A starch, soap and candle business in Manhattan.

Colgate began as a soap and candle maker, not a toothpaste company. English Wikipedia says William Colgate was born in Hollingbourne, Kent, in England, and that his family emigrated to Baltimore in 1798, where his father went into a short-lived partnership making soap and candles. In 1804 William went to New York City as an apprentice in a soap-boiler’s business, and in 1806 he set up a starch, soap and candle business on Dutch Street in Manhattan. Colgate-Palmolive’s own history gives the same year and the same street, and adds that the first Colgate advertisement appeared in a New York newspaper in 1817.

The business grew steadily on the far side of the Hudson as well. The company says it opened a starch factory in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1820. When the founder died in 1857, it was reorganised as Colgate & Company under the management of his son Samuel Colgate. Perfumed soaps and perfumes followed in the 1860s, and the company registered Cashmere Bouquet, a perfumed toilet soap, as a Colgate trademark in 1872.

Toothpaste came next. Colgate-Palmolive says it began selling an aromatic toothpaste in jars in 1873, and introduced toothpaste in a collapsible tube in 1896. English Wikipedia’s article on the toothpaste brand dates the jars and the tube to the same two years, and notes that the tube itself had been pioneered by several makers, including Kalodont and Johnson & Johnson. In 1906, the company says, Colgate was incorporated by the five sons of Samuel Colgate, and a ribbon-shaped opening was added to the tube. The line it used about that change is a small piece of brand history in itself: “We couldn’t improve the product, so we improved the tube.”

The family name also travelled well beyond the factory. English Wikipedia records that Madison University, a Baptist college in upstate New York that the Colgates had supported for decades, was renamed Colgate University in 1890.

From a family firm to Colgate-Palmolive.

The present company took shape through a merger of three soap makers. Colgate-Palmolive’s history traces the Palmolive side to a soap factory that B.J. Johnson opened in Milwaukee in 1864, which introduced Palmolive soap in 1898, and the Peet side to a soap company the Peet brothers set up in Kansas City in 1872. Palmolive and Peet merged in 1926. In 1928, Colgate merged with Palmolive-Peet to form the Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Company; English Wikipedia dates the merger as effective on 1 July 1928. The company says it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1930, and that Colgate-Palmolive Company became its official name in 1953.

Expansion abroad began before the merger. The company says it set up its first international subsidiary in Canada in 1914 and began establishing operations in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa from 1920. It moved its corporate headquarters to 300 Park Avenue in New York in 1956 and opened a research centre in Piscataway, New Jersey, in 1962. English Wikipedia still places the headquarters on Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.

The toothpaste line widened through formulas and acquisitions. Colgate-Palmolive says it added MFP fluoride to Colgate toothpaste in 1968, introduced Colgate Total in 1992 and, in 1995, bought the Kolynos oral care business in Latin America and launched the Sorriso toothpaste there. In 2006 the company agreed to buy Tom’s of Maine, the natural toothpaste maker Tom Chappell founded in 1970, and in 2020 it bought Hello Products of New Jersey, according to English Wikipedia.

The brand has also moved into electronics. English Wikipedia says that in 2018 Colgate licensed technology from the Paris-based company Baracoda to launch a connected toothbrush, the Colgate Smart Electric, and that it sells connected brushes for children and adults under the hum name. The same article notes that Colgate Tooth Powder is still made and sold.

Design and documentation.

Toothpaste and mouthwash brands are seen up close, every day, and usually for only a few seconds at a time. A tube sits on a basin, a bottle sits beside it, and a box is glimpsed on a crowded pharmacy shelf. Their identities tend to be carried by a few repeatable signals: the colour of the tube or carton, the shape and weight of the name, and in some cases the look of the product itself.

Colour does much of the work. Many oral-care names are tied to one strong pack colour, and a shopper often reaches for that colour before reading a word. Toothpaste adds a second surface that most packaged goods lack, the paste or gel squeezed onto a brush, which some brands have made part of their look with stripes or tinted gels. Mouthwash goes further still, because the liquid is visible through a clear bottle and its colour becomes part of the pack.

Each guide in this group looks at who started the brand, who owns it now and how its look has been described over time, and separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself.

A tube, a ribbon and a name on a carton.

Colgate’s identity has always leaned on its packaging and its advertising as much as on its name. The 1906 change to the tube, which the company still describes in its own history, turned the shape of the paste itself into a selling point: a flat ribbon rather than a round bead. Colgate-Palmolive says that in 1911 it handed out tubes of toothpaste and toothbrushes to schools and hygienists to demonstrate brushing.

The copywriting was just as plain. English Wikipedia credits the copywriter Alicia Tobin with the 1950s slogan “It Cleans Your Breath While It Cleans Your Teeth.” For children, the company’s website has used songs and animated videos, and English Wikipedia names Dr. Rabbit as a former animated mascot.

The company has kept the founding name at the front of everything it sells for the mouth. Its history lists the Colgate Plus toothbrush in 1983 and Colgate Total in 1992, and English Wikipedia lists toothpastes, toothbrushes, mouthwashes and dental floss under the Colgate name. The corporate name, meanwhile, still carries the soap brand it merged with in 1928.

For a design guide, Colgate shows how a family name from an early nineteenth-century soap works has been carried on a toothpaste tube since the 1870s, with the pack and the shape of the paste doing much of the talking. Compare it with Crest, the Procter & Gamble toothpaste that English Wikipedia names as a long-standing rival, and Tom’s of Maine, its stablemate since 2006. For this guide we use tube red and carmine on ribbon white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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