A Covington drugstore, a customer’s phrase and a name that stuck.

Boudreaux’s Butt Paste began behind a pharmacy counter in Covington, Louisiana. Its creator, George Boudreaux, told The Republic of Columbus, Indiana, in May 2006 that he had earned a degree in bacteriology from Louisiana State University and a pharmacy degree from Louisiana-Monroe, then opened Boudreaux’s Family Pharmacy in Covington and ran it for sixteen years. The paste, he said, was a derivative of something he had made in pharmacy school, and he began mixing it in the store in the early 1970s. An Associated Press report published in August 2004 likewise places the start in his Covington pharmacy in the 1970s, and says customers came from as far as New Orleans to buy it.

For several years the product had no name. The AP account, which it introduces with “the story goes,” is that a mother took her baby to a Covington pediatrician, Buddy Terral, who offered to write a prescription; she replied that she was going down to George Boudreaux’s store to have him whip up “some of that butt paste.” In the version Boudreaux gave The Republic in 2006, the doctor rang him laughing and told him he needed to call it Boudreaux’s Butt Paste. The name stuck.

Boudreaux was candid that the name did much of his marketing. “Would you be talking to me if it was called George’s Diaper Cream?” he asked the AP reporter in 2004. The same report noted that the name had drawn attention from Oprah Winfrey, ESPN and Jay Leno, and The Republic recorded that he had appeared on Oprah’s show and on ESPN. At a Blairex event in 2006 he described himself, in a line the paper printed, as “the Colonel Sanders of butt paste.”

The AP gave its formal name in 2004 as Boudreaux’s Family Pharmacy, doing business as Boudreaux’s Butt Paste, a privately held company with its creator still at the centre of it.

From a Louisiana pharmacy to Prestige Brands.

The paste left the pharmacy in 1994. Both the AP in 2004 and The Republic in 2006 report that Boudreaux sold his drugstore that year, kept the rights to the paste and set out to sell it nationally, at trade shows and to the major retail chains. A manufacturer in Alabama made it from 1994 to 2003, The Republic said; the AP dates the switch of manufacturing to New Orleans to July 2003, and Baton Rouge station WAFB reported in 2006 that it had been made at a facility in eastern New Orleans since 2003. By 2004 the AP listed Wal-Mart and Target as national stockists, with Walgreen’s about to add it; The Republic named Target, Wal-Mart, Walgreen’s and CVS two years later, and said it was then also on sale in Canada.

Hurricane Katrina, which struck on 29 August 2005, left the New Orleans plant out of action, according to The Republic. Tony Moravec, president of Blairex Laboratories of Columbus, Indiana, had already shown an interest in the paste; he contacted Boudreaux, and for four months the product was made in Columbus. The two companies then agreed to join forces. The Republic reported that Blairex and Boudreaux’s Family Pharmacy Inc. merged operations on 8 May 2006, with Blairex taking over manufacturing and Boudreaux staying in Louisiana to concentrate on selling; WAFB reported in June 2006 that the brand had been acquired by Blairex, which it described as a maker and marketer of nonprescription health aids, and that terms were not disclosed.

The brand changed hands twice more. English Wikipedia, citing a BusinessWeek company profile, says Blairex sold it to C.B. Fleet Company, Inc. on 29 December 2011. Fleet, founded in 1869 by Charles Browne Fleet and based in Lynchburg, Virginia, according to Roanoke-Lynchburg station WSET in December 2016, was then owned by the private-equity firm Gryphon Investors, whose December 2016 announcement listed Boudreaux’s among Fleet’s product lines alongside Summer’s Eve, Fleet, Pedia-Lax and Phazyme.

On 22 December 2016, Prestige Brands Holdings of Tarrytown, New York announced a definitive agreement to acquire C.B. Fleet, in a release carried by Business Wire, and the adviser Capstone Partners dates the completed sale to 26 January 2017. Prestige has owned Boudreaux’s since 2017; the official Butt Paste website carried a 2026 copyright line in the name of Prestige Consumer Healthcare Inc.

Design and documentation.

Baby-care brands live on a small set of containers: the squeeze tube, the wide screw-top tub, the pump bottle and the printed diaper pack. Each one leaves only a little room for a name, so the identity has to work at the size of a changing-table shelf as well as on a store fixture, and it is often read from across a room or upside down in a bag.

Because many of these names have changed owners several times, the pack is frequently the steadiest thing about them. A tube may carry the same word through decades in which the company printed on the back has changed, and a refreshed logo or a new colour band is often the only visible sign that a business has been sold. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who made the product originally, who owns the name now, and how its labels have changed.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what a company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and its packaging — and describes products by name and category only.

A grinning baby, a blanket and a name across the bumper.

The brand also went racing. In May 2004 USA Today reported that driver Kevin Ray would attempt his Nextel Cup debut at Dover International Speedway in the No. 90 Ford owned by Junie Donlavey, carrying Boudreaux’s Butt Paste as sponsor, and that hats, T-shirts and scale-model cars were already planned. NASCAR, the paper noted, sometimes refused edgy sponsors, but its vice president of communications, Jim Hunter, said it was “very fitting” that Donlavey’s team was “now being sponsored by a baby product.” The Chicago Tribune’s RedEye edition described the car with the name on the bumper, more on the fenders and plenty on the hood.

A second car followed. In April 2005 the Orlando Sentinel reported that the brand was the primary sponsor of Kim Crosby, a Tallahassee native racing in NASCAR’s Busch Series, and quoted her: “If a female has Butt Paste on the back of her car, people are going to talk about it.” The AP report of 2004 describes the mark itself: a logo of a grinning baby covered by a blanket, carried on Crosby’s car with the product’s full name across the rear bumper.

Today the range on the brand’s own website is organised under a few plain product names — Original Butt Paste, Maximum Strength Butt Paste and Butt Barrier Ointment — and the possessive “Boudreaux’s” still heads each name: a family name from a Louisiana drugstore paired with the phrase a customer supplied.

For a design guide, Boudreaux’s Butt Paste shows how a name with a laugh in it can carry a small brand from one shop counter to national shelves and a stock car, alongside a cartoon baby under a blanket. Compare Desitin and Balmex, two other diaper-cream names, or Johnson’s Baby. For this guide we use bumper red, bayou brick and blanket cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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