Donated goods, mended and sold in Boston’s South End.

Goodwill began in Boston in 1902. The International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, volume 66, 2004) says it was founded that year by the Rev. Edgar James Helms, a Methodist minister who came to head the multidenominational Henry Morgan Memorial Chapel in the slums of Boston’s South End. Boston University’s own timeline dates the start to 28 February 1902 and describes Helms, one of its graduates, as teaching applied Christianity at its School of Theology at the time. English Wikipedia calls the business he started Morgan Memorial, run as part of his ministry.

The directory says Helms issued an appeal for used clothing and hired poor seamstresses to repair it before selling it cheaply to people in need; a donation of burlap bags from a coffee-importing firm let the system grow to take in furniture and other household items for repair and resale. Wikipedia describes the same cycle: Helms and his congregation collected discarded household goods and clothing from wealthier parts of the city, then trained and hired unemployed or poor people to mend them. The Labor Arts exhibition “One Hundred Years of Goodwill”, mounted for the centenary in May 2002 with the Tamiment Library at New York University, sums up the philosophy as “a hand up, not a handout”: collect goods from the well-off, train and hire people to repair them, and sell them in retail stores.

The work took a formal name in Boston as the Morgan Memorial Industries and Stores, the directory says. It also records criticism from some professional social workers of the day, and that the Unitarian church eventually withdrew its support, after which Helms found sponsorship from the Methodist Church.

A Brooklyn name, a national network and a world tour.

The name itself came from New York. Wikipedia says that in 1915 Helms had representatives of a workshop mission in Brooklyn visit Boston to learn his methods, and was in turn persuaded that “Goodwill Industries”, the name of the Brooklyn workshop, was preferable to Morgan Memorial. The Boston operation became Morgan Memorial Goodwill Industries; the directory likewise says the Goodwill Industries name was born in Brooklyn. By 1919, it records, Goodwill training shops and stores had opened in Cleveland, Denver, Los Angeles and Brookline, Massachusetts, and it quotes the Buffalo organisation’s 1930 description of its work as “Jobs from Junk — Wages from Waste”.

Helms took the idea abroad in 1926, the directory says, on a world tour that included Europe, the Middle East, Japan, Korea, Ceylon and the Philippines, though an international department was not formed until 1969. It notes a feature in the Saturday Evening Post in 1953 that listed clothing, shoes, furniture, repairable household appliances, toys and books as the main donations, and dates the organisation’s change of name to Goodwill Industries International Inc. to 1994.

Goodwill is a network rather than a single company. Wikipedia describes it as a group of independent, community-based organisations, each running its own regional stores and job-training programmes, with Morgan Memorial Goodwill Industries still operating in Boston where it began. Donated goods that cannot be sold in a regular store go, Wikipedia says, to a “Goodwill Outlet” or “Bargain Store”, where items are mostly sold by weight. Online selling followed in 1999: Wikipedia credits George Kessinger, then head of Goodwill of Orange County, with starting the auction site shopgoodwill, and the directory dates Goodwill’s e-commerce website to the same year. Wikipedia adds that a group of local Goodwill organisations launched the online marketplace GoodwillFinds in October 2022 as a separate nonprofit, and that it closed in 2025.

Design and documentation.

Charity identities live in public in a way few commercial marks do. An emblem has to read at the size of a lapel pin and at the size of a banner across a street, and it often has to survive being redrawn by volunteers with whatever paint, felt or tape is to hand. That is why so many charity marks rely on one strong shape and one strong colour: a simple silhouette holds up when it is stencilled onto a collection tin, printed on a sticker or stitched onto a cap.

Collection boxes and tins are small pieces of packaging design. They carry the mark, a short line of copy and a slot, and they are seen for a second or two as someone walks past. Volunteer uniforms do similar work at human scale: a coloured vest, a lanyard or a printed T-shirt tells a passer-by who to approach at an event or a shop counter.

Campaign posters are where charity identities stretch. Photography, hand lettering and bold headlines change from season to season, while the emblem, the name and the core colour stay fixed in a corner. Reading a charity brand well means noticing which elements move and which never do.

One letter drawn twice.

The Goodwill mark is a single letter. English Wikipedia describes the logo as a stylised letter “g” resembling a smiling face, designed by Joseph Selame in 1968. Goodwill NYNJ, one of the local organisations, gave the background on the logo’s 50th anniversary on 29 March 2018: in 1968 Morgan Memorial Goodwill Industries in Boston began looking for an updated visual for the brand and chose Selame to create a logo representing the many faces of self-sustaining and self-respecting people within Goodwill. He used a lowercase “g” twice, Goodwill NYNJ wrote, so that it serves as the letter itself and as a smile — the reason the mark is known as the “Smiling G”. An obituary by the design writer Steven Heller, reprinted in April 2011, credits Selame with logos and identities for companies and nonprofit organisations, among them Apple Bank, Goodwill Industries, Kodak and CVS Pharmacy.

The Labor Arts exhibition of 2002 drew on Goodwill’s own collection of graphic art, and describes the centennial artwork as an inclusive image showing elderly people, family groups, a uniformed officer and people of different ethnicities, abilities and jobs. The exhibition’s curators add that images from the organisation’s past play an important role in that centenary artwork, alongside the self-help message Helms set out in Boston.

Goodwill NYNJ noted in 2018 that the logo had appeared on billboards and television, including twice on the game show Jeopardy!.

For a design guide, Goodwill shows how a single lowercase letter, drawn so that one shape reads as both a “g” and a face, can hold together a network of independent organisations under one name that began as a Brooklyn workshop’s title. Compare it with The Salvation Army, whose charity shops are known by nicknames in several countries, and Habitat for Humanity, whose ReStores resell donated building materials. For this guide we use smile blue, sky blue and tag white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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