The glue began as a by-product of dairy.

Elmer’s is a glue brand that grew out of a dairy business. English Wikipedia’s article on Elmer’s Products traces it to Borden, the company Gail Borden founded on 11 May 1857. In 1929, Wikipedia says, Borden bought the Casein Company of America, a maker of glues made from casein, a by-product of milk. That purchase put Borden into adhesives, and after the Second World War the company expanded into synthetic resin glues.

The consumer glue arrived in 1947. Wikipedia says Elmer’s Glue-All, a multipurpose white glue, was introduced that year, and that the product first appeared under the name Cascorez Glue, when it still contained casein from dairy milk. Over the second half of the twentieth century, Wikipedia says, synthetic glue became cheaper and more consistent from bottle to bottle, and the article says Elmer’s does not currently use animals, animal parts or milk to make its glue. Glue-All is described there as a PVA-based synthetic glue.

The early packaging was simple. According to Wikipedia, the glue was sold in a glass bottle with a wooden applicator, like a lolly stick, attached with a rubber band. Consumer feedback, the article says, pointed to the need for an easier way to apply it, and in 1962 the company introduced a squeeze bottle with a twistable orange cap. Wikipedia says that design is still in use and is a trademark of Elmer’s Products, which makes the orange cap one of the most direct links between the brand’s identity and the object in the hand.

The name came from the dairy side of Borden. Wikipedia’s article on Elsie the Cow says the cartoon cow was created in 1936 by an advertising team headed by David William Reid, and that her mate, Elmer the Bull, followed in 1940. The Elmer’s Products article says Elmer was designed by Reid, was a familiar household name through the 1940s and appeared alongside Elsie and their cartoon children in many Borden campaigns.

From the bull to the classroom.

Elmer moved from the dairy cases to the glue aisle in 1951. Wikipedia says that was the year Elmer the Bull was officially chosen as the marketing symbol for all adhesives in the Borden line, and that his portrait has appeared on Elmer’s packaging ever since. The Elsie the Cow article describes the same move from the other side, saying Elmer was lent to Borden’s then chemical division as the mascot for Elmer’s Products. The brand name and the mascot are therefore the same character, and a cartoon figure from Borden’s dairy advertising became the face of its glue.

The range then widened towards schools and the home. Wikipedia says that over the following decades Elmer’s added adhesive products for school and home along with hardware sealants, compounds and caulks. In 1968 the company introduced Elmer’s School Glue, a white glue made to wash out of clothes; Wikipedia says Glue-All and School Glue later came to contain the same ingredients while keeping their different packaging. In the 1970s Elmer’s began marketing Krazy Glue, a cyanoacrylate instant adhesive that Wikipedia says was introduced to the North American market in 1973, and in 1989 Borden and Toagosei America formed a joint venture to make and sell adhesives under the Krazy Glue and Aron Alpha names.

Classrooms shaped later formats too. Wikipedia says Elmer’s introduced glue sticks in 1983 in response to teacher requests for an easier, less messy way to bond paper, and that in 1991 it moved into children’s arts and crafts with GluColors, coloured glues designed for children. In 2013, according to the same article, the company introduced Elmer’s School Glue Naturals, made mainly from plants such as corn. Wikipedia also lists wood fillers, display boards and paint markers among the company’s products.

Design and documentation.

Glue and correction products are among the most ordinary things in an office, a classroom or a craft drawer, and the brands behind them usually reach people through a tube, a stick, a bottle or a small dispenser rather than through anything grander. Many of these names began with a single product made to solve a particular, everyday problem, and some have since become shorthand for the whole kind of product they sell.

A brand in this category is often carried more by its name, its packaging colours and the shape of its container than by any single advertisement, and the company behind the name may have changed hands several times, been folded into a larger stationery or household group, or moved where its products are made. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and how its packaging and name have changed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and the way its labels have developed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Borden to Newell.

Elmer’s left Borden as Borden itself was broken up. Wikipedia says Kohlberg Kravis Roberts bought Borden in 1994 and that Elmer’s was then launched as a separate operating company focused on adhesives and related products for school, crafts, hardware and home repair; the article’s summary dates the spin-off from Borden to 1999. The Elsie the Cow article describes the wider decline of Borden from the 1990s to 2001, after which the cow lived on with the company’s partial successors in dairy and food.

Elmer’s then grew by acquisition. Wikipedia says it bought Ross Products in 2000, moving further into creative arts and crafts, and was then bought by a private equity firm and merged with Hunt Corporation, maker of the X-Acto and Boston brands; the article’s history section places that deal in 2002, while its summary says the company was acquired in 2003 by the Berwind Corporation, a privately held investment firm.

The latest change came in 2015. Wikipedia says Newell Rubbermaid announced a deal to acquire Elmer’s Products on 5 October 2015, and a Newell Rubbermaid press release issued in Atlanta on 22 October 2015 announced that it had completed the acquisition from an affiliate of Berwind Corporation, naming the Elmer’s, Krazy Glue and X-Acto brands. Newell Rubbermaid became Newell Brands after its combination with Jarden in 2016, so Elmer’s now sits in the same group as the Sharpie and Paper Mate writing brands.

For a design guide, Elmer’s shows how a mascot and a cap colour can carry a brand for decades: a cartoon bull lent from a dairy campaign still signs the label, and an orange twist cap introduced in 1962 does much of the recognition work on a classroom shelf. Compare a Newell stablemate in our Liquid Paper brand guidelines and another American adhesive brand in our Gorilla Glue brand guidelines. For this guide we use cap orange, glue white and classroom blue with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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