A pet brand from a bleach company.

Fresh Step is a cat-litter brand of The Clorox Company, the American consumer-goods group headquartered in Oakland, California. Clorox began on 3 May 1913 as the Electro-Alkaline Company, when five founders set up a factory on the east side of San Francisco Bay to make bleach, according to English Wikipedia. The investor William Murray took over in 1916, and his wife, Annie Murray, helped build demand by giving away sample bottles, the article says. The business became the Clorox Chemical Company in 1928 and The Clorox Company after Procter & Gamble bought it in 1957 — a purchase the US Supreme Court ordered undone in 1967, with the divestiture completed on 1 January 1969.

The litter is a long way from that bleach bottle, but it has sat inside Clorox for decades. The earliest capture of freshstep.com in the Internet Archive, from December 1996, is a page titled “Pet Home Page – The Clorox Company”, carrying a 1996 Clorox copyright line. Today the footer of the brand’s website says FRESH STEP is a registered trademark of The Clorox Pet Products Company, and English Wikipedia lists Fresh Step alongside Scoop Away and Ever Clean among Clorox’s pet products.

Fresh Step was already a Clorox brand when the company made its big move into litter by acquisition. In 1999 Clorox bought First Brands, the former consumer-products division of Union Carbide, which brought it Glad bags, Handi-Wipes and STP, according to English Wikipedia. In a post marking the deal’s 25th anniversary, published on 14 March 2024, Clorox said First Brands’ portfolio had also included Scoop Away and Jonny Cat litters. Jonny Cat and STP were later sold, the company said, while Glad and Scoop Away remain large parts of its business; the same post says the deal brought Clorox a litter plant at Spring Hill, Kansas.

A West Virginia plant and a licensed name.

Clorox has since added litter capacity in the east. It opened a cat-litter plant at Martinsburg, in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle, in October 2022, West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported on 24 October that year. The broadcaster said the plant makes Fresh Step and Scoop Away litter, and would reach full capacity in early 2023; English Wikipedia describes the facility as built to support the growth of Clorox’s cat-litter business. The plant joined two Kingsford charcoal plants that Clorox runs elsewhere in the state. Clorox’s 2024 anniversary post describes Martinsburg as a recent addition, made “to better serve pet parents and their cats”.

Some of the names on the bags belong to another company. The footer of freshstep.com says the Febreze and Gain names are used under licence from Procter & Gamble or its affiliates. That links a Clorox litter to the company that owned Clorox in the 1960s — and with which, English Wikipedia records, Clorox formed a joint venture for Glad in 2002. The website also lists ranges including Extreme Clump, Light Weight, Clean Paws and Heavy Duty.

The brand’s current voice is warm and joking. The website’s headline asks “Is it crazy, or is it love?” and says Fresh Step celebrates “the little ‘crazy’ things cat parents do, because that’s what love looks like”; its newsletter sign-up plays on a “tailing” list. Fresh Step also says it works with Best Friends Animal Society in support of that organisation’s mission to end pet homelessness, and that it has donated litter to the society’s sanctuary.

Litter as a brand.

The seven brands in this group are all cat-litter names: World’s Best Cat Litter, Tidy Cats, Fresh Step, Cat’s Best, Catit, PrettyLitter and Dr. Elsey’s. Cat-litter brands in general sit at many different points in the pet trade, from names that still carry a founder’s story to labels that now belong to much larger consumer-goods or pet-care groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a supermarket aisle to a pet shop or an online subscription.

A litter brand’s identity is usually carried less by the product itself than by a bag or box, a name and the material it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its litter is actually made.

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

One brand in a family of brands.

Fresh Step’s identity has to work inside a large house. The brand’s website links to Clorox’s “Family of Brands”, and that family, as English Wikipedia lists it, runs from the original bleach to Glad bags, Kingsford charcoal, Pine-Sol, Burt’s Bees and, in the Americas, Brita water filters. It also includes Hidden Valley ranch dressing, which Clorox added during its expansion of the 1970s and 1980s.

The parent’s own mark has a long memory. English Wikipedia says the original Clorox packaging used a diamond-shaped logo, and that a diamond has appeared in Clorox branding in one form or another ever since. Fresh Step refers to that parent through its trademark footer and a link to the wider family, while the litter itself is sold under its own name.

Within litter, Clorox now runs two names side by side from the same West Virginia plant: Fresh Step, which was a Clorox brand by the mid-1990s, and Scoop Away, which arrived with First Brands. Each keeps its own name, website and range, so the brand is carried by the product names and the tone of voice as much as by the corporate parent, which appears in the small print rather than on the front.

For a design guide, Fresh Step shows how a pet brand can live inside a cleaning-products group and borrow scent names from another company under licence. Compare Tidy Cats, another American litter brand, and Hidden Valley, a Clorox food brand. For this guide we use a deep teal, a fresh green and white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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