A licence, a new compound and a radio campaign.

d-CON began as a selling operation built around a new chemical. English Wikipedia says that in 1950 the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation patented warfarin, a compound that had been in development since the 1930s, and that the Chicago businessman Lee Ratner secured a non-exclusive licence for it after it had been approved for use against rodents. Ratner then founded the d-CON Company to sell the product, buying his first supply from another company that was already distributing the compound. Wikipedia, citing the trade magazine Broadcasting Telecasting of 11 December 1950, says the name was a reference to the word “decontaminate”.

The early product was plain. Wikipedia says d-CON was originally sold as a packet of green powder that customers mixed with grain or ground meat to make bait. Its packaging was a sideline to its advertising: the infobox on the brand’s Wikipedia page illustrates a d-CON can from 1950, but the article’s history is almost entirely about how the product was sold.

That selling began on the radio. Wikipedia, drawing on the same Broadcasting Telecasting article and on Sponsor magazine of 1 January 1951, says Ratner hired a small team in the summer of 1950 and that on 5 September 1950 the company bought a trial run of radio advertising. Long-form programmes ran during farm and news broadcasts on WIBW in Topeka and WLW in Cincinnati, with listeners ordering by mail. Demand led the company to air the advertisements more often and on more stations, and print advertisements in farm papers followed, according to Printers’ Ink in 1951.

Demonstration was part of the method. Wikipedia says Ratner organised an experiment in Middleton, Wisconsin, where d-CON was distributed free of charge from 4 November 1950; a photograph on the article shows Boy Scouts preparing packets for the town. Similar demonstrations were staged elsewhere, and the company used endorsements, local authorities’ statements and customer testimonials in its advertisements. The advertising agency was Marfree Advertising, whose vice president Alvin Eicoff appears in a 1950 photograph of d-CON’s executives and later became the company’s vice president of advertising.

From mail order to Lehn & Fink, Sterling Drug and Reckitt.

The brand moved from the mailbox to the shop shelf within its first year. Wikipedia says the company turned to television as well as radio, contracted McKesson & Robbins for retail distribution, and on 1 May 1951 stopped selling d-CON by mail order, having placed it in drug, grocery and hardware stores. Advertising was then shifted to daytime slots aimed at individual shoppers.

Ratner used the business as a base for others. Wikipedia says he announced plans to add household products as subsidiaries of d-CON, beginning with an insecticide called Fli-Pel, and that the company continued mail-order selling through subsidiaries including the Grant Tool Company, M-O-Lene and Sona. Broadcasting Telecasting reported in August 1954 on the company’s long television advertisements for cleaning supplies, cosmetics and household tools, and in September 1955 on a large radio campaign that Eicoff described.

The brand then changed hands. Wikipedia says that in 1956 Ratner sold the d-CON brand to the household-products maker Lehn & Fink, keeping the subsidiaries under the name The Grant Company; it cites a 2014 local history of Lehigh Acres and a 1966 volume of Federal Communications Commission reports. In June 1966, according to a 1972 volume of Federal Trade Commission decisions cited in the article, Lehn & Fink was acquired by Sterling Drug in an all-stock merger and continued as Sterling’s household division.

Wikipedia says that in 1994 the company now called Reckitt bought Sterling Drug’s business, and it names Reckitt, the UK-based consumer-goods company, as the brand’s current owner and its distributor in the United States. A 2025 capture of the d-CON website by the Internet Archive shows a Reckitt Benckiser copyright line in its footer. In June 2014, as Wikipedia reports citing Chemical & Engineering News, Reckitt Benckiser and the US Environmental Protection Agency reached an agreement ending a legal dispute, under which the company agreed to stop making certain loose-pellet and powder products. Wikipedia describes today’s range as traps, bait packets and bait stations, mostly marketed to households.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make the plain tools of household upkeep: mops, brooms, brushes, sponges and scourers, and the traps and baits sold for mice and rats. Cleaning-tool and pest-trap brands in general sit on the same hardware and supermarket aisles, and they are bought quickly, often by someone standing in front of a crowded peg wall, so their identities tend to work at a glance rather than through long copy.

In this category the product itself often carries the brand. A handle colour, the colour of a sponge or scouring pad, a stamped wordmark on a wooden base or a moulded plastic housing can be as recognisable as any logo. Packaging adds another layer: blister packs and header cards that hang on hooks, cartons with a large product photograph, and, for chemical products, the warning panels and directions that regulators require, which take up space a designer cannot reclaim.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, where the products are made and how the packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A coined name, a hyphen and a radio voice.

d-CON’s central design element is its name. Coined from “decontaminate”, according to the 1950 Broadcasting Telecasting article that Wikipedia cites, it is written with a lower-case d, a hyphen and the capitals CON. Wikipedia’s article on the brand uses a lower-case title to match, and the same spelling appears in the website address, d-conproducts.com, that the article lists for the brand.

The brand was built in sound before it was built in print. Wikipedia’s account of the early advertising, based on Sponsor magazine in January 1951, lists the points the radio pitch made: the cost of the damage rats did on farms, the claim that the product could not be detected by the animals, and the results of the Middleton experiment. It also says the company promised discretion, mailing the product in a “plain, unmarked wrapper”. Wikipedia adds that, according to retailers who stocked several brands, the advertisements and in particular the Middleton story persuaded many farmers to ask for d-CON by name.

Later slogans kept that direct voice. The infobox on the brand’s Wikipedia page lists two taglines, “Get Out” and “Mice Love It to Death”, both short enough for a carton or a television spot. The first is an instruction; the second is a joke in the tradition of household advertising.

The owners changed around the name rather than the name itself. Lehn & Fink, Sterling Drug and Reckitt each kept the d-CON spelling, according to the Wikipedia account, and the range the article describes today — traps, bait packets and bait stations — carries the same coined word that Ratner’s radio advertisements introduced in 1950.

For a design guide, d-CON shows how a coined, hyphenated name and a direct radio voice can carry a household brand through three owners and a changing product range. Compare it with Victor, a mousetrap name with roots in Pennsylvania, and TERRO. For this guide we use warning red and signal yellow on black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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