A lumberjack on a paper towel wrapper.

Brawny’s identity has long centred on a man. In a report published on 14 February 2002, the St. Petersburg Times, now the Tampa Bay Times, wrote that the Brawny man was launched by the American Can Company in the early 1970s. In that original version, the paper said, he carried an axe over his shoulder and wore a red and black plaid shirt. By the early 1980s the axe had been removed from the image, and over the following years his bushy moustache was trimmed and the parting in his hair moved from the middle to the side.

American Can also ran a consumer paper business. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its 1998 entry on the Fort James Corporation, describes that business as the Dixie/Northern division, which made Dixie cups, Northern toilet paper, folding cartons and three towel brands: Bolt, Brawny and Gala. English Wikipedia’s article on American Can, citing a 1995 company history held by Lafayette College, records that the James River Corporation of Virginia bought American Can’s paper business in 1982.

The face on the wrapper was a drawing, and the St. Petersburg Times traced who drew it. From the late 1980s, it reported, the artist was the commercial illustrator John Solie, whose work also included film posters, NASA images and TV Guide covers, and the model was his son, Eric, who found his own face on a pack of Brawny when his father told him to go and buy one. John Solie told the paper that in 1999, at the request of the brand’s then owner, Fort James, he also sketched a family for the Brawny man.

By 2002 the shirt had changed too. The paper noted that the character, asked about by game-show writers checking trivia questions, was then wearing a blue denim shirt rather than plaid. It also recorded his place in popular culture: in a December 2001 episode of The Simpsons, Marge Simpson becomes infatuated with “Burly,” a thinly fictionalised paper towel man, kissing his picture on the package and writing him a fan letter.

James River, Fort James and Georgia-Pacific.

Brawny has changed hands as part of larger deals. After the 1982 purchase, the International Directory of Company Histories says, James River pushed its Northern bathroom tissue and Brawny towels into the north-eastern United States in 1984, in a campaign it called “Operation Yankee.” In August 1997 James River merged with the Fort Howard Corporation of Green Bay, Wisconsin, to form the Fort James Corporation, which listed Brawny towels among its consumer brands alongside Quilted Northern bathroom tissue, Vanity Fair napkins and Dixie cups and plates.

English Wikipedia’s article on James River, citing an Associated Press report of July 2000 and a Georgia-Pacific press release of November 2000, says Georgia-Pacific of Atlanta acquired Fort James in 2000. The St. Petersburg Times put it the same way in 2002: when Georgia-Pacific bought Fort James in late 2000, it inherited several brands, “such as Brawny and Quilted Northern,” and assembled a new marketing team for them. Georgia-Pacific itself changed hands five years later. Wikipedia, citing The New York Times of 14 November 2005, says the sale to Koch Industries was announced on 13 November 2005 and completed on 23 December that year; since then Georgia-Pacific has been an independently operated subsidiary of Koch. Georgia-Pacific has owned Brawny since 2000, and the brand’s website today carries the name of Georgia-Pacific Consumer Products and links to its sister brands, among them Angel Soft, Quilted Northern, Sparkle and Dixie.

The new owner turned to a racing driver. In February 2002, the St. Petersburg Times reported, Georgia-Pacific said it would temporarily replace the Brawny man with the NASCAR driver Richard Petty, while the lumberjack’s image appeared on the hood of a car at five races that season. Company officials said they wanted to “modernize” the character but would keep him. “We have to be careful in changing an icon,” the brand manager, Michael Adams, told the paper. “You can cause significant damage.”

The product has changed beneath the mascot. Brawny’s own website now says that all of its towels have moved to three plies from two, and it sells them in three sheet formats it calls Tear-A-Square, Pick-A-Size and Full Sheet. Its current campaign, “Summon the Strongest,” invites people to call the Brawny Man by shouting “BRAWNNNYY!” through an empty paper towel tube.

Design and documentation.

Paper towels, tissues, paper cups and food wraps share a design question. The product itself is usually plain paper, plastic or foil, so much of a brand’s identity is carried by the package around it: a printed wrapper around a roll, a carton or cube of tissues, a sleeve of cups, a box with a cutting edge. That package sits on a shelf beside its rivals and has to tell one name from another at a glance.

The identities in this category therefore tend to rest on things printed on the pack and seen in advertising: a drawn character, a slogan, a run of colours or patterns, a box shape. Many of these names have also passed between owners over the decades, through acquisitions and mergers of the paper and packaging companies behind them, so a character or a slogan can stay in use long after the company that introduced it has gone.

Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its packaging and advertising have changed over time, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A redrawn lumberjack, then a Brawny woman.

The makeover arrived in 2004. Slate’s advertising critic Seth Stevenson, writing on 22 March 2004, described the old character as head and shoulders only, in a denim shirt open at the chest, with a centre parting he kept until 1991. The redrawn Brawny Man, he reported, had gone from fair skin, blond hair and green eyes to olive skin, brown hair and brown eyes — a change that Gino Biondi, Brawny’s director of marketing, said was meant to appeal to a wide variety of ethnic groups. The denim shirt was replaced by flannel with a T-shirt beneath it, after consumer research found the old man was seen as “very 1970s,” and the figure gained a full torso, which Biondi said was about projecting strength.

The television spots that introduced him were a puppet show of household products. Stevenson described two paper towel rolls watching a soap opera side by side: the old Brawny Man, on one roll, indifferent to the drama, and the new one, on a roll in updated packaging, following its loves and losses. In another spot the new man meditated on a yoga mat, chanting “Om,” while the old one looked on and scoffed. Each ad ended by saying that Brawny had been “massively improved.”

The pack has also carried someone else. On 4 March 2017, ABC’s station WTVD reported that Brawny had replaced the Brawny Man on its packaging with a Brawny Woman for Women’s History Month, as part of the #StrengthHasNoGender initiative started by Georgia-Pacific. The initiative, then in its second year, celebrated women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and the Brawny Woman rolls were sold in eight-roll packs at Walmart stores across the country during March. Today the brand’s website describes the Brawny Man as a “friendly but empowering giant lumberjack” with a “signature plaid,” who spends his free time at his cabin in the woods.

For a design guide, Brawny shows how a single drawn character can carry a household brand through five decades and four owners, with each change — the axe, the moustache, the shirt, the torso — read as a change in the brand itself. Compare it with Bounty, the rival paper towel built on a slogan rather than a mascot, and Quilted Northern, the bathroom tissue that travelled with Brawny from American Can to Georgia-Pacific. For this guide we use flannel red, timber black and denim blue with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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