From Redmond Products to Clairol to Procter & Gamble.

Aussie is an American haircare brand with an Australian theme. Its founder, Tom Redmond, came from the salon trade rather than from Australia: English Wikipedia, citing Procter & Gamble, describes him as an American businessman with more than 20 years in the professional salon industry and dates the brand to 1979. Chain Drug Review, in a February 2025 article, gave a slightly different sequence: Redmond founded Redmond Products in 1979, and the company went on to create the Aussie brand in 1980. Both dates appear in the record, and the difference is between the company and the brand.

Chain Drug Review reported that Redmond was born in Chicago, graduated from Lewis University and served in the US Army at the close of the Korean War, and that his first job in the beauty business was selling advertising space for the trade magazine Modern Beauty Shop before he became a sales representative for beauty products. The brand’s own story, as summarised by English Wikipedia, says Redmond came across Australian ingredients such as blue gum leaves and jojoba seed oil on a visit to Australia and built a range of hair products around them.

The product that launched the line was a conditioner. English Wikipedia, again citing Procter & Gamble, names Australian 3 Minute Miracle, a deep conditioner, as the brand’s first product, and the name still heads one of Aussie’s collections today. Chain Drug Review quoted the motto Redmond is remembered for — “If you’re not different, you’re dead” — and credited the brand’s purple packaging and quirky product names with setting it apart.

Redmond did not keep the business. In 1997 Redmond Products sold Aussie to Bristol-Myers Squibb, then the owner of Clairol, Chain Drug Review reported, and English Wikipedia cites a January 1998 trade report on the purchase. Redmond went on to found other haircare companies, including Onesta and Renpure, according to the same 2025 article, which reported that he died in February 2025.

Purple bottles, a kangaroo and miracle names.

Aussie’s visual identity is built from a few repeated parts. The first is colour: Chain Drug Review singled out the brand’s signature purple packaging in 2025. The second is the animal. English Wikipedia describes both the logo and a former advertising mascot as kangaroos, and says earlier advertising used the voice of an Australian woman. The third is the naming. The current US range, as listed on aussie.com, groups products into collections with names such as Miracle Moist, Miracle Curls, 3 Minute Miracle and Total Miracle, and the word “miracle” recurs across most of them.

For all its Australian references, the brand is American. English Wikipedia, citing a 1993 report in the Australian Financial Review, says the brand was then unknown in Australia and not sold there, with its business centred on the United States and the United Kingdom.

The packaging has been reworked more than once. Packaging Insights reported in October 2017 on a rebrand across the whole Aussie portfolio of eight collections, covering shampoos, conditioners and styling products. The new packs, the report said, brought bolder and brighter text, new graphics and a clear statement of the hair type each product was meant for, and the relaunch was promoted to a millennial audience through Instagram, Snapchat and beauty influencers.

The tone of the brand is still written as playful. A Procter & Gamble release of November 2025 opened its description of the brand with the line “Aussie Haircare strives to bring the fun into haircare,” and said all Aussie products are certified cruelty-free by PETA.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all mass-market haircare names: TRESemmé, Pantene, Herbal Essences, Garnier Fructis, Aussie, Not Your Mother’s and John Frieda. Haircare brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still carry a founder’s story to ranges that now belong to much larger consumer-goods groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner chemist to a supermarket aisle.

A haircare brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a name, a colour and the promise on the label, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its shampoos and conditioners are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Clairol brand that stayed with Procter & Gamble.

Aussie reached its present owner as part of a larger deal. On 21 May 2001 Procter & Gamble announced that it would buy the Clairol business from Bristol-Myers Squibb, and its announcement, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, said Clairol brought “some outstanding hair care brands, including Herbal Essences, Aussie and Infusium.” A second P&G release, dated 16 November 2001, said the acquisition had been finalised. Aussie has belonged to Procter & Gamble since then, alongside Herbal Essences, which arrived in the same purchase, and Pantene.

Under P&G, new lines have continued to appear in the US and the UK. In November 2025 a P&G release on Business Wire introduced Ultra Wonder, a three-piece curl-care collection of a daily mist, a treatment and a gel crème. In the United Kingdom, P&G’s UK website described in 2026 a line extension called Oh My Gloss, launched across the country with Boots leading the retail roll-out.

The name needs care online. The haircare brand’s US site is aussie.com, while aussie.com.au belongs to Aussie, the unrelated Australian mortgage-broking business.

For a design guide, Aussie shows how a colour, an animal and a single repeated word can give an American drugstore brand a borrowed accent that has lasted for more than four decades. Compare Herbal Essences, the other Clairol haircare brand that came to P&G in 2001, and Pantene, another Procter & Gamble haircare brand. For this guide we use Aussie purple, deep violet and wattle gold with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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