A Cleveland tape distributor and a new name.

The company behind Duck Tape began as a distributor rather than a maker. English Wikipedia, citing a book on inventions, says the Melvin A. Anderson Company of Cleveland, Ohio, acquired the rights to a cloth-backed tape in 1950; the brand’s own history describes Anderson as a small industrial tape distributor that set out to supply duct and electrical tapes to factories in the area. In 1971, by both accounts, Jack Kahl bought the Anderson business and renamed it Manco, Inc. The Duck Brand timeline describes the purchase as a leveraged buyout.

The name Duck was a play on words. Duct tape had long been called “duck tape” in everyday speech, and English Wikipedia, citing The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook by Jay Conrad Levinson and Seth Godin (1994) and a 2014 Smart Business profile, says Manco chose the word both as a nod to that older name and as a way to stand out from the many other companies selling the same kind of tape. Wikipedia dates Kahl’s rebranding of the company’s duct tape to 1975. Adweek, in an October 2014 article by Robert Klara, says the Duck name was registered in 1980 by Manco, which Adweek described as doing business in 2014 as ShurTech, and that the trademark followed the need to differentiate a product that had never been patented and was made under many names.

The company’s own timeline fills in the steps. It says Manco began converting duct tape in its Ohio factory in 1973, that a complete package redesign in 1978 introduced the green brand colour still used today, and that Jack Kahl created a branded duct tape under the Duck and Duck Tape trademarks in 1980, when coloured rolls were also added. By 1984, the timeline says, the Duck logo and the Duck Tape name appeared on all of the company’s duct tape packaging, and a mascot called Manco T. Duck had been born. The logo was updated in 1985, the year Kahl’s son John Kahl joined the sales department, and the company moved its headquarters to Avon, Ohio, in 1996.

Manco did not stay independent. The Plain Dealer reported in June 2009 that Henkel of Düsseldorf, Germany, had completed its purchase of Manco in 1998; the brand’s timeline says that Jack Kahl retired in 2000 and John Kahl became chief executive, and that in 2003 Manco, Inc. changed its name to Henkel Consumer Adhesives, Inc.

A cartoon duck and a roll in every colour.

Two elements recur through the brand’s history: a cartoon bird and the colour of the roll. English Wikipedia describes the mark Manco launched as a yellow cartoon duck logo, and Adweek wrote in 2014 that Manco went so far as to develop a matching duck mascot for its packaging, drawn by a former Disney cartoonist. The brand’s timeline says the mascot, originally named Manco T. Duck, was renamed Trust E. Duck in 2002, and that the Duck logo was updated to its current form in 2003. The mascot’s name survives in the brand’s contests: on the 2026 results page of its prom contest, one of the special prizes is called Trust E’s Choice.

The roll itself is the second element. The brand’s timeline traces its range of colours to 1980, printed Duck Tape to 1997, starting with camouflage, and character tape to the years after 2009, beginning with a Hello Kitty design. It says sports-licensed tapes followed in 2010, NFL-licensed and glow-in-the-dark rolls in 2012, scented duct tape in 2014 and the translucent Duck Tape Transparent Tints in 2016. On the brand’s current website, Duck Tape sits beside moving and storage supplies, shelf liners, weatherization kits, painting tapes and craft and décor products, all under the Duck name.

The brand has also run contests built around making things from tape. Its timeline says its Stuck at Prom scholarship contest began in 2001; entrants make and wear prom dresses and tuxedos from Duck Brand duct tape or crafting tape and submit photographs, and the public votes on finalists. The contest was still running in 2026, when the brand announced winners in dress and tux categories. Adweek also described a Halloween contest, Stick or Treat, that rewarded costumes made from the tape.

The name also reached the town where the company is based. The brand’s timeline dates the Avon Heritage Duck Tape Festival to 2004, and the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram reported in June 2018 that Avon’s leaders had created the festival fifteen years earlier to celebrate the community’s heritage and the Duck Brand headquartered there. The paper described a three-day event over Father’s Day weekend at Veterans Memorial Park, with a Duck Tape Parade of floats built from duct tape and a Duck Tape Festival Fashion Show on the main stage.

Design and documentation.

Greeting cards, tape and notebooks are everyday objects that most people buy without much thought, and that is exactly why their packaging and covers have to work hard. A card is usually chosen in a few seconds at a rack, so the back of the card, where the publisher’s name and mark sit, becomes a quiet signature that travels with every one sold. A roll of tape is often bought from a peg or a shelf beside dozens of similar rolls, and the core, the label and the colour of the roll itself carry much of the name.

A notebook brand works differently again: its cover is handled every day for months, so a name printed on that cover is carried in bags, on desks and in classrooms long after it was bought. Across all three categories, the companies behind familiar names may have been bought, merged or renamed several times, and the products may be made far from where the name began.

Each guide in this group separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Shurtape brand since 2009.

The brand changed hands again in 2009. The Plain Dealer, in a report by Kathryn Kroll dated 2 June 2009, said Henkel had sold its Northeast Ohio consumer brands, including Duck Tape, together with its Avon facility, to Shurtape Technologies LLC of Hickory, North Carolina, a family-owned maker of industrial tapes that had supplied the Avon business for years. The paper said the local company had taken the new name ShurTech Brands, with John Kahl as chief executive, that its operations would stay at the same Avon site, and that the brands involved were Duck Tape, Painter’s Mate Green masking tape and the Easy Liner shelf liner. It added that a planned sale of the same assets to Innovative Brands Holdings of Phoenix, announced in early 2008, had not gone through.

English Wikipedia describes Shurtape as a company that grew out of the tape division of Shuford Mills, a textile manufacturer, and that is owned by the Shuford family; it places Shurtape’s headquarters in Hickory and the ShurTech subsidiary’s in Avon. Shurtape added the green painter’s tape FrogTape in 2010. According to the Duck Brand timeline, ShurTech Brands formally changed its name in 2020 to Shurtape Technologies’ Consumer & Craftsman Group, which continues to sell Duck products for do-it-yourself, crafting and home and office use. The brand’s website today carries a Shurtape Technologies copyright and offers country versions for the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands and France.

The Duck name sits apart from the generic phrase it plays on. “Duck tape” is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1899 and “duct tape” from 1965, English Wikipedia notes, and ShurTech’s marketing director, Shelley Price, told Adweek in 2014 that the product category is still called duct tape, while Duck Tape is the name of the brand.

For a design guide, Duck Tape shows how a pun, a mascot and a colour can turn a commodity on a hardware peg into a named product — compare Scotch, 3M’s tape brand, and Gorilla Glue. For this guide we use shelf green, duckling yellow and roll silver with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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