorts tyres into all-terrain 4×4, extreme 4×4, everyday car and SUV, van, and muscle car and vintage categories. That last category is a reminder that the name sells history as well as rubber.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all tyre names. A tyre brand reaches people in an unusual way: its name is moulded into the rubber itself, so the lettering on a sidewall, the shape of a tread and the colours of a shop sign or a racing livery often do more of the identity work than any single advertisement. Many of these names have also travelled far from where they began, through mergers, new owners and factories in other countries.

That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started the business, which companies came together to form it, who owns it now, where its head office sits and where its tyres are made. A brand that began as a repair business, a rubber works or a family firm can end up as one name among several inside a much larger group, while still carrying the mark it was given decades earlier.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its factories and the history of its marks — and attributes each claim to the source it comes from.

Desert racing and a heritage name.

Much of BFGoodrich’s public image is built on racing in dirt and sand. On its British website the company says its Baja 1000 record begins in 1972 and that it built its off-road reputation in North American desert racing. It says it competed in the World Rally Championship from 2006 to 2010, entered the Intercontinental Rally Challenge in 2007, and returned to the Dakar rally in 2016 with Team Peugeot. Its site lists Dakar and Red Bull among its partnerships. These are the company’s own statements about its competition history, and they are the material from which much of its advertising is made: dust, desert, rally cars and tall sidewalls.

The company also keeps a list of milestones on the same page. It gives dates for a tubeless tyre for American cars (1947), a radial tyre on the American market (1965), a run-flat tyre (1967), an all-terrain tyre (1976) and a line of heavy truck tyres (1996), each presented as a BFGoodrich innovation. They are the brand’s claims, and they explain why the T/A name and the all-terrain category sit at the centre of its range.

For a design guide, BFGoodrich shows how a family name can outlive the company that carried it: the Goodrich firm left tyres in the late 1980s, but the brand passed to a new owner and kept telling the story of Akron, Lindbergh and the desert. Compare it with its owner, Michelin, and with Goodyear, which The New York Times described in 1989 as based in Akron too. For this guide we use brick red, tread black and desert sand with a heavy grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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