A quarry leftover, a grist mill and a French name.

Bon Ami dates to 1886, when the J. T. Robertson Soap Company in Connecticut began making a household scouring soap from feldspar. The International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 2003) places Robertson’s company in Manchester, Connecticut, and says it had set out to match a popular soap of the 1880s made from tallow and finely ground quartz. English Wikipedia, citing a 1999 Hartford Courant article, says the soap was made at a factory in Glastonbury before production moved to Manchester later in the 1880s.

The raw material came from the quarries. The Directory explains that quartz mined in the north-eastern United States was found together with feldspar, a softer mineral, and that workers broke the two apart with heavy cobbing hammers, leaving the feldspar behind as waste. Robertson saw a use for the leftover mineral, the Directory says, and brought in a neighbour, Gurdon Hicks Childs, whose grist mill could grind it. Wikipedia, drawing on Robert Hubbard’s Glastonbury (2012) and Mary Cross’s A Century of American Icons (2002), describes the result as an alternative to the quartz-based scouring powders then in shops.

The name is French for “good friend”, a translation the company still prints on its own story page. Bon Ami Company says it has used feldspar as the base mineral of its product since the start, and its website pairs the brand with the line “Clean Made Simple” and the date 1886.

The Childs family soon took the brand over. In 1892, according to the Directory, a son and a nephew of Gurdon Hicks Childs formed Childs & Childs and bought the exclusive rights to Bon Ami soap, and in 1897 the business took the name Bon Ami Company. Wikipedia, citing the Directory, says Bon Ami was a common product in households of the north-eastern United States by 1896.

The company widened its reach in the early 20th century. The Directory records a listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 1915, a manufacturing subsidiary called Orford Soap Company organised the same year, a Canadian subsidiary, Canada Bon Ami Ltd., in 1922, and an Australian company, Bon Ami Co. of Australia, in 1930. Wikipedia describes the original product as a cleaning cake; the brand is sold today as a scouring powder, alongside other cleaners under the same name.

From the Childs family to a Kansas City starch maker.

The Childs family ran Bon Ami into the 1950s. The Directory’s chronology dates the family’s sale of its holdings to 1954, and its account of the following decade is a run of short ownerships: United Dye & Chemical Corporation acquired Bon Ami in 1955, control passed to other investors in 1957 and 1958, and in 1963 the company fell to Lestoil Products. Wikipedia, citing The Wall Street Journal of 27 August 1963, says Lestoil bought a controlling stake that year, and, citing The New York Times of 27 June 1964, that Bon Ami was merged into Lestoil in 1964.

The next owner came from Missouri. The Faultless Starch Company traces its own history to 1886, when Major Thomas G. Beaham moved to Kansas City and bought into a tea, coffee and spice business that became Beaham & Moffit. The Directory says the firm took up a dry laundry starch called Faultless and renamed itself after the product in 1891; Wikipedia records that it gave away a series of children’s primers, the Faultless Starch Books, to early buyers from the 1890s. In 1960 the company introduced a spray-on starch in an aerosol can, and in 1968 it bought the Kleen King line of metal cleaners.

In 1971 Faultless bought Bon Ami, a purchase recorded by Wikipedia, citing The New York Times of 21 March 1983, and by the Directory. Faultless has owned the brand since. Its president at the time was Gordon T. Beaham III, a great-grandson of the founder, and the Directory, citing a New York Times interview of 19 April 1972, says he set out to give the old name renewed attention. In 1974 the company changed its corporate name to Faultless Starch/Bon Ami Company, a change both Wikipedia and the Directory record.

The Directory describes manufacturing plants and a distribution centre in Kansas City and a factory in nearby Humansville, Missouri, as of its 2003 edition, and says the business was still owned and run by the Beaham family in 2002, with David Beaham, of the fifth generation, as president. It also records the purchase of the Magic starch and sizing brand in 1997. Wikipedia now titles its article on the company Faultless Brands, says it is headquartered in Kansas City, and dates its move to the current headquarters to 2009.

On the brand’s own website in 2026, the footer reads “Bon Ami Company” and the navigation lists the group’s other names: Faultless, Magic, Niagara and Kleen King. The Faultless plant building in Kansas City, rebuilt after the 1903 flood to a design by the local firm Shepard and Farrar, is the subject of a 2022 National Register of Historic Places registration form cited by Wikipedia.

Design and documentation.

Household cleaners are usually met on a shelf rather than in an advertisement, so much of their identity is carried by the container itself. A cleaner can arrive as a squeeze bottle, a jug with a handle, a round canister of powder with a perforated or sliding lid, an aerosol can, or a bottle topped with a trigger sprayer, and each of those forms leaves a different amount of room for a name, a mark and a line of instructions.

On a bottle or a jug the label usually wraps the body, with the brand name set large and the product description below it. On a powder canister the name tends to run around a cylinder, so it is read in part as the can turns. A trigger sprayer adds a coloured head and a nozzle above the label, which often becomes part of how a product is recognised from across an aisle.

Each guide in this group looks at where a name began, who has owned it over time and how its labels, canisters and advertising are described in the sources, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A chick, a slogan and a painter of birds.

The Bon Ami identity rests on a small bird and a short sentence. The company says the chick has appeared on its packaging and in its advertising since the late 1800s, and that the name Bon Ami, the chick and the slogan “Hasn’t Scratched Yet!” are registered trademarks. The Directory describes the early logo as a yellow chick with that slogan and explains the joke behind it: newly hatched chicks do not scratch the ground for food.

The chick was redrawn by a specialist. The Directory says that around 1900 it was reimagined by the painter Ben Austrian, whose career was built on pictures of chickens and other birds, and Wikipedia, citing Cross (2002) and the Encyclopedia of Consumer Brands (1994), says Austrian painted the prints used in the advertising. Wikipedia also says that Alfred W. Erickson, whose agency later became part of McCann, took Bon Ami on as a client around 1908 and ran full-colour pages in women’s magazines, and that the campaign extended into a children’s book, The Chick That Never Grew Up, with a character called Princess Bon Ami.

The advertising archive shows how long the theme has run. Wikipedia illustrates the brand with an advertisement of 1890, a 1907 advertisement carrying the slogan, and a 1919 page from American Cookery. It records a 1980 magazine campaign whose headline played on the chick’s French name, citing Pam Percy’s The Complete Chicken (2002), and a mention of the cleanser in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934), where Dick Diver cleans his washroom with Bon Ami.

An anniversary brought the original form back. For the brand’s 125th anniversary in 2011, Wikipedia says, citing the company’s archived shop page, the original cleaning cake was reissued in limited numbers, sold with or without a commemorative tin. The company’s current story page shows an advertisement from 1909 and a “retro logo” alongside the present one.

For a design guide, Bon Ami shows how a single drawn animal and a short line can carry a product through a change of owners, a change of form from cake to powder, and a move from Connecticut to Missouri. Compare it with Comet and Bar Keepers Friend, two other American scouring powders. For this guide we use ink navy, chick yellow and canister cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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