From tungsten wire in Indianapolis to a brand name.

Duracell begins with a partnership rather than a single founder. English Wikipedia traces the brand to the work of the scientist Samuel Ruben and the businessman Philip Rogers Mallory, who met during the 1920s. Mallory’s business, the P. R. Mallory Company, had started in Burlington, Massachusetts, and Wikipedia says it moved its headquarters to Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1924.

On its own company page, Duracell calls Indianapolis its ancestral home. The company says that Mallory owned a tungsten filament wire manufacturing operation there, and that Ruben sought him out for a piece of equipment he needed for an experiment. What followed, the company says, was a partnership that laid the groundwork for the Duracell business of today.

The early products were not the familiar household cells. According to English Wikipedia, the Mallory company produced mercury batteries for military equipment. In 1956, it says, P. R. Mallory & Co. acquired General Dry Batteries, Inc., a Cleveland, Ohio, company that had made mercury batteries under licence from Mallory during and after the Second World War.

The name came later. Wikipedia says the word “Duracell” was introduced as a brand in the 1960s, built from the phrase “durable cell”. For years the two names travelled together: until 1980, Wikipedia says, the batteries also bore the Mallory brand. The coined word eventually outlived the family name on the pack, and it went on to become the name of the company itself.

Ruben’s work stayed close to the business. The company’s page describes the partnership between Ruben and Mallory as one that lasted for decades, and English Wikipedia lists, as further reading, a 2009 article in the journal Technology and Culture by the historian Eric S. Hintz, titled “Portable Power: Inventor Samuel Ruben and the Birth of Duracell”.

Dart, Kraft, KKR, Gillette, P&G and Berkshire Hathaway.

Duracell changed hands often. English Wikipedia says P. R. Mallory was acquired by Dart Industries in 1978, and that Dart merged with Kraft in 1980. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts bought Duracell in 1988 and took the company public in 1989. The Gillette Company acquired it in 1996, and in 2005 Procter & Gamble acquired Gillette, bringing Duracell with it.

The most recent move was a share exchange. According to Wikipedia, P&G announced on 24 October 2014 that it would separate Duracell, and on 14 November 2014 Berkshire Hathaway said it intended to acquire the business in exchange for P&G shares that Berkshire held. The European Commission approved the deal in July 2015, and the transfer was completed on 29 February 2016. Berkshire Hathaway has owned Duracell since 2016, and the company’s own site describes it as a “Berkshire Hathaway Company since 2016”.

The headquarters has moved with the owners. English Wikipedia says that in September 2016 Duracell announced plans to move its executive team to Chicago, and that in February 2025 it established a new global headquarters for research and development in Atlanta, Georgia.

Where the batteries are made is something the company addresses directly. On a page titled “Built in the USA”, Duracell says that every AA, AAA, C and D battery it sells in the United States is assembled there, “with US & Global Parts”: AA and AAA cells in LaGrange, Georgia, and C and D cells in Cleveland, Tennessee. Its company page adds that it has international plants in Belgium and China.

The range today, as the company presents it, is led by Coppertop and Optimum batteries alongside lithium coin cells, hearing aid batteries and specialty cells. Duracell describes Procell as its professional, business-to-business battery brand; Wikipedia says it was previously sold as “Industrial by Duracell”.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make or sell batteries, from the small cells that go into torches, remote controls and toys to the heavy batteries that start cars, boats and trucks. Battery brands in general sit at many different points in the trade: some names belong to the company that makes the cells, some are owned by retailers or parts chains, and some are licensed to different companies in different parts of the world.

A battery brand’s identity is usually carried less by the product itself than by its packaging, its colours, its slogans and sometimes a mascot, because one sealed case looks much like another. Behind the label, the company that owns the name and the factory that builds the battery may have changed several times. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started the brand, who owns it now, and who actually makes the batteries.

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

A copper top and a pink rabbit.

Two things carry the Duracell look more than any wordmark: a colour and an animal. The colour is copper. English Wikipedia uses the phrase “copper top” for the brand’s trademark colouring, and notes that when Duracell licensed its name to the memory maker Dane-Elec in 2008, the memory cards and drives carried that same copper-top colouring. Its everyday alkaline line is named Coppertop.

The animal is the Duracell Bunny. According to English Wikipedia, Mallory Duracell launched the campaign in 1973 with a television advertisement called “Drumming Bunny”, created by the agency Dancer Fitzgerald Sample. It showed a row of pink toy rabbits beating drums, and by the end of the spot only one was still going: the one with a Duracell battery inside.

The rabbit has changed form over the decades. Wikipedia says the Duracell Bunny has appeared as a battery-powered toy, a stop-motion puppet and a computer-animated character, often in groups, competing at football, drumming or racing. In 2019, it says, the bunny was given a speaking voice, provided by the American actor and writer Miles Luna.

The character is not used everywhere. English Wikipedia says a dispute between Duracell and Energizer over their pink rabbits ended in a confidential settlement on 10 January 1992, under which Energizer holds the rights in the United States and Canada and Duracell holds them in the rest of the world.

Sport is the other stage. Wikipedia says Duracell began a partnership with Williams Racing in February 2022, and that the car’s vertical air intake was styled like a Duracell battery from the 2022 Miami Grand Prix. Duracell’s own site calls itself the official power of Atlassian Williams Racing and of Inter Miami CF.

For a design guide, Duracell shows how a single colour, applied to the top of a small cylinder, can become as recognisable as the name printed beside it. Compare Energizer, the rival with its own pink rabbit, and Rayovac, another American battery name. For this guide we use a copper, a near-black and a soft pink with a heavy sans-serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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