A softener business in a Chicago suburb.

Culligan began in Northbrook, Illinois, in 1936. The company’s own history page, published in 2025, names Emmett Culligan as the founder, and its corporate announcements describe the business as “founded outside of Chicago in 1936 by Emmett Culligan.” From the start the product was soft water: equipment that treats hard water at home so that it behaves differently in pipes, kettles and laundry.

A 2006 article in the trade magazine Water Conditioning & Purification, written by Bob Boerner, whose family ran Culligan dealerships, gives a vivid picture of those early years. It says that in the summers of 1936 and 1937 Culligan could be found in the streets of Northbrook drying the zeolite media he used in his process, and that he was experimenting with portable exchange tanks: cylinders of treatment media that could be delivered to a house, used, and swapped for a fresh one.

The same account explains how the idea travelled. Wilbur Walton, who was in the coal business in Chicago, met and befriended Culligan. According to Boerner, Culligan confessed that he was not sure how best to distribute and promote the concept, and Walton suggested a franchise system and offered to open a dealership in nearby Wheaton to test it. Walton & Company opened in 1938, and the portable tanks were promoted in the western suburbs as a no-fuss way to get soft water.

That arrangement — a national name carried by locally run dealers — is still the shape of the business. The Chicago Tribune, in a report syndicated by Shaw Local in January 2018, described a family-owned water-softening business that grew to national prominence on the back of a widespread dealer network and an advertising campaign. The company says it works in partnership with Culligan water dealers in North America and through direct service and dealers internationally.

From a family firm to private-equity owners.

Culligan’s later history is a story of owners. The Chicago Tribune report of 2018 summarised it as “a series of ownership changes,” and the most recent steps are the best documented. The paper reported that New York private-equity firm Centerbridge Partners bought the company in 2012 in a restructuring deal that avoided another bankruptcy, and that Boston-based Advent International bought Culligan in December 2016.

The headquarters moved too. The same report says the company moved from Northbrook to Rosemont in 2007, so older material places Culligan in the town where it began and newer material in Rosemont.

In May 2021 Culligan announced that BDT Capital Partners had agreed to acquire it, together with several strategic family-business owners and investors in BDT’s network, from Advent International and Centerbridge Partners. The announcement said Advent would reinvest to take a minority stake, and it credited the outgoing owners with supporting investment in new products, digital tools and expansion across Europe, Asia and Latin America. Trade titles including ATM Marketplace and Vending Times reported on 4 August 2021 that BDT had officially completed the acquisition.

The deals continued under the new owner. In November 2023 Vending Times reported that Culligan International had agreed to acquire a “significant portion” of Primo Water, as part of Primo’s plan to exit its international businesses. Across those changes the product categories stayed recognisable: softeners, filtration systems, bottled-water and cooler delivery for homes and offices, and the service visits that go with them.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make the equipment behind water at home: pool pumps, filters and cleaners, above-ground pools, water-softening and filtering systems, and the tanks and tankless units that heat water for kitchens and bathrooms. Brands in these trades sit at many different points in the market, from names that began as small family workshops to labels that now belong to much larger industrial groups, and the same badge can be sold through a pool shop, a plumbing wholesaler or a big retailer.

Because the products are often installed out of sight, in a pump room, a basement or a utility cupboard, a brand’s identity in these fields tends to be carried by its name, its labels and its packaging rather than by the product’s shape. Ownership can change several times while a familiar badge stays on the box, which makes the plain questions worth asking: who started the brand, who owns it now, and where its products are made.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A slogan, a renaming and a fairy-tale hero.

Culligan’s most famous brand asset is a line of copy. The Chicago Tribune reported in 2018 that the “Hey, Culligan Man!” campaign first aired on a Los Angeles radio station in 1958 and “proved hard to ignore.” The phrase turned the person who delivered and serviced the equipment into the face of the brand, and it is the reason the company is often remembered by its call rather than its logo.

In January 2018 the company changed it. The Tribune reported that, looking to broaden and modernise its appeal to younger consumers, Culligan was dropping “man” from the slogan, and that the campaign also introduced a new brand name, Culligan Water, to make clearer what the company does. The launch commercial was made by the Minneapolis agency Fallon and starred Cary Elwes, who revisited his role in The Princess Bride and its line “as you wish.” In that spot, the paper noted, the old slogan was never spoken; it appeared only at the end, steering viewers to the campaign’s HeyCulligan web address.

Reel Chicago gave more detail in its coverage of the launch. It said the campaign idea was “You Could Give Your People Culligan Water,” that the spot was directed by Abteen Bagheri, and that it would run on national television in North America with print, streaming audio, digital and social work around it. Fallon and Culligan also built an Amazon Alexa skill that answered questions with “As you wish,” a small piece of brand voice that turned the film reference into an interaction.

For a design guide, Culligan shows how a service brand can be carried by words and people as much as by a mark: a slogan shouted for decades, a dealer’s van, and a renaming that kept the call while dropping one word. Compare Brita, a filter brand sold on the shelf, and PUR, a Minneapolis filter maker. For this guide we use softener blue, deep navy and a pale rinse white with a friendly grotesque, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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