A razor company moves into the bathroom cabinet.

Right Guard began inside a company that had built its name on razors. English Wikipedia’s article on the brand says it was introduced in 1960 by The Gillette Company, and Dallas Innovates, reporting on the brand’s sale in August 2021, also gave 1960 as its launch year. The Gale reference series How Products Are Made, in its entry on antiperspirant and deodorant sticks, places the introduction in the early 1960s and describes Right Guard as an aerosol antiperspirant. Wikipedia’s Gillette article describes the parent as a brand based in Boston, Massachusetts, a brand of safety razors and shaving supplies.

By the time Right Guard arrived, Gillette had already stepped beyond shaving. Wikipedia records that in 1948 the company bought The Toni Company, a maker of home permanent kits, and later expanded into other products including shampoos and hair sprays, and that in 1955 it bought the ballpoint-pen maker Paper Mate. Right Guard joined that wider family of household and personal care names at the start of the following decade, and it remained a Gillette brand until Procter & Gamble bought Gillette in 2005.

How Products Are Made also sets the launch in context. It notes that in the late 1950s manufacturers had begun using aerosol technology to dispense personal care products such as perfumes and shaving creams, and that in the years after Right Guard appeared, aerosols became a popular format for antiperspirants in the United States.

Today the range is wider than the original can. Wikipedia lists Right Guard in invisible solid, deodorant stick, clear gel and aerosol forms, alongside shower gel, and the brand’s own website, as fetched in October 2026, presents product lines named Xtreme Defense, Humidity Breaker and Plant-Based, sold as gels, invisible solids and a dry spray. The site also carries a separate link for buyers in the United Kingdom.

From Gillette to Procter & Gamble, Henkel and Thriving Brands.

Right Guard’s ownership changed along with its parent’s. Advertising Age reported on 21 February 2006 that Procter & Gamble had completed its acquisition of Gillette in October 2005, and that P&G was required to sell certain brands under its agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, which cleared that deal. Right Guard was among them. In the same report, Jack Neff wrote that Henkel had agreed to buy Right Guard together with two other deodorant brands, Soft & Dri and Dry Idea, and that the brands would go to Henkel’s American unit, The Dial Corporation. English Wikipedia’s article on Henkel’s North American consumer business records the purchase by Dial in 2006.

The deal also touched the brand’s advertising. Advertising Age noted that the New York office of the agency BBDO had handled the deodorant brands for Gillette, while BBDO’s Chicago office was already agency of record for Dial’s own brands, so the account could stay within the same agency network after the sale.

Henkel owned Right Guard until 2021. In a press release dated 10 June 2021, Henkel North America said it had closed the sale of Right Guard and Dry Idea to Thriving Brands LLC, effective 1 June 2021. The release described Right Guard as a men’s grooming brand offering antiperspirants and shower gels, mainly focused on the United States and the United Kingdom, and said the two brands had been identified as non-core activities within the Henkel Beauty Care portfolio. It added that the transaction included trademark rights and access to product formulations.

The buyer’s backers were named later that summer. Dallas Innovates reported on 24 August 2021 that Trive Capital, a private equity firm based in Dallas, had formed Thriving Brands, which the report described as based in Cincinnati, in partnership with the industry executives Craig Cappozzo and Rolando Collado. The report said Cappozzo would serve as chief executive and chief marketing officer and Collado as chief operating officer and chief sales officer, and that the Henkel deal was Thriving Brands’ opening acquisition. Thriving Brands has owned Right Guard since 2021, and the online shop at rightguard.com runs under a store name that includes Thriving Brands.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group belong to the bathroom shelf: deodorants and antiperspirants, hairsprays and face scrubs. Personal-care brands of this kind sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still carry the place or the people who started them to labels that have passed through several owners and now belong to much larger consumer-goods groups.

A brand of this kind is usually carried less by a single formula than by a container and a name: a twist-up stick, a pressurised can, a squeezable tube, each with a label that has to be read at a glance on a crowded shelf. The company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or redrawn its packaging several times. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and how its cans, sticks and tubes have looked over time.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and how its labels and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A mirror gag, a trigger can and a workday voice.

Right Guard’s television history centres on a mirror. English Wikipedia, citing a 2018 Advertising Age column by Barbara Lippert and a 2006 book by the BBDO executive Phil Dusenberry, says that from 1969 to 1976 Right Guard commercials showed a man looking into a mirror and finding another man looking back at him. Chuck McCann played the energetic man who greets him with “Hi, guy!”, and Bill Fiore played the confused man who calls out “Mona!” Wikipedia says the BBDO campaign started from a practical brief: the need to show two different cans of Right Guard, the existing product and a newer formula. Dallas Innovates, writing in 2021, referred to a 1971 “Hi guy!” commercial.

Wikipedia adds that from the late 1980s to the late 1990s the brand’s advertising was aimed at sports enthusiasts. The current website’s About Us page, as fetched in October 2026, speaks to people who “build, craft, move, fix”, and frames the brand around hard work and the workday.

The can itself was redesigned in the 2000s. Cosmetic & Personal Care Packaging magazine, in a September 2005 report, described Gillette’s Right Guard Xtreme Cool Spray can, whose cap let users release the spray by pressing a handle on its side. The magazine said the package was designed by the firm Herbst Lazar Bell, and quoted its senior vice president Mark Dziersk saying that Gillette “wanted the ‘Wow’ factor for the package”. Dziersk told the magazine that Gillette wanted the new can to fit the brand’s existing display shelves and shipping cartons, so it was made no taller and no wider than the original, with the handle sitting in the spaces between cans in a carton. Wikipedia dates the form to 2004 and says it needed no protective cap, locking and unlocking with a twist.

Across these changes the two-word name has been carried from Gillette’s Boston business to Procter & Gamble, to Henkel’s Dial and then to Thriving Brands. Over the same decades the range has moved from the original aerosol to solids, gels and dry sprays, as Wikipedia and the current website both record.

For a design guide, Right Guard shows how a brand name can travel through several owners and formats while its advertising history stays part of how it is remembered. Compare Old Spice, the men’s deodorant name Procter & Gamble kept, and Dry Idea, which changed hands alongside Right Guard in 2006 and again in 2021. For this guide we use blue, navy and steel with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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