Five investors, a coined name and a diamond.

Clorox began on 3 May 1913 as the Electro-Alkaline Company, set up to make liquid bleach in a factory on the east side of San Francisco Bay. English Wikipedia, drawing on the company’s own history pages, names five founders and their trades: Archibald Taft, a banker; Edward Hughes, who dealt in wood and coal; Charles Husband, a bookkeeper; Rufus Myers, a lawyer; and William Hussey, a miner. The company says Clorox liquid bleach made its debut in 1913 as an institutional product, sold to businesses rather than to homes.

The name came before the company’s own. Clorox was coined from the two main ingredients, chlorine and sodium hydroxide, and Wikipedia says the original packaging carried a diamond-shaped logo that has been used in one form or another ever since. The company’s heritage timeline dates both to 1914, when it says the Clorox name was registered and the diamond trademark adopted, and it credits both to Abel Hamblet, an engineer at the firm that supplied the electrolytic cells used to make the bleach.

The early years were difficult. Wikipedia says the business was close to collapse when the investor William Murray took charge in 1916 as general manager. His wife, Annie Murray, pushed for a less concentrated bleach for home use and built demand by handing out sample bottles at the family’s grocery store in downtown Oakland. The company says it appointed the Kelley-Clarke Company of San Francisco as its exclusive broker for household bleach the same year, and that an exhibit at the California State Fair in 1917 introduced the household product to farmers and other visitors.

In the 1920s, the company says, a giant CLOROX billboard greeted Bay Area ferry riders, the brand name was painted on the sides of the vessels that carried bleach from the Port of Oakland to the East Coast through the Panama Canal, and pamphlets explained its home uses in French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish and Yiddish. The business reorganised as Clorox Chemical Corporation in 1922, and on 28 May 1928, as Clorox Chemical Company, it went public on the San Francisco stock exchange — taking the name customers already used.

Procter & Gamble, independence and a widening portfolio.

Through the Depression the company expanded east. Its timeline records plants in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Chicago, with Jersey City dated to 1938 as the first East Coast plant and distribution centre, and says household Clorox reached national distribution in a quart-sized container in 1932. It remained a one-product business for decades: a second product, a household cleaner called Boon, appeared in 1946 and was withdrawn in 1948, the company says.

In 1957 Procter & Gamble bought Clorox Chemical Company and ran it as a subsidiary renamed The Clorox Company, with its home office still in Oakland. The Federal Trade Commission challenged the purchase, and in 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the order that P&G divest the business (FTC v. Procter & Gamble Co.), which became independent again at the start of 1969. The company says that under P&G its advertising moved beyond magazines into television, and that its shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 1968.

Independence brought new products and acquisitions. The company lists Clorox 2, developed in its own laboratory, and the purchase of Liquid-Plumr in 1969; Formula 409 in 1970; Kitchen Bouquet in 1971; Hidden Valley ranch dressing mixes in 1972; and Kingsford charcoal in 1973, the year it built a research centre in Pleasanton, California. A bleach plant in Caguas, Puerto Rico, opened in 1975, and the mildew remover Tilex was developed in-house in 1981. In the 1970s, the company says, it moved its main offices from the outskirts of Oakland into the city centre.

Later decades widened the portfolio further. Wikipedia records a 1988 licensing and distribution agreement that brought Brita water filters to the United States, the purchase of Pine-Sol in 1990, and the 1999 acquisition of First Brands, which brought Glad into the group. A Glad joint venture with Procter & Gamble followed in 2002, Burt’s Bees was acquired in 2007, and the Armor All and STP car-care brands were sold in 2010. In 2006 Clorox bought the Canadian Javex bleach line and similar Latin American lines from Colgate-Palmolive, so the bleach is sold under regional names in some markets. In 2022 the company opened a cat-litter plant in Martinsburg, West Virginia, which makes Fresh Step.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make products for cleaning the home: sprays, powders, liquids, wipes and the tools that carry them. Household-cleaning brands sit in a crowded aisle, and a single name can cover dozens of formats, from a trigger bottle by the sink to a refill pack bought in bulk, so the identity has to hold together across very different objects.

On the shelf, much of that identity is carried by shape and colour before any word is read: the profile of a bottle or tub, the colour of the liquid seen through it, a cap or trigger in a set hue, and a logo placed in the same spot on every pack. Some brands lean on a character or mascot in their advertising; others rely on a coined name or a single strong colour.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, and how its packs, logos and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A coined word, a diamond and a changing bottle.

The Clorox identity rests on two things that predate almost everything else about the company: a coined word that compresses a chemical formula into two syllables, and a diamond that has framed it, in one form or another, since the first packaging. Wikipedia distinguishes the Clorox logo used on consumer products from the corporate mark of The Clorox Company, so the brand on the bottle and the name of the company that owns it are drawn as separate pieces of identity.

Advertising gave the bottle a character early on. Wikipedia, citing the company’s history pages, says an animated Clorox bottle named Butch was used in the brand’s advertising, became well known and survived the 1940 change from rubber stoppers to screw caps. The company’s timeline traces that change in detail: in 1940 the original amber bottle with a rubber cork gave way to a more slender bottle with a threaded neck and a plastic screw cap; an aluminium screw cap arrived in 1953, the year the first local television commercials for the bleach appeared; and in 1960 a white polyethylene bottle with a plastic cap was introduced, replacing the amber glass container by 1962. The company says the bleach had been sold in glass until the early 1960s and that a “splash-less” bottle followed in 1981.

The company renamed itself after its product twice, first as Clorox Chemical in the 1920s and then as The Clorox Company under Procter & Gamble in 1957.

For a design guide, Clorox shows how a single coined product name, held inside the same simple shape for more than a century, can carry a company through new owners, new materials and a portfolio that now runs from cat litter to salad dressing. Compare it with Fresh Step, the company’s cat-litter brand, and Hidden Valley, the ranch dressing it bought in 1972. For this guide we use diamond navy, sky blue and bottle white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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