A 1987 bath tissue with a baby on the pack.

Angel Soft is a bathroom tissue made and sold in the United States by Georgia-Pacific, the pulp and paper company based in Atlanta, Georgia. The brand dates its arrival to 1987. The frequently asked questions page on the Angel Soft website, as it stood in January 2025, says the toilet paper was introduced that year, and the brand’s About page, archived in June 2026, says Angel Soft “landed on store shelves” in 1987, “trusted by families to deliver softness and strength.” Trade coverage gives the same year: the advertising news service shots wrote in January 2023 that the brand had launched in 1987, and the packaging publication Dieline reported in September 2024 that the brand had carried a photorealistic baby in its identity and on its packaging since that launch.

That baby is the thread running through the brand’s look. Georgia-Pacific said in a January 2023 announcement that a new campaign was taking the character beyond the packaging, where it had appeared since the 1987 launch, into a fully integrated marketing campaign. The brand now calls her simply Angel.

The product itself is a two-ply roll. The company’s FAQ says all Angel Soft toilet paper is two-ply and that the brand does not offer a one-ply version. English Wikipedia, in its article on Georgia-Pacific, describes Angel Soft as one of the company’s more value-priced tissue brands and Quilted Northern as one of its premium ones, and the Angel Soft site itself leans on value, telling shoppers the tissue “fits your budget.” The brand’s tagline on the same site pairs its two promised qualities: “Soft and Strong. Simple.”

Scent became part of the range in the 2010s. The brand’s About page says that in 2015 Angel Soft introduced its Fresh Scented Lavender Tube, and that the line has since grown with further scents; in 2026 the site listed fresh linen, ocean breeze and vanilla versions alongside the lavender roll and an Angel Soft Ultra. In 2022, the FAQ says, the company thickened the sheet, took sheets off each roll so that the thicker product would still fit most holders, added rolls to the mega pack and dropped the double and family roll sizes to simplify the line.

Georgia-Pacific, Koch Industries and a Green Bay mill.

Angel Soft’s owner has a long history of its own. English Wikipedia says Georgia-Pacific was founded by Owen Robertson Cheatham on 22 September 1927 in Augusta, Georgia, as the Georgia Hardwood Lumber Co., and that it took the name Georgia-Pacific Corporation in 1956. It moved into pulp and paper in 1957 with a mill at Toledo, Oregon, and grew through acquisitions, among them Great Northern Nekoosa in 1990 and the Fort James Corporation in 2000.

The Fort James purchase reshaped the company’s consumer tissue business. Fort James had been formed in 1997, when the James River Corporation of Richmond, Virginia, merged with the Fort Howard Paper Company of Green Bay, Wisconsin, a deal reported by the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press on 6 May 1997. The Los Angeles Times reported in November 2000 that Georgia-Pacific had received approval to buy Fort James, whose brands included Quilted Northern and Brawny; Georgia-Pacific dates the completion of the acquisition to 27 November 2000.

Five years later the whole company changed hands. The New York Times reported on 14 November 2005 that Georgia-Pacific was to be sold to Koch Industries, and English Wikipedia says the acquisition was completed on 23 December 2005, when Georgia-Pacific shares were removed from the New York Stock Exchange. Koch Industries has owned Georgia-Pacific, and with it Angel Soft, since 2005; the brand’s own pages describe it as part of Georgia-Pacific Consumer Products, and English Wikipedia, citing The New York Times, describes Georgia-Pacific as an independently operated and managed Koch subsidiary.

Some of that production can be placed. Georgia-Pacific’s page on its Green Bay, Wisconsin, operations, as archived in June 2016, listed Angel Soft and Angel Soft ps among the products made at the city’s mills, which it said were sold in grocery and discount stores as well as in hotels, restaurants, airports, offices and schools. The same page listed Quilted Northern Ultra Plush among the Green Bay products. The Angel Soft FAQ says the tissue is sold at most grocery and mass-merchandise retailers across the United States.

Design and documentation.

Paper towels, tissues, paper cups and food wraps share a design question. The product itself is usually plain paper, plastic or foil, so much of a brand’s identity is carried by the package around it: a printed wrapper around a roll, a carton or cube of tissues, a sleeve of cups, a box with a cutting edge. That package sits on a shelf beside its rivals and has to tell one name from another at a glance.

The identities in this category therefore tend to rest on things printed on the pack and seen in advertising: a drawn character, a slogan, a run of colours or patterns, a box shape. Many of these names have also passed between owners over the decades, through acquisitions and mergers of the paper and packaging companies behind them, so a character or a slogan can stay in use long after the company that introduced it has gone.

Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its packaging and advertising have changed over time, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

“Be Soft. Be Strong.”, then an animated Angel in the clouds.

Angel Soft’s advertising has moved through two very different ideas in a decade. The first was “Be Soft. Be Strong.” Adweek’s AgencySpy reported in June 2016 that the agency Deutsch had launched the campaign for the brand the year before with a Father’s Day film, “Happy Father’s Day, Mom,” celebrating single mothers. For Father’s Day 2016 Deutsch followed it with a two-minute spot about an immigrant father working three jobs to bring his children to the United States, which ended by surprising the family with flights home. AgencySpy called the campaign’s approach “sadvertising” and said the 2016 spot had little to do with toilet paper itself, while judging the 2016 spot the clearest expression of the “Be soft. Be strong” positioning so far.

The second idea brought the pack’s baby to life. shots reported in January 2023 that the brand had named Grey New York its creative agency in 2021, and that Grey, working with the animation studio Psyop, had moved the angel baby from the packaging into a three-dimensional animated world. The first spot introduced Angel and her “heavenly crew” at a toilet paper factory up in the clouds, making sure each roll is soft and strong. Georgia-Pacific announced the campaign on 3 January 2023 as an animated campaign, running across television, streaming, online video, social media, audio and in-store marketing.

The cast has its own job titles. The brand’s About page presents “Angel Soft Inc.,” with Angel as chief executive, Judy as her chief of staff, Jorge as head of the Department of Soft, Alicia as head of the Department of Strong, Otto as head of research and development, credited with the scented tubes, and Glenn as the intern. The same page says that in 2024 Angel “took center stage on every pack.” Dieline reported in September 2024 that the brand was carrying the animated campaign into a new identity with the brand design agency Soulsight, replacing the photorealistic baby with what it called a “Pixar-esque” Angel. Adweek reported on 28 January 2025 that Angel Soft would run a spot during Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, built around the length of the broadcast and the bathroom breaks viewers take during it.

For a design guide, Angel Soft shows how a mascot that sat quietly on a pack for decades can become the whole campaign, and then return to the pack redrawn in the style of its own advertising. Compare it with Cottonelle, another bath tissue sold on a character, and Brawny, a Georgia-Pacific stablemate. For this guide we use sky blue, halo gold and cloud white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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