A Racine family firm steps beyond floor wax.

Raid was born inside a company known for wax. S. C. Johnson & Son, the privately held household-products maker based in Racine, Wisconsin, traces itself to 1886, and for its first decades it sold floor wax and related products. English Wikipedia’s article on the company, citing a 2016 CBS Sunday Morning report, says the launch of Raid House & Garden Bug Killer in 1955 marked the company’s first major departure from wax-based products. Wikipedia’s article on the brand itself dates Raid’s first launch to 1956, so the two accounts differ by a year.

The same company article says that within the next few years Sam Johnson, the fourth generation of the family to lead the business, introduced several of the names it is best known for today, among them Glade, OFF! and Pledge. Raid therefore sits at the head of a run of new brands that turned a wax company into a maker of household chemicals across the home, from air care to insect repellent.

The brand’s chemistry has a history of its own. Wikipedia says Raid’s initial active ingredient was allethrin, citing a 2019 review in the Journal of Pesticide Science of how that family of compounds was modified over the decades. The products have changed many times since, and the range now spans sprays, baits and other formats for ants, roaches, flying insects and more.

S. C. Johnson has also sold the line under other names in some markets. Wikipedia says the line was sold as Ridsect in Malaysia, and that Baygon, another S. C. Johnson insecticide brand, is related to Raid in Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. The company’s Wikipedia article records that S. C. Johnson acquired four Bayer household brands, including Baygon and Autan, in 2003.

An agency, a poet and a line first used in 1966.

The words most people attach to Raid came from an advertising agency. Wikipedia says the tagline “Raid Kills Bugs Dead” was created by Foote, Cone & Belding, and that the phrase itself is often attributed to the poet Lew Welch, who worked for the agency at the time; the source it gives is Aram Saroyan’s 1979 book Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation. The same article says the line was first used in commerce in 1966 and was trademarked in 1986.

The line works through repetition and bluntness. “Kills” and “dead” say the same thing twice, and the brand name sits at the front of the sentence, so that it is said every time the slogan is. In the television spots the brand name became a cry in its own right: Wikipedia describes the cartoon insects screaming the word “Raid” in alarm before the can arrives.

The slogan stayed in use for decades. Wikipedia’s summary of the brand lists “Raid Kills Bugs Dead” as running until 2016, followed by a sequence of newer lines: “It’s Good to Be Tough” from 2017, “Protection for Everyone” from 2021 and “Bugs Hate Raid” from 2024. The most recent of them puts the insects themselves at the centre of the sentence.

Behind the advertising stood a company that stayed in family hands. Wikipedia says S. C. Johnson remains privately held, and in 2018 it updated its corporate tagline from “A Family Company,” used since 1998, to “A Family Company at Work for a Better World.” The company’s headquarters in Racine, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and opened in 1939, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1974, according to the same article.

Design and documentation.

Garden-care and pest-control brands share the shelf with paint, cleaning products and hardware, and they have to be read quickly by someone standing in a store aisle or a garden centre. Their identities are carried by a few repeated signals: a bottle, bag or can in a single strong colour, a name set large on the front panel, and, for some, a mascot or a short slogan that has run in advertising for years.

These packs also carry text the brand does not choose. In the United States, pesticide products are registered with the Environmental Protection Agency, and their labels set out directions for use, precautionary statements and a registration number. That regulatory panel sits beside the brand’s own graphics on the same container, so the designed part of the label and the required part have to work together.

Some of the names in this group have changed owners more than once, while others have stayed with the company that launched them. Each guide in this group sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its name and packaging are presented, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Cartoon bugs, a scream and an explosion.

Raid’s visual identity lives as much in animation as on the can. Wikipedia says the noted animation director Tex Avery was the producer of the first “Kills Bugs Dead” commercials, and that the artist Don Pegler developed the bug characters used in the United States and went on animating them for decades. Its source is Warren Dotz and Jim Morton’s 1996 book What a Character! 20th Century American Advertising Icons, published by Chronicle Books.

The formula of the spots, as Wikipedia describes it, borrowed from crime drama. The name conjures an Eliot Ness-style raid on a Prohibition bar, and the commercials showed cartoon mosquitoes, flies, cockroaches, ants and spiders plotting some silly scheme — invading a kitchen, hanging out, staging a caper — until the can appeared. The bugs would scream the brand’s name, and a huge cartoon-style explosion would follow. It is a structure that repeats the brand name at the moment of greatest drama and ends on a visual full stop.

The bugs had many voices. Wikipedia lists Avery himself, Mel Blanc, Paul Frees and Frank Welker among those who voiced them, along with the Chicago voice actor Larry Moran. The Chicago Sun-Times, in a profile published in January 2018, described Moran as one of the busiest voice artists in the city, whose roles ran from a Keebler elf to “a Raid bug” to a tub of Parkay margarine. Wikipedia adds that similar campaigns ran in other countries, either by dubbing the American cartoons or by producing local versions.

Together these elements form an unusually consistent identity: a red can as the hero, a cast of cartoon villains drawn in one house style for decades, a scream that doubles as a brand mention, and a slogan built on blunt repetition.

For a design guide, Raid shows how a household product can build its identity on a recurring cartoon cast and a slogan that names the brand in every line. Compare it with OFF!, the S. C. Johnson insect repellent introduced soon after Raid, and Windex, another S. C. Johnson household brand. For this guide we use can red, burst yellow and kitchen blue with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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