A small Minnesota company and a hardware-show debut.

FrogTape did not begin at the company that sells it today. Archived pages of the brand’s first website, captured between 2008 and 2009, name its maker as Inspired Technologies, Inc., a company based in Le Sueur, Minnesota, a river town south-west of the Twin Cities. On those pages the name was written as two words, Frog Tape, and the product was introduced as a “pro painter’s crepe masking tape.” The site’s main page said that Inspired Technologies “introduces Frog Tape,” and described the tape as treated with what it called Paintblock Technology.

The early site dated the launch itself. A page about trade fairs said that Frog Tape had made its debut at the National Hardware Show in 2007 in Orlando, Florida, and invited visitors to the 2008 show in Las Vegas. An events list from the same period shows how the young brand went to market: through the buying shows of the American hardware trade. It listed the Spring Handy Market in Houston and the Moore-Handley spring buying show in Birmingham, Alabama, both in February 2008, then the Orgill spring market and the True Value market, both in Orlando, before the National Hardware Show in Las Vegas in May 2008. The press section offered a press release from the 2007 hardware show, a media kit and downloadable images of the tape in one-inch, inch-and-a-half and two-inch widths, together with a logo file.

The company explained its idea in its own words. When latex paint touches the edges of the tape, a page titled “Why It Works” said, the Paintblock treatment “creates a micro barrier along the edges of the tape,” which, the company said, “helps prevent paint from bleeding under Frog Tape.” The same page called the product a patented crepe masking tape. An “About Us” page carried a mission statement that set out the founders’ plan: “to design, manufacture, and distribute quality tools, supplies, and peripherals for the home-improvement business sector,” and to build recognition for the brand on quality, value, uniqueness and functionality.

A Hickory tape maker, a Henkel deal and one corporate name.

The brand changed hands at the end of the decade. The corporate history published by Shurtape Technologies, LLC gives the step in a single line: in 2010, the “FrogTape brand is acquired from Inspired Technologies.” English Wikipedia’s article on Shurtape records the same year. By the last day of 2010, an archived copy of the brand’s website shows the name closed up as FrogTape and the product presented as “FrogTape Painter’s Tape with PaintBlock Technology,” with a capital B in the middle of the technology’s name.

Shurtape is a family company from Hickory, North Carolina. Its own timeline traces it to Shuford Mills, a textile business it dates to 1880 that made spun yarns and cordage, which created a tape division in 1955. In 1996, the timeline says, Shurtape Technologies and the Shurtape brand were spun out of Shuford Mills as a separate company; English Wikipedia describes the firm as owned and run by the Shuford family, with the tape company and the remaining textile business held under a parent called STM Industries. Painter’s tape was already part of the group before FrogTape arrived: in 2000 Shurtape bought Kip GmbH, which its timeline describes as a Germany-based provider of painters’ tapes.

The FrogTape purchase followed a larger deal. In 2009, Shurtape’s timeline says, the former Manco assets, including the Duck and Painter’s Mate brands, were acquired from Henkel to form ShurTech Brands, LLC; Wikipedia places that subsidiary’s headquarters in Avon, Ohio. FrogTape joined Duck and Painter’s Mate in the group’s consumer business the following year. In 2020, according to the timeline, all of the group’s companies moved to the single corporate name and brand of Shurtape Technologies, LLC.

Shurtape’s company profile lists its facilities across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Peru, Denmark, Australasia, the United Arab Emirates and China, and names FrogTape among the group’s brands alongside Duck, Painter’s Mate, Shurtape, T-Rex, Kip and Pro Tapes. On Shurtape’s industrial site the brand sits next to the Shurtape and Duck Pro lines, with the line that “when performance cannot be compromised, FrogTape brand delivers professional results you can trust.”

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell the things that sit around a tin of paint rather than the paint itself: masking tape, brushes, primers, wood stains, clear finishes and spray paint. In a hardware aisle they compete for attention on crowded shelves, so their identities are carried by a few repeated signals — the colour of a roll of tape, the band of colour on a can, a label that customers can find again on the next visit.

Wood-finish brands also have to show colour that is not their own. A stain only makes sense once it is on wood, so swatch cards, sample boards and finished projects often do as much of the visual work as the logo. Tape brands, by contrast, can make the product itself the signature, with one colour of roll standing for the whole name.

Many of these names have changed hands over the years, and the business behind a familiar label may now be part of a much larger coatings group. Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how it presents itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An unexpected colour and a technology with a trademark.

Colour is the first thing the brand talks about. The “Why FrogTape?” page on the current website opens with three short sentences: “It started with one product. An unexpected color. And unbeatable results.” The product it means is the original FrogTape Multi-Surface painter’s tape, which the site’s own image captions call green, and which the company credits with “exclusive PaintBlock Technology.” Other tapes in the range are identified by their own colours, such as the Pro Grade Orange painter’s tape the site lists for production painting.

The name and the technology are the two words the brand repeats most. Both carry registered-trademark symbols across the site, and the PaintBlock name has stayed with the product since the first Le Sueur website, changing only from “Paintblock” to “PaintBlock” as the brand moved to Shurtape. Newer lines borrow the same pattern of a capitalised technology name: the brand’s damage-free mounting products are sold as FrogTape reMOVEables with what the company calls CleanGrip Technology.

The range has grown well beyond the single tape. The current product menu runs from painter’s tape and performance masking tape to protection and containment tape, flashing tape and a family of hooks and picture-hanging strips. The website greets visitors by asking whether they are a “Seasoned Pro” or a “DIY Enthusiast,” and offers tutorials, technique pages, an inspiration gallery and a “Paintover Challenge.” A language selector lists versions for France, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain alongside English.

For a design guide, FrogTape shows how a single unexpected colour, a short compound name and a trademarked technology can carry a hardware product from a Minnesota start-up into a family-owned tape group without losing its shape. Compare it with ScotchBlue, 3M’s blue painter’s tape, and Wooster, the paintbrush and roller maker of Wooster, Ohio. For this guide we use tape green, pond and primer white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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