A salon company’s hair tonic goes to retail.

Suave began as a single hair product made by a Chicago company that would later take a different name. The company history published in the International Directory of Company Histories and reproduced by FundingUniverse says Gerald Gidwitz and Louis Stein founded the National Mineral Company in Chicago in 1927. Its first product was a facial mask, the Peach Bloom Facial Mask, made from clay and sold to beauty salons.

The same history says the company went on to make a shampoo for salons, Lanolin Creme Shampoo, in the mid-1930s, and followed it in 1937 with Suave Hairdressing, a hair tonic. Demand for the tonic, the history says, led the company to make small retail sizes that salons could sell on to their customers. English Wikipedia’s article on the brand also dates Suave to 1937 and to the National Mineral Company.

Wikipedia describes Suave as having later been “acquired” by Helene Curtis, but the company history tells a different story. In its account, the business was renamed National Industries during the Second World War, when its factories were turned over to wartime production, and after the war took the name Helene Curtis, after the wife and son of Louis Stein. On that account, Suave never changed hands at this stage: the maker of Suave Hairdressing simply became Helene Curtis.

Under its new name, the company introduced Suave Hairdressing and Lanolin Creme Shampoo for sale in department stores and drugstores after the war, the history says, and in 1948 it moved to a new headquarters and manufacturing site in Chicago. Through the 1960s, it says, Helene Curtis built on the Suave name with shampoos, creme rinses and wave sets, while also selling a long list of other products to salons and shops. The Suave name had become a family of hair-care products rather than a single tonic.

From Helene Curtis to Unilever to Suave Brands Company.

The Suave range kept spreading. The FundingUniverse history says that in the 1970s Helene Curtis widened the brand’s choice of fragrances and formulas and launched a Suave roll-on antiperspirant and deodorant, the company’s first product in that category. English Wikipedia says Helene Curtis took the Suave name beyond hair care in that decade and aimed it at discount stores, and that it grew to cover shampoo, lotions, soaps and deodorant.

The family company was sold in 1996. The New York Times reported on 15 February 1996 that Helene Curtis Industries had agreed to be acquired by Unilever, describing Helene Curtis as the maker of Suave and Finesse hair-care products and Degree deodorant. The paper noted that the Gidwitz family of Chicago controlled most of the voting stock, and quoted the industry newsletter publisher Allan G. Mottus describing the end of “a very family-driven toiletries and cosmetics business.” Under Unilever, Suave sat alongside brands such as Dove in the company’s American personal-care business.

The next change came in 2023. The trade magazine Happi reported on 9 May 2023 that Yellow Wood Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm that invests in consumer brands, had completed its acquisition of Suave in North America from Unilever. With the deal, Yellow Wood created a new stand-alone business, the Suave Brands Company, led by chief executive Daniel Alter, whom the magazine described as a long-serving former Unilever executive, and headquartered in New Jersey. Yellow Wood partner Tad Yanagi told the magazine the firm saw an opportunity in “growing consumer demand for value-based brands.” English Wikipedia says Unilever still holds the rights to the brand outside North America.

The brand’s own shop, run by Suave Brands Co., today groups its products into hair, body, deodorant, men’s and kids’ ranges, with shampoo, conditioner, body wash, hand wash, body lotion and several formats of antiperspirant among them.

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 salon name carried into the everyday aisle.

Suave’s story is about a name being stretched. It started on one bottle of hair tonic sold through salons in 1937, became a family of shampoos and rinses in the 1960s, added an antiperspirant in the 1970s and, as the brand’s current shop shows, now runs from shampoo and conditioner to body wash, lotion and deodorant for adults and children. The name has stayed the same while the products under it have multiplied.

The places Suave has been sold have shifted too. The company history describes a tonic first sold through beauty salons and then, after the war, through department stores and drugstores. By the time of the Unilever deal, The New York Times wrote in 1996, Helene Curtis sold its products through mass merchants, drugstores and hair salons, and English Wikipedia describes the Suave range as aimed at discount stores. Over its life the brand has moved from the salon chair to the everyday aisle while keeping the name it was given in 1937.

Suave’s ownership history shows a further point. The brand has passed from a family company that changed its own name, to a multinational, and then in 2023 to a private equity firm that created a company named after it. As the Happi report makes clear, the North American business is now run as a stand-alone company, the Suave Brands Company, while Unilever keeps the name in other markets — so the same word can appear on shelves under two different owners.

For a design guide, Suave shows how a single product name can grow into a broad everyday range and survive several changes of owner without a change of name. Compare it with Degree, the deodorant that also came to Unilever with Helene Curtis, and Dove, its former Unilever stablemate. For this guide we use bottle blue and rinse pink on white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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