Bound Brook, asphalt and a coined word.

The company now known simply as GAF traces its start to 1886, when the Standard Paint Company was set up in Bound Brook, New Jersey. Fire-insurance maps of Bound Brook from 1890 onwards show the works, and a trade journal of 1904 describes the business. On its own history page, GAF says the company was founded in a remodelled sawmill and that one of its early employees was a young chemist, William Griscom, who worked on asphalt compounds. The firm first made waterproof and insulating paints and varnishes.

Its most important product of those early years was a roll of ready-to-lay asphalt roofing sold under the coined name Ruberoid, a word meant to suggest the material’s likeness to rubber. GAF dates the product to 1892; an issue of the Commercial and Financial Chronicle from 1921 and English Wikipedia give the trademark as 1893, and the Electrical Review of February 1891 reports the material on show at an exhibition in Providence, Rhode Island. GAF says that by 1904 the company had worked out a method of embedding coloured granules in the asphalt coating, and that in 1912 it introduced individually cut asphalt shingles made from rag felt dipped in asphalt.

The product name eventually became the company name. In 1921, as the Electrical World reported that April, the Standard Paint Company renamed itself The Ruberoid Co. According to the Commercial and Financial Chronicle of July 1935, the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange that summer. GAF’s history page adds that in 1933 Ruberoid introduced interlocking asphalt shingles under the name Tite-On.

Those three letters came from a different industry. General Aniline & Film was a chemicals, dyes and photographic-film business, and The Oregonian reported on 2 March 1967 that the boards of the two companies had approved a merger. A year later, according to The Sunday Oregonian of 12 May 1968, General Aniline & Film changed its name to GAF Corporation at its annual meeting in Portland on 23 April. The roofing business that had begun in Bound Brook was from then on part of a company whose initials referred to aniline dye and film.

Timberline, a new chairman and a private parent.

GAF’s best-known shingle name arrived in the same year as the merger. GAF says that in 1967 a Ruberoid engineer, Phil Bottoli, laminated two strip shingles together to make a thicker shingle, which was sold as Timberline. The name has been extended many times since: GAF says a granule technique introduced in 1991 led to its “High Definition” shingles, Roofing Contractor reported the launch of Timberline HDZ with a nailing feature called LayerLock in January 2020, and the same magazine covered the relaunch of the Ultra High Definition line as Timberline UHDZ in February 2023.

For a period the company was much broader than roofing. GAF’s own history page says that in the 1970s and 1980s it made film and cameras and was the manufacturer of the View-Master stereoscopic viewer. In 1983 a new board was formed and Samuel J. Heyman became chairman and chief executive, according to a 2009 Harvard Law School notice. In 1985 GAF bid for the chemicals group Union Carbide; The New York Times reported in January 1986 that the bid was at a crossroads after Union Carbide restructured, and GAF withdrew. GAF says Heyman’s period in charge brought heavy investment in its factory network.

The roofing side then grew by acquisition. Roofing Contractor reported in April 2007 the details of the merger between GAF and Elk Corporation, a maker of residential roofing, and GAF says it acquired Quest Construction Products, including United Coatings, in 2015. Today GAF operates as a subsidiary of Standard Industries, a privately held industrial company headquartered in New York City whose chief executive is David Winter. Standard Industries’ other businesses include the European roofing group BMI, formed from Icopal and Braas Monier, the waterproofing maker Siplast and, since September 2021, the chemicals company W. R. Grace. In January 2019 Standard launched GAF Energy to make solar roofing, and the two businesses later introduced the Timberline Solar product together.

GAF’s headquarters are in Parsippany, New Jersey, and in June 2025 ROI-NJ reported the appointment of John Barkhouse as chief executive. On where its products are made, the documented record is of American factories: Shaw Local News reported in July 2022 that GAF had chosen Peru, Illinois, for a new commercial roofing plant, Fox Business reported a new factory in Valdosta, Georgia, that September, and Roofing Contractor reported in March 2024 plans for a residential shingle plant in Kansas. GAF products are sold through distributors and retailers such as ABC Supply, The Home Depot and Lowe’s, and installed by independent roofing contractors.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make the outside of a house: the shingles and membranes on its roof, the boards and panels on its walls and the decking and railings around it. Roofing, siding and decking names sit at many different points in the building trade, from businesses that grew out of a single product or family firm to names that now belong to much larger groups selling a whole range of exterior materials.

Most homeowners meet these brands only a few times, and often through someone else: a contractor, a dealer, a sample board or a colour card. A brand’s identity is therefore carried less by a single product than by its name, its product families, its colour ranges and the programmes it runs for the people who install its materials. Ownership can change several times while the name on the bundle stays the same.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its names and product lines have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Three letters, a shingle name and a contractor ladder.

The visible identity of GAF rests on two layers of naming. The corporate mark is a set of initials whose original meaning, General Aniline & Film, has nothing to do with roofs; the product names underneath it, above all Timberline, are what appear on bundles at a builders’ merchant and in a contractor’s quote. The older layer, the coined word Ruberoid, carried the business for more than half a century before the initials did, and the company still tells its own story through it on its history page, from the 1890s asphalt roll to the shingle of 1967.

A third layer is the contractor programme. GAF grades the independent roofers who install its products into tiers — GAF Certified, Certified Plus and Master Elite — and ties its enhanced warranties to those tiers: System Plus, Silver Pledge and Golden Pledge, with a President’s Club warranty for award-winning firms. In 2020 the company also launched GAF Community Matters, reported by Roofing Contractor that January, which includes the GAF Roofing Academy training scheme covered by Fast Company in March 2020.

For a design guide, GAF shows how a company can carry initials from a merger that predates its current business, alongside a long-running product name and a ladder of contractor credentials. Compare it with Owens Corning, whose roofing competes on the same American roofs under a colour rather than initials, and James Hardie, another building-materials name sold to homeowners through installers. For this guide we use red, slate and granule grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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