A pill company looks for a second product.

Arrid came out of a company that had been selling pills for decades. The company history of Carter-Wallace in the International Directory of Company Histories, republished by FundingUniverse, traces the business to Erie, Pennsylvania, where Dr. John Samuel Carter sold Carter’s Little Liver Pills from his pharmacy, originally advertising them with a sign in the window. The history says the New York businessman Brent Good suggested turning the pills into a national business, and that the Carter Medicine Company was formed in 1880; English Wikipedia also records the 1880 incorporation. The business later moved to New York, and leadership passed through the Good family and their relatives.

The change that led to Arrid began in 1929. According to the company history, Henry Hamilton Hoyt Sr., son-in-law of the company president Charles Orcutt, became managing director that year, bought a controlling interest and set out to widen the company beyond its single pill. The history says research during the 1930s pointed the company towards deodorants and antiperspirants, and that it recruited John H. Wallace, a research chemist from Princeton, to develop one. English Wikipedia, citing the same history and a 1989 profile of Wallace in The New York Times, says John Higgins Wallace Jr. formulated Arrid in 1935.

The product went on sale that year. The company history says Arrid led Carter to build a new plant in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and that in 1937 the business changed its name to Carter Products, Inc. to reflect its new direction. English Wikipedia’s Arrid article gives the brand’s introduction as 1935 and names Carter Products as the company behind it.

Arrid was the start of a run of new products. The company history says a depilatory called Nair followed in 1940, an aerosol shaving cream named Rise in 1949 and the prescription tranquilliser Miltown in 1955. During the Second World War, it adds, the company also made foot powders for the armed forces.

From Carter-Wallace to Church & Dwight.

The research side of the business eventually gave the company its later name. The company history says that by the mid-1960s the Wallace Laboratories division of Carter Products had produced a string of new products, and that in 1965 the company was renamed Carter-Wallace, Inc. to reflect the division’s importance. English Wikipedia describes Carter-Wallace as a personal care company headquartered in New York City, with a research facility in Cranbury, New Jersey.

Arrid itself continued to grow new lines. The company history records that Arrid Extra Dry Anti-Perspirant Spray Deodorant was introduced in 1968 The Extra Dry name is still in use on the brand’s website today. Over the same years Carter-Wallace kept adding businesses outside toiletries: the history lists the pet-products maker Lambert Kay, the tooth polish Pearl Drops, and diagnostic test businesses, while Wikipedia records the purchase of Youngs Drug Products in 1985 and lists Trojan condoms among the company’s products.

The company was split in 2001. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, both cited by Wikipedia, reported on 9 May 2001 that Carter-Wallace would sell itself as two businesses. Wikipedia records that MedPointe bought the pharmaceutical business together with the Carter-Wallace name, and that Church & Dwight, the maker of Arm & Hammer baking soda, took the consumer brands in partnership with the private equity firm Kelso & Company.

Wikipedia’s Church & Dwight article, citing the company’s annual report for 2001, gives the detail. The purchase of the consumer business was completed on 28 September 2001. Church & Dwight acquired the Arrid antiperspirant and Lambert Kay pet-care businesses directly, while Armkel, its joint venture with Kelso, took brands including Trojan, Nair and First Response. Church & Dwight, which Wikipedia says is headquartered in Ewing Township, New Jersey, has owned Arrid since 2001.

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.

Film stars, radio comedy and a jeep named after an advertising line.

Advertising runs through Arrid’s history. The Carter-Wallace company history says the company sponsored radio programmes such as Amos ’n’ Andy and Fibber McGee and Molly, and later advertised on television. In print, Wikimedia Commons holds a scan of an Arrid advertisement from the magazine Modern Screen in 1944 in which the actress Gloria Swanson appears under the headline “Why I use Arrid”.

One of the brand’s advertising lines found its way onto a boat. Hemmings Daily reported on 2 March 2011 that the Australian engineer Ben Carlin, who set out after the Second World War to travel around the world in a converted 1942 Ford GPA amphibious jeep, christened the vehicle Half-Safe after a catchphrase in a deodorant commercial. English Wikipedia’s Arrid article identifies that catchphrase as an Arrid line of the 1940s and 1950s. According to Hemmings, Carlin and his wife Elinore left Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 19 July 1950 and crossed to the Azores, before continuing to Africa, Europe and England, where they displayed Half-Safe in department stores to raise money.

Under Carter-Wallace the brand was relaunched in the 1990s. English Wikipedia, citing Adweek, says Arrid was set for a major restaging in 1993, backed by television, radio and print advertising.

Today the range is sold under Church & Dwight. The brand’s website, as fetched in October 2026, sets the name in capitals as ARRID™ and lists solids, aerosols, gels, a roll-on and a cream, with names such as Extra Dry Regular Aerosol, Regular Roll-On, Extra Dry Cream and Morning Clean Gel. English Wikipedia lists the same forms. The site groups the roll-on and the cream together under a heading that calls them heritage products.

For a design guide, Arrid shows how a brand born in a pill company can carry its name through two company renamings, a corporate split and a new owner, with its advertising history part of its story. Compare Nair, the 1940 Carter Products brand that also passed to Church & Dwight’s side of the 2001 deal, and Right Guard, a deodorant name that changed hands in 2006 and 2021. For this guide we use blue, midnight and gold with a gothic sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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