A deodorant soap with an Irish name from an American company.

Irish Spring is a deodorant soap made and sold by Colgate-Palmolive, the consumer-products company whose roots, according to the International Directory of Company Histories, go back to 1806, when William Colgate started a business selling soap and candles. The brand’s name evokes Ireland, but the soap is an American company’s product, and Colgate-Palmolive has owned it since its launch.

The launch date depends on the market and the source. English Wikipedia says Irish Spring was introduced in Germany in 1970 and reached the United States in 1972. The trade magazine HAPPI, writing in February 2022, dated the brand’s introduction to 1970. The International Directory of Company Histories (volume 71, 2005) places the arrival of Irish Spring deodorant soap in 1972, in its account of Colgate under David Foster, who became the company’s president in 1970 and its chief executive in 1971. Colgate’s own brand site puts it more loosely: Irish Spring, it says, began with bar soap “in the 1970s.”

Foster’s period at Colgate is the setting the reference book gives for the launch. The directory describes him as the son of the founder of Colgate-Palmolive’s British operations, a man who had joined the company in 1946 as a management trainee and risen through sales and marketing in the United States and abroad. It records that after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission restricted in-store promotions such as couponing in 1971, Colgate turned to other ways of keeping its products in view, including programmes that rewarded schools and civic groups whose young people collected labels and boxtops from selected Colgate products, and the sponsorship of women’s sporting events. Irish Spring is the product-development note in that same chapter.

At launch the soap was a bar, and the bar was the brand. HAPPI described the original as “the enduring green and white deodorant bar soap,” marketed to men who wanted to smell good, and singled out its original fragrance as the thing Colgate-Palmolive had long promoted. The company’s current site makes the same two points about its own product, calling the soap’s look “iconic” and “striped” and describing a “signature scent.”

From one bar to a range, and a 2022 rebrand.

For its early decades Irish Spring was a single product. Colgate-Palmolive says the brand expanded beyond bar soap in 2007, when it added body washes, and the range of bars has also widened since. The International Directory of Company Histories notes that in the 1990s Colgate’s North American business used a new Irish Spring variant as one of the product introductions intended to revive its sales in the region. Today the company presents the line as bar soaps and body washes in a series of named scents, each tied to an image of the outdoors.

The most documented chapter in the brand’s visual history is recent. In February 2022 Colgate-Palmolive introduced a new look for Irish Spring. HAPPI reported on 8 February 2022 that the company, looking to widen the brand’s appeal to younger men, had brought in two creative agencies, Chase Design Group and Tin Horse, to work with the Colgate-Palmolive Global Design Brand Group on a rebrand that would better reflect what the magazine called stylish, modern masculinity. English Wikipedia, citing the same report, adds that the original bar was renamed “Original Clean” as part of the change.

The rebrand came with a new line of copy. HAPPI reported that the design team built the work around a new brand promise — “smell from a nice-smelling place” — and that this line was to appear across the new advertising and marketing. The campaign supporting the redesign was scheduled to air during Super Bowl LVI, on Sunday 13 February 2022.

Ownership has been steady throughout. Irish Spring has been a Colgate-Palmolive brand since its introduction, sold alongside the company’s toothpastes, liquid soaps and household cleaners, and the 2022 work was run from inside the company’s own global design group with the two outside agencies. That continuity is part of what the redesign set out to protect: HAPPI described the aim as a look that pays homage to the brand’s legacy while modernising it.

Design and documentation.

Soap, body-wash and deodorant brands are bought often, used daily and chosen in seconds, so their identities rely on signals a shopper can read from across an aisle. A bar of soap can carry its brand in its shape, its colour and the lettering pressed into its surface, as well as on the wrapper or carton around it. Liquids and deodorants move the same work onto bottles, tubes and sticks, where a fixed name panel usually sits above a changing band of colour or a picture that marks each variant.

Scent names do much of the sorting. Fragrances are often given evocative names drawn from places, weather, fruit or flowers rather than chemical descriptions, and a single brand may run many of them side by side, each with its own tint. Ranges also split by user, with separate lines for men, women and children.

Many of the names in this group are long-lived and have changed hands between large companies. 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.

A richer green, a white mark and a golden clover.

The 2022 redesign is documented in the words of the people who made it. Steve Dunphy, executive creative director at Chase Design Group in New York, told HAPPI that the team “created a restrained aesthetic style by using a title case and bold sans-serif typography that retains the fresh white color of the old brand mark,” and added a lock-up with “a stylized clover in a warm golden hue,” which he described as a symbol of the brand’s legacy. The magazine summarised the brand’s core assets after the change as a richer green Irish Spring structure, a white brand mark and a golden clover.

The packaging was treated as a series of scenes. According to HAPPI, the richer green of the bar packs is set off by the new clover icon, and the large multi-packs serve as a canvas “similar to a travel poster,” highlighting what the report called the refreshing destinations of Irish Spring. Monica Goodman of Colgate-Palmolive Design and Jamila Aubain of Colgate-Palmolive Marketing described the effect as “breathtaking layered computer-generated images of landscapes that invite you into an experience.” The body wash bottles followed the same idea, each scent carrying its own natural scene.

Colgate’s own copy leans on the same imagery. Its brand site describes the scent as “as invigorating and bold as the mist over the Irish countryside” and plays on the clover with lines such as “no four-leaf clover needed.” HAPPI reported that the new body wash design was meant to celebrate simplicity, with the green-and-white bar still the reference point for the range.

For a design guide, Irish Spring shows how a long-running mass brand can be modernised by stripping a mark back to type and colour and moving the storytelling onto the pack as landscape. Compare it with Dial, another American deodorant bar with decades of advertising behind it, and Ivory, Procter & Gamble’s long-running bar. For this guide we use bar green, stripe white and clover gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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