A Philadelphia oil company and a fluid for clothes.

Renuzit started out as something to clean clothes with. United States trademark records show that Radbill Oil Co. of Philadelphia filed in July 1932 to register a mark reading “Renuzit Safe Non-Explosive French Dry Cleaner” for a dry-cleaning fluid, giving 6 June 1932 as the date the name was first used. The registration was granted in November 1932. Only the word Renuzit was claimed as the mark itself; the rest of the wording on the label was disclaimed as descriptive.

The name itself is a piece of spelling play: read aloud, Renuzit sounds like “renews it,” a promise aimed at a stained coat or a dress. A second registration, filed in October 1947 and granted in 1948, covered the word Renuzit on its own in a stylised form, again for dry-cleaning fluids. By then the owner was listed as Renuzit Home Products Co. of Philadelphia, which the record says had formerly done business as Radbill Oil Company — the oil firm had, in effect, taken the name of its product.

English Wikipedia notes that the Renuzit brand once also covered a solvent-based spot remover and cleaner. The move into air care came under a new owner. According to the International Directory of Company Histories, the Cincinnati household-products company Drackett, maker of Drano and Windex and a Bristol-Myers subsidiary since 1965, “acquired and aggressively promoted Renuzit solid air freshener beginning in 1969.” From then on Renuzit was an air-freshener name, sold alongside Drackett’s cleaners.

Drackett, a federal order, Dial and a family firm in Michigan.

The brand changed hands twice in quick succession at the start of the 1990s. Bristol-Myers, by then merged with Squibb, sold Drackett to S. C. Johnson & Son of Racine, Wisconsin. United Press International reported on 11 February 1993 that S. C. Johnson had acquired Drackett from Bristol-Myers Squibb on 31 December and had been required by the Federal Trade Commission to sell Renuzit, because S. C. Johnson already had its own competing line of air fresheners. The company history puts the same point plainly: Renuzit was sold off “so that Johnson could concentrate on its own line of Glade brand air fresheners.” The rival in question is the subject of our Glade guide.

The buyer was the Dial Corp. of Phoenix, Arizona. In the same UPI report Dial said it had agreed to buy Drackett’s Renuzit air-freshener business, and its chairman John W. Teets described the deal as “consistent with our long-term strategy to build our core consumer-products business.” The report listed the Renuzit range of the time as Renuzit Adjustable, aerosol sprays, a Fragrance Jar and RoomMate, and said Dial planned to continue rolling out an electric product called Renuzit Electric LongLast. Among the household names Dial already owned was Brillo, the soap pad.

Dial in turn changed owners. English Wikipedia, citing Advertising Age of December 2003, records that Dial became a subsidiary of the German group Henkel in 2004, and Renuzit came with it.

Today the brand belongs to Armaly Brands of Walled Lake, Michigan, which lists Renuzit first among its brands and whose name appears at the foot of the Renuzit website. English Wikipedia dates the sale to April 2023. Armaly describes itself as “family owned since 1908” and traces its roots, the company says, to a natural-sponge business that W. J. Armaly started in the Bahamas; his son John W. Armaly later opened a packing plant in Detroit. Armaly says it acquired Brillo in 2010, so the soap pad and the air freshener that sat together in Dial’s portfolio in 1993 now share an owner again.

Design and documentation.

Household glue and air-care brands sit on the same kind of shelf, in hardware aisles and supermarket cleaning sections, and both have to be recognised quickly by someone who is usually in the middle of a job. A glue’s identity is often carried by a small tube, a squeeze bottle or a twin syringe, where a name, a colour band and a few words about what the product sticks have to fit on very little space. An air freshener’s identity is carried by a can, a cone, a plug-in or a jar, and by the names given to its scents.

In air care, a fragrance named after a flower, a fruit or a season gives a label designer a colour and a picture to start from. On a glue pack, the name has to share its space with directions for use and safety wording.

Many of these names have also changed owners more than once. Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its packaging and advertising have been described, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name that sounds like a promise, and a cone you twist.

Renuzit’s identity begins with its name, a coined spelling that reads as “renews it” and that has passed from a 1930s dry-cleaning fluid to a range of air fresheners. The 1932 registration shows that the name was presented from the start inside a drawn label, with circle and rectangle elements recorded among its design features, and the 1947 filing registered the word in a stylised lettering of its own.

The product that carried that name into air care is the cone. UPI’s 1993 report already listed a Renuzit Adjustable line, and the Renuzit website today is built around cones, with a three-step guide to opening one: tear off the removable part, twist the cone, then lift it. The company describes its cones as “outlet-free and flame-free.”

The rest of the identity is carried by scent names and colour. The current site sorts its range into fragrance families — Floral, Fresh, Fruity, Tropical, Seasonal and Natural Elements among them — alongside a line called Scent Swirls. Across owners, from Drackett in Cincinnati to Dial in Phoenix and Armaly in Michigan, the word Renuzit has stayed the fixed point while the formats, fragrances and companies around it changed.

For a design guide, Renuzit shows how a sound-alike brand name can outlive the product it was coined for, and how a simple shape and a set of scent names can carry a brand through several changes of owner. Compare it with Glade, the S. C. Johnson line that led to Renuzit’s sale in 1993, and Air Wick, another long-running air-freshener name. For this guide we use cone green, petal pink and cleaner cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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