A garage, home canning and three surnames.

DAP dates its story to 1865 and to a garage in Dayton, Ohio. The company’s own history says that Robert H. Dicks and a partner named Elmer Wiggins began making sealing wax for food canning there, at a time when, as DAP puts it, refrigeration and commercially prepared foods were not yet available and home canning was common. The same timeline spells the partner’s surname “Wiggim” in its 1906 entry, and English Wikipedia uses that spelling too, so the record carries both forms.

The business took on a new partner and a new name in the early twentieth century. According to the company, Dicks bought out his original partner in 1906 and joined forces with George Pontius; the two formalised their partnership in 1913 as the Dicks-Pontius Company. DAP says that Robert Dicks’s son John later joined the firm and widened it into the manufacture of putty and caulk in bulk, moving the company from the pantry towards the building trade.

The next shift was in packaging. DAP’s history credits the Dicks-Pontius Company with helping move the market during the 1940s and 1950s towards disposable cartridges for caulks and sealants, the tubes loaded into a caulking gun. English Wikipedia, citing the company, gives the same account.

The name that survives came from a merger. In 1957, the company says, it combined with the Armstrong Company of Chicago, one of several acquisitions it made during that decade. The merged business was renamed Dicks-Armstrong-Pontius, and the three surnames were eventually shortened to the initials DAP, the brand name used ever since. English Wikipedia lists Dicks-Armstrong-Pontius as the former name of DAP Products Inc. and gives its headquarters as Baltimore, Maryland.

Latex caulk, Weldwood, Plastic Wood and a 1999 sale.

From the 1960s DAP’s range moved from putty into modern sealants. The company’s timeline records latex caulking compounds in 1964 and a siliconized latex caulk in 1980, and English Wikipedia, citing DAP, adds acrylic latex in 1970 and silicone sealants in the mid-1980s. The brand also grew by buying names that were already familiar to builders and woodworkers. DAP says it acquired Weldwood through a merger in 1983, bringing it into adhesives, and that the Plastic Wood brand of wood filler joined its portfolio in the 1990s.

Several of the names still printed on DAP packs today were introduced in the decade that followed. The company dates the launch of its Alex and Alex Plus caulks to 1995; aerosol caulking and a seven-day telephone helpline, 888-DAP-TIPS, to 1996; DAPtex latex insulating foam to 1997; and DryDex spackling to 1998. DryDex is a rare case of colour doing a practical job: DAP describes the compound as going on pink and drying to white, a visible cue that it is ready to sand.

The ownership changed at the end of that decade. RPM International, the Ohio coatings and sealants group, says on its own history page that it added DAP to its consumer brands in 1999, when it acquired DAP Products, “a manufacturer and marketer of caulks, sealants, adhesives, and patch and repair products.” RPM has owned DAP since 1999, and today lists DAP, DAP Foam, Alex Plus, Plastic Wood and Kwik Seal among its consumer brands, alongside Rust-Oleum and Zinsser.

DAP has continued to buy and launch under RPM. The company says it acquired the Phenoseal brand in 2004, and English Wikipedia adds Custom Building Products’ ready-mix repair products between 2004 and 2006. In 2017, DAP says, it bought the foam division of Clayton Corporation, known for its Touch ’N Foam and Touch ’N Seal brands. Its more recent launches include Kwik Seal Ultra in 2015, Dynaflex Ultra in 2018, a spray Craft Foam in 2021 and wall and ceiling spray textures in 2023. DAP marked its 160th year in 2025, and its website today carries the name DAP Global, Inc.

Design and documentation.

Household glue and air-care brands sit on the same kind of shelf, in hardware aisles and supermarket cleaning sections, and both have to be recognised quickly by someone who is usually in the middle of a job. A glue’s identity is often carried by a small tube, a squeeze bottle or a twin syringe, where a name, a colour band and a few words about what the product sticks have to fit on very little space. An air freshener’s identity is carried by a can, a cone, a plug-in or a jar, and by the names given to its scents.

In air care, a fragrance named after a flower, a fruit or a season gives a label designer a colour and a picture to start from. On a glue pack, the name has to share its space with directions for use and safety wording.

Many of these names have also changed owners more than once. Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its packaging and advertising have been described, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Three letters, a putty knife and a cartridge.

DAP’s identity rests first on its name. The three letters are the initials of Dicks, Armstrong and Pontius, the surnames joined in the 1957 merger, and the company has used the short form as its brand name since then. The short name sits above a family of sub-brands, among them Alex Plus, Kwik Seal, DryDex and Plastic Wood.

English Wikipedia’s infobox shows the DAP logo with the caption “the DAP ‘putty knife’ logo,” linking the mark back to the putty and patching trade that John Dicks expanded into in the early twentieth century. The putty knife is a fitting emblem for a business whose products are pressed, smoothed and tooled into gaps by hand, whether by a contractor or by someone fixing a crack in a hallway wall.

Packaging is part of the company’s own account of itself. DAP’s history credits the Dicks-Pontius years with the move to disposable cartridges, and the brand’s products today span cartridges, tubs and aerosol cans. DryDex adds a small piece of product design to the story, a compound that is pink when it goes on and white when it is dry, with the colour change itself doing the communicating.

DAP’s own website frames the brand around its age and its users. It describes DAP as established in 1865, marked the 160th anniversary in 2025, and addresses both professionals and do-it-yourself customers, with technical data sheets and a product helpline alongside how-to articles. In 2026 the company presents itself under the name DAP Global, Inc., within RPM International’s group of consumer brands.

For a design guide, DAP shows how a set of founders’ initials can become a durable trade mark, and how a utilitarian format like the caulk cartridge can carry a brand on a crowded shelf. Compare the Loctite and J-B Weld guides for two other hardware-aisle adhesive brands. For this guide we use cartridge red, deep brick, hardware yellow and caulk white with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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