A 1947 powder that became a family of products.

Ajax is a brand of household cleaning products owned by Colgate-Palmolive, and it began as a scouring powder. Colgate-Palmolive’s own history timeline lists 1947 as the year “Ajax cleanser is launched”, and English Wikipedia gives the same year for the introduction of Ajax Powdered Cleanser. The name used here is the cleaning brand’s, sold in canisters, bottles and sprays.

The company that launched it had been through several mergers. Colgate-Palmolive’s timeline says the soap makers Palmolive and Peet merged in 1926 to form the Palmolive-Peet Company, that Colgate merged with Palmolive-Peet in 1928 to become Colgate-Palmolive-Peet, and that Colgate-Palmolive Company became the official name in 1953. Ajax was therefore launched under the longer corporate name, six years before the company took the one it uses today, and the company says it opened its corporate headquarters on Park Avenue in New York City in 1956.

English Wikipedia illustrates the original product with a canister of Ajax powder from Mexico labelled bicloro, a Spanish word Wikipedia translates as “double bleach”.

From the early 1960s the name moved well beyond the canister. English Wikipedia lists Ajax All Purpose Cleaner with Ammonia in 1962, advertised as the “White Tornado”, and says Procter & Gamble, maker of Mr. Clean since 1958, introduced its own ammoniated cleaner, Top Job, in 1963 in response. Wikipedia goes on to list Ajax Bucket of Power, an ammoniated floor cleaner, in 1963; Ajax Laundry Detergent in 1964; Ajax Window Cleaner in 1965; and Ajax for Dishes in 1971, the product now sold as Ajax Dishwashing Liquid. Within a quarter of a century of its launch, a scouring-powder name had been stretched across floors, windows, laundry and dishes.

Colgate-Palmolive, Phoenix Brands and the laundry licence.

Colgate-Palmolive has owned Ajax since 1947, but it has not always kept every use of the name. On 12 July 2005 the Associated Press reported that Colgate-Palmolive had agreed to sell its North American laundry detergent brands to Phoenix Brands LLC. The brands named were Fab, Dynamo, Arctic Power, ABC, Cold Power and Fresh Start, together with the Ajax brand licence for laundry detergents in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. The AP described the sale as part of a strategy to focus on Colgate’s oral, personal and pet care businesses, and said Phoenix Brands had been formed by Lehman Brothers Merchant Banking Group to buy household brands from Unilever in December 2003, including Rit fabric dyes and Niagara spray starch.

The 2005 transaction moved the laundry use of the name, not the cleaner itself. English Wikipedia says that in November 2023 Awesome Products Inc. acquired the rights to the Ajax laundry products line, and that in the United States Colgate-Palmolive sells Ajax powdered cleanser and dishwashing liquid. The American Ajax website, in a 2025 capture carrying a 2026 Colgate-Palmolive copyright line, lists Ajax Ultra dish soaps in scents such as Vinegar + Lime, the Ajax Powder Cleanser and an Ajax All Purpose Cleaner in several fragrances.

In the United Kingdom, Marketing Week reported on 19 January 1996 that Colgate-Palmolive had withdrawn marketing support for Ajax in Britain in favour of its oral and body care businesses, and that the company’s business development manager for the brand said Colgate would not invest in Ajax in Britain unless a new product could be found to rebuild it, while also saying the brand was not being actively downgraded.

In Australia the name took another form. Mumbrella reported in March 2010 that Colgate-Palmolive was bringing back a long-running television campaign for Ajax Spray n’ Wipe, a product name that adds a local description to the four-letter brand.

Design and documentation.

Household cleaners are usually met on a shelf rather than in an advertisement, so much of their identity is carried by the container itself. A cleaner can arrive as a squeeze bottle, a jug with a handle, a round canister of powder with a perforated or sliding lid, an aerosol can, or a bottle topped with a trigger sprayer, and each of those forms leaves a different amount of room for a name, a mark and a line of instructions.

On a bottle or a jug the label usually wraps the body, with the brand name set large and the product description below it. On a powder canister the name tends to run around a cylinder, so it is read in part as the can turns. A trigger sprayer adds a coloured head and a nozzle above the label, which often becomes part of how a product is recognised from across an aisle.

Each guide in this group looks at where a name began, who has owned it over time and how its labels, canisters and advertising are described in the sources, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A tornado, a knight, Squeaky Clean and a jingle.

Ajax’s identity has been carried as much by advertising characters as by any label. English Wikipedia says the 1962 all-purpose cleaner was sold as the “White Tornado”, and that the brand’s laundry detergent was often advertised with a knight in armour riding a white horse.

A human character followed. The Los Angeles Times reported in August 2004 that the character actor Eugene Roche became a household face in the 1970s as Squeaky Clean in commercials for Ajax household cleaner, a role it listed alongside his parts in Magnum, P.I., All in the Family and Soap.

Australia supplied a different kind of signature: a song. Mumbrella’s report of 5 March 2010 says the original brief for Ajax Spray n’ Wipe advertising was written in 1987 and executed by the agency FCB (Foote, Cone & Belding), and that the opening commercial, called “Real Estate”, aired in 1988. The jingle was derived from “Billericay Dickie” by Ian Dury and the Blockheads, with new lyrics written by the agency for each storyline, and the actor Paula Duncan played a busy housewife who is always seen cleaning her house in a hurry. Mumbrella says George Patterson Y&R took over the account in the 1990s, made executions including “Back From Holidays” in 2002 and “Posh Relatives” in 2004, and created the 2010 return, in which Duncan reprised the character after a six-year break.

Across these markets the constant is the name itself: four letters, carried on a powder canister, a spray bottle and a dish-liquid bottle, and paired with local product descriptions such as Spray n’ Wipe in Australia or the Spanish-language bicloro label on the Mexican canister.

For a design guide, Ajax shows how a short name can lean on recurring advertising figures — a tornado, a knight, a named character and a sung jingle — to build recognition across products and countries. Compare it with Comet, Procter & Gamble’s 1956 scouring powder sold in a canister, and Colgate, the toothpaste brand of the same parent company. For this guide we use canister blue, citrus orange and tornado white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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