A chemist’s white soap and a name from the Bible.

Ivory is a nineteenth-century brand of Procter & Gamble, the Cincinnati company founded by the candle maker William Procter and the soap maker James Gamble. English Wikipedia’s article on the soap, which cites the company’s own published history, says that in 1879 James Norris Gamble, a son of the co-founder and a trained chemist, developed an inexpensive white soap. The product needed a name, and the one it got came from the other side of the family.

According to the same account, Harley Procter, a son of William Procter, chose “Ivory” after reading a line in Psalm 45: “All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces.” Wikipedia says Procter & Gamble registered Ivory as a trademark for the new soap in September 1879.

The best-known story about the soap concerns its ability to float. For many years it was told that a worker had left a mixing machine running too long, whipping extra air into a batch, and that the company sold the batch anyway and then made the longer mixing time standard after customers wrote in to praise the floating bar. English Wikipedia reports that the company itself later discounted that story: in 2004 the P&G archivist Ed Rider found papers showing that James N. Gamble had worked out how to make the soap float and had recorded the result in his notes.

Ivory became so closely tied to its maker that, Wikipedia notes, P&G’s factory and research site in St. Bernard, Ohio, near Cincinnati, is nicknamed “Ivorydale.” The brand’s first advertising campaign dates to 1882, according to The New York Times, which reported in October 2001 that P&G had donated Ivory advertising materials going back to that campaign to the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Two slogans, one bar and a long life on the shelf.

Ivory’s early identity was carried by words as much as by pictures. English Wikipedia dates the slogan “It Floats!” to 1891, and says the company’s other famous line, “99 44/100% Pure,” was in use by 1895. Wikipedia explains that the second slogan came from a laboratory analysis that Harley Procter commissioned to compare Ivory with the castile soaps sold at the time. Both lines are historic company slogans, and they are quoted here as the company’s own words from that period.

The slogans outlived the original product in one respect. Wikipedia says P&G discontinued the whipped, floating version of the bar in 2013, and that the reformulated bar no longer floats; it adds that newer packaging leaves out the words “soap” and “float.” Earlier, in October 1992, the company had test-marketed a new Ivory formula, described as a skin care bar, that did not float like the original.

The brand has also used its own history as a marketing tool. The New York Times reported in October 2001 that P&G was putting a large share of the Ivory bars it shipped in the United States into special packaging based on the original late 19th-century design, and running a contest in which a small number of those bars were made to sink rather than float. The contest was administered by D. L. Blair, a unit of Draft Worldwide, and the print advertising was produced by Interbrand Hulefeld of Cincinnati. The Times described one advertisement showing white bathroom accessories in a white bathroom under the line “choose a classic,” and another pairing a sepia-toned photograph of a mother bathing her baby with a drawing from an old Ivory advertisement. A third invited readers to “celebrate 120 years of pure, simple, clean.” P&G’s marketing director for personal cleansing, Alexandra Lipinski, told the paper the aim was to bring Ivory “to the forefront of consumers’ minds as they think about simplifying their lives.” The same promotion put a Victorian-style Ivory float, showing a baby’s bath time, into the 2002 Tournament of Roses Parade.

Over time the name has been stretched beyond the original bar. English Wikipedia lists the classic bar soap, hair and body wash, dish liquid and other products under the Ivory name. Ivory remains a Procter & Gamble brand, owned by the same company that registered the name in 1879, and it sits in the P&G personal-care range beside names such as Secret and Old Spice.

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 white bar, a blue wrapper and a heritage campaign.

Ivory is a case of a brand whose name, product and colour all point the same way. The bar is white, the name refers to a white material, and, as The New York Times reported in 2001, P&G chose to sell it to a new generation with advertisements built around white bathrooms, sepia photographs and reproductions of the brand’s old drawings. The company’s own message at the time, as quoted by the paper, was about simplicity rather than novelty.

The 2001 campaign is also a useful record of how the brand treated its past. Instead of a redesign, P&G put a large share of its bars into packaging based on the original late 19th-century design, donated early advertising materials to the Smithsonian, and entered a Victorian-style float in the Rose Parade. Each of those moves presented Ivory as an heirloom, and each relied on material the brand already owned: a name from 1879, slogans from the 1890s and the image of a baby’s bath.

The slogans themselves are a lesson in brand language. “It Floats!” described something a customer could see in the bath, and “99 44/100% Pure,” according to Wikipedia, was drawn from a laboratory comparison the company commissioned. Both are historic company words, quoted here as such, and both were attached to the bar itself rather than to any picture or logo.

For a design guide, Ivory shows how a plain product can be given an identity through a well-chosen name, a short line of copy and a consistent colour story, and how an old brand can lean on its archive when it wants to look new again. Compare it with Secret, another Procter & Gamble personal-care name, and Dial, a rival American bar soap. For this guide we use wrapper blue and bar white on cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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