A household-products company makes a shave gel.

Edge is a shave gel that began at S. C. Johnson & Son, which Reuters described in 2009 as a privately held company. Wikipedia, citing The New York Times of 25 March 1970, says S. C. Johnson launched the brand nationally in the United States on 24 March 1970, with an advertising campaign behind the launch. The product was a gel rather than a foam or a cream, designed to foam after it left the can.

That idea is spelled out in the patent behind it. Titled “Package containing a post-foaming gel,” the patent names James A. Monson as inventor and S. C. Johnson as its original assignee; Google Patents gives its priority date as 13 November 1967 and its publication date as 17 November 1970, a few months after the national launch.

The name is a single short word, Edge. S. C. Johnson built a range around the original formula over the following decades. Wikipedia lists the line as including Sensitive Skin, Extra Moisturizing, Extra Protection and Soothing Aloe, among other variants, and the same names still appear on the brand’s current product pages.

Rivals followed. Wikipedia, citing the Chicago Tribune of 26 July 1983, says Gillette introduced a gel version of its Foamy shaving cream in 1983 to compete with Edge. S. C. Johnson went to court over the gel patent in the 1980s; Wikipedia, citing the court records and a 1989 report in The New York Times, says the company won infringement cases against Carter-Wallace and against the Gillette Company over gel versions of their own shaving products.

From S. C. Johnson to Energizer, then Edgewell.

Edge changed hands in 2009. Reuters reported on 11 May 2009 that Energizer Holdings, the St. Louis company best known for its batteries, planned to buy S. C. Johnson’s Edge and Skintimate brands, adding shaving creams and gels to its Schick-Wilkinson Sword razor business. Energizer said it aimed to market Edge and Skintimate together with its razors, which included Quattro. Reuters noted that Energizer, a company with a record of expanding through acquisitions, had itself entered the razor business by buying Schick-Wilkinson Sword. Wikipedia says S. C. Johnson sold the brands in order to concentrate on household chemicals and fragrances.

Six years later the shaving business moved again, this time without a sale. On 20 February 2015 Energizer Holdings announced the names of the two companies it would become after a separation targeted for completion by 1 July 2015. The household-products division, which made the batteries, would keep the Energizer name and logo. The personal-care division, which held the razors and the shave gels, would become Edgewell Personal Care, an independent company. Wikipedia gives Edgewell’s founding date as 1 July 2015 and its headquarters as Shelton, Connecticut. Edgewell has owned Edge since that separation in 2015, after Energizer had owned it from 2009.

The 2015 announcement also explained the new company name. It said “Edgewell” was a newly coined word made from two familiar terms. “Edge,” it said, expressed the drive to be on the leading edge of innovation and evoked the company’s shaving business, “which is literally about putting an edge on blades.” “Well” stood for well-being and for the promise that products would be well designed and well made. The release added that the Edgewell logo would be accompanied by a hummingbird symbol in a fresh aqua blue, a bird the release called a challenger of the natural world.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell razors, shaving creams, gels and depilatories, the everyday products of the bathroom shelf. Shaving and hair-removal brands in general are bought often and quickly, so their identity has to work at arm’s length, on a crowded shelf, through a name, a colour and a familiar shape of can, tube or handle.

Much of that identity is carried by packaging and advertising rather than by a single logo. A can of shaving cream or gel is a cylinder that can be printed all the way round; a razor is a handle and a cartridge that change shape from one generation to the next; a depilatory is a tube or bottle that sits beside skin creams. Slogans and jingles belong to that identity too, and several of these names have passed between owners over the decades, so the company on the back of the pack may not be the one that first put the name on the front.

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

A gel brand on a razor company’s shelf.

Today Edge is sold as part of Edgewell’s shaving family. On Schick’s US website, Edge appears among the men’s brands alongside Schick and Wilkinson Sword, while Skintimate, the women’s shave-gel brand that came from S. C. Johnson in the same 2009 deal, sits among the women’s brands. The brand page opens with the line “Shaving just got a whole lot cooler,” introducing a Cooling Shave Gel with a eucalyptus and tea-tree fragrance and a matching Edge+ post-shave lotion.

The current range keeps the long-running names and adds new ones. Alongside Sensitive Skin, Extra Moisturizing, Ultra Sensitive and Soothing Aloe gels, the page lists a Cedarwood & Shea Butter gel and an Edge Sensitive face wash and face moisturiser, taking the name beyond the shave itself. The variant names follow one pattern: each describes either a skin type, such as Sensitive or Ultra Sensitive, or an ingredient or scent, such as Soothing Aloe or Cedarwood & Shea Butter, and the brand name stays in front of each one. The Edge+ name on the post-shave lotion extends the same word with a single symbol. The range is presented on Schick’s US website, which Wikipedia also gives as the brand’s official address. The copy is informal and direct. Of its Sensitive Shave Gel the brand says, “You don’t mess with perfection. That’s why we’d never change a molecule in our most popular shave gel.”

For a design guide, Edge shows how a one-word product name can travel through three owners and still read as itself: a short name, a can, and variant names that carry the range. Compare Schick and Barbasol. For this guide we use gel blue, graphite navy and silver with a sturdy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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