Two brothers-in-law, a bag of soda and a borrowed emblem.

The business behind Arm & Hammer began in 1846, when the brothers-in-law Dr. Austin Church and John Dwight started preparing bicarbonate of soda for sale. The company’s own timeline says their first factory was Dwight’s kitchen and that the product was packed by hand into paper bags. English Wikipedia, in its article on Church & Dwight, gives the same origin and says John Dwight & Company was formally established the following year, in 1847.

For decades there were two families and two trademarks. The company says John Dwight and Company adopted the Cow Brand for Dwight’s Saleratus, an old name for baking soda, in 1876, and chose as its emblem Lady Maud, a Jersey cow shown at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The Church side took a different picture. In 1867, the company says, Austin Church retired and his two sons formed Church & Co., bringing with them the arm-and-hammer logo that his son James A. Church had used for his business, Vulcan Spice Mills. English Wikipedia gives the same date and source for the logo in its Church & Dwight article, while its Arm & Hammer article dates Austin Church’s retirement to 1886; the company’s own date is 1867.

The image is a myth turned into a trademark. The company says the arm stands for Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, striking his hammer on an anvil, and Wikipedia describes the logo as a muscular arm holding a hammer inside a red circle with the brand name and slogan. For many years, the company says, the Cow Brand and the Arm & Hammer brand were sold side by side, each with its own following. The two businesses came together in 1896, when Church & Co. and John Dwight & Company merged to form Church & Dwight Co., Inc., according to both the company and Wikipedia.

The name has nothing to do with the industrialist Armand Hammer, Wikipedia notes; the brand was already in use long before he was born. Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum did acquire a stake in Church & Dwight in 1986, along with a seat on its board, as part of an agreement involving a potassium-carbonate plant.

Recipe booklets, bird cards and a box in the refrigerator.

For most of its history Arm & Hammer was sold as a household staple, and its early promotion was printed. The company says the first edition of its “Valuable Recipes” booklets reached American mailboxes in 1860, some carrying recipes from the founders’ families. From 1888 came the “Beautiful Birds of America” trading cards, small cards illustrated by artists including Louis Agassiz Fuertes, the company says; the bird theme carried on into the 1938 “Birds: Nature’s Protectors” posters. By 1927 the brand was advertising in national magazines such as Good Housekeeping and McCall’s, and in 1950 it produced a rotating reference wheel listing household uses for baking soda.

Laundry entered the story in 1970. Church & Dwight introduced Arm & Hammer Powder Laundry Detergent that year, which it describes as phosphate-free, and Wikipedia records the same launch. In 1972 the brand ran an advertising campaign proposing an open box of baking soda in the refrigerator to absorb odours, an idea the company still promotes. Wikipedia says that from the late 1970s Church & Dwight extended the name to products using baking soda as a deodorising ingredient, among them toothpaste, laundry detergent, underarm deodorant and cat litter, and the company dates a detergent made with baking soda to the 1980s and 1990s, followed by carpet deodoriser and toothpaste.

In 1986, Wikipedia says, the company created Armex, a line of soda blasting agents originally used in the restoration of the Statue of Liberty. The laundry business grew through acquisition: on 25 May 2001 Church & Dwight bought USA Detergents, adding the Xtra detergent and Nice ’n Fluffy fabric-softener brands, and on 7 August 2006 it acquired the assets of Orange Glo International, bringing in OxiClean. The company says its plant in York, Pennsylvania, began making Arm & Hammer laundry detergent in 2009. Today the Arm & Hammer site sells liquid detergent, laundry paks, scent boosters, dryer sheets and a line labelled Arm & Hammer Plus OxiClean.

Church & Dwight is headquartered in Ewing Township, New Jersey. Wikipedia says Richard Dierker became chief executive on 2 April 2025, succeeding Matthew Farrell, and that the company counts Arm & Hammer among its “power brands.”

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all sell laundry care: detergents, fabric softeners, stain removers and products for delicate clothes. They sit side by side on the same supermarket shelf, often in the same aisle, and a shopper usually picks one out in a few seconds, from several steps away.

That is why a laundry brand’s identity tends to live on the pack. Bottle and box colours, the shape and placement of a logo, the name of a scent printed across a label and, for some brands, a mascot or a familiar face from television advertising all do the work of recognition. The same name can also appear on a liquid, a powder, a pod or a dryer sheet, so the visual system has to hold together across very different containers. Within a single range, colour can also be used to tell one version apart from another at a glance.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who launched the brand, who has owned it over time and how its packs and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Roman god, a red circle and one name across many shelves.

The Arm & Hammer identity rests on an emblem older than the company that now owns it. The arm-and-hammer picture began on a spice business, Vulcan Spice Mills, and moved to baking soda when Church & Co. was formed in 1867. The company still explains it through the same story, the Roman god Vulcan at his anvil, and Wikipedia describes the mark as a muscular arm holding a hammer inside a red circle, carrying the brand name and slogan. The Cow Brand was used alongside it by the Dwight business for many years, the company says.

Much of the brand’s visual history is in printed ephemera rather than in packaging alone. The company points to its recipe booklets from 1860, its bird trading cards from 1888, its magazine advertising of the 1920s and its 1950 reference wheel, and it says the cards are now collected. Its 1972 refrigerator campaign gave the familiar carton a place outside the pantry.

From 1970 the name moved into laundry, and from the late 1970s, Wikipedia says, into toothpaste, deodorant and cat litter. In laundry it shares shelf space with its stablemate OxiClean, whose name appears on the Arm & Hammer Plus OxiClean line.

For a design guide, Arm & Hammer shows how a nineteenth-century emblem can carry a name across very different products — compare OxiClean, owned by the same company since 2006, and Tide. For this guide we use circle red, box yellow and soda white with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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