A Philadelphia cream, a New York drug house and a new applicator.

Ban began life under another name. English Wikipedia’s article on Mum, citing Joey Green’s 2004 book Incredible Country Store, says the deodorant was developed in Philadelphia in 1888 and was originally sold as a cream in a jar, applied with the fingertips. Two explanations for the name are on record. The brand’s own site, quoted by Wikipedia, says Mum was named after a nurse of its inventor whose nickname was “Mum”; Green’s book connects it instead with the phrase “mum’s the word”, meaning to keep quiet. The same Wikipedia article says the small company behind the cream was bought by Bristol-Myers in 1931.

The buyer was a New York drug house with its own long history. English Wikipedia’s article on Bristol Myers Squibb says that in 1887 two graduates of Hamilton College, William McLaren Bristol and John Ripley Myers, bought the Clinton Pharmaceutical company of Clinton, New York, and the business carried the Bristol-Myers name from then until 1989. By the time it bought Mum, the company already sold household names such as Sal Hepatica and Ipana toothpaste, which Wikipedia dates to the 1890s and 1901 respectively.

The change that produced the Ban name was a new way of applying the product. Wikipedia’s articles on Mum and on deodorant say that in the late 1940s a Bristol-Myers employee, Helen Barnett Diserens, developed an underarm applicator modelled on the ball-point pen. The deodorant article cites a 2015 Reader’s Digest book, 99 Cent Solutions, and Garrett Socol’s 2011 book Gathered Here Together for the account. In 1952, both Wikipedia articles say, the company began marketing the product as Ban Roll-On, so that the format of the applicator became part of the product’s name.

The old name did not disappear. Wikipedia’s Mum article records that in 1958 the roll-on was launched in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth as Mum Rollette, keeping the 1888 name in those markets while the United States used Ban. Two names for one applicator thus ran side by side from the late 1950s, one carrying the Philadelphia cream’s history and the other a short new word chosen for the roll-on.

From Bristol-Myers to Chattem and Kao.

Ban spent more than four decades inside Bristol-Myers. The International Directory of Company Histories (volume 37, St. James Press, 2001) records one episode from the 1970s: when concern over the use of fluorocarbons threatened the market for spray deodorants in the middle of that decade, Bristol-Myers responded by increasing its advertising of the Ban roll-on. The same history dates the merger of Bristol-Myers with the Squibb Corporation to 1989, after which Ban belonged to the combined Bristol-Myers Squibb Company.

The brand left the drug group at the end of the 1990s. The New York Times, carrying a Reuters report on 24 February 1998, said that Chattem Inc., a maker of health and beauty care products based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, whose products included the Sunsource line of dietary supplements, had agreed to buy the Ban antiperspirant and deodorant brand from Bristol-Myers Squibb, with the deal expected to be completed by the end of March that year.

Chattem’s ownership was brief. On 25 August 2000 The New York Times reported that Chattem, which it described as the maker of Gold Bond medicated powder and Flexall, had agreed to sell the Ban line of antiperspirants and deodorants to the Andrew Jergens Company, a unit of the Japanese Kao Corporation. Kao has owned Ban since 2000.

Ban’s new American home was itself an old company. The International Directory of Company Histories (volume 20, 1998) says Kao acquired the Andrew Jergens Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1988 and placed it within its main United States subsidiary, Kao Corporation of America. Kao’s archived American history page, captured in 2009, says the Jergens Soap Company was founded in 1882 and that Kao kept the Andrew Jergens Company name until 2004, when the business became Kao Brands Company; the same page listed Ban beside Jergens, Curél, Bioré, Guhl and John Frieda. English Wikipedia gives Kao’s headquarters as Nihonbashi-Kayabacho in Chūō, Tokyo.

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.

A short name, an applicator in the title and two names across markets.

The name is the core of the identity. Ban is a single syllable of three letters, and from 1952, Wikipedia says, it was paired with the words Roll-On, so that the brand name and the description of the applicator travelled together. In Britain and the Commonwealth, Wikipedia adds, the same roll-on was launched in 1958 under the older Mum name as Mum Rollette.

The brand has also been an advertising property for each of its owners. The International Directory of Company Histories singles out the 1970s campaign behind the Ban roll-on as a decision of the Bristol-Myers management of that decade. The two New York Times reports on the sales of 1998 and 2000 described what changed hands as the Ban antiperspirant and deodorant brand and the Ban line of antiperspirants and deodorants.

Today the name sits inside a family of Kao labels. Ban’s American website, fetched on 16 October 2026, presents roll-ons and solids under the Ban name, groups some of them as Ban Total Body, and sells them through a shared shop that offers several Kao brands at a single checkout. On the same company’s archived history page from 2009, Ban appeared in a short list of brand sites alongside Bioré, Curél, Guhl, Jergens and John Frieda.

The owners’ names have changed far more often than the brand’s. Bristol-Myers, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Chattem, the Andrew Jergens Company, Kao Brands Company and Kao Corporation have each carried it, and through all of them the three letters introduced in 1952 have stayed on the pack.

For a design guide, Ban shows how a short coined word, paired at the start with the name of its applicator, can stay constant through a drug company, a Tennessee consumer-products firm and a Japanese household-goods group, while an older sister name, Mum, carries on in other markets. Compare it with Jergens, its Cincinnati stablemate under Kao, and Secret, another long-running American deodorant brand. For this guide we use roll-on blue and deep navy with fresh aqua on chalk white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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