A Chicago trip, a pair of buildings and a borrowed name.

Goodyear begins in 1898 with a purchase its founder had not planned. On the history page of its corporate website, the company says F.A. “Frank” Seiberling travelled to Chicago on business that year and came away as the owner of two empty factories on Market Street in Akron, Ohio. With his brother C.W. “Charley” Seiberling, the company says, he began making rubber goods: horseshoe pads, poker chips, and carriage and bicycle tires.

The name was borrowed. The brothers did not call the business after themselves but after Charles Goodyear, the chemist and inventor whom the company credits with discovering, in 1839, that natural rubber mixed with sulphur and heated became pliable, resilient and durable — the process later called vulcanisation. The company says the Seiberlings were inspired by his spirit of discovery.

Akron was a deliberate setting. Goodyear says the manufacturing town was already home to other rubber companies in 1898, with a workforce in place and convenient shipping by the Little Cuyahoga River and the B&O Railroad line. The city later became known, the company says, as the “Rubber Capital of the World.”

The automobile changed the product. Goodyear says that in 1901 it introduced a straight-sided tire held to the rim by a braided wire bead, designed to be easier to mount and remove. English Wikipedia records that Frank Seiberling supplied racing tires to Henry Ford that year. In 1908, the company says, it set up a Development Department and launched an all-weather tread made of diamond-shaped blocks, a pattern that it says remained its leading design into the 1940s.

Growth followed quickly. According to English Wikipedia, Goodyear bought an existing rubber factory in Bowmanville, Ontario, in 1910, taking its manufacturing beyond the United States, and in 1916 acquired land near Phoenix for growing long-staple cotton to reinforce its tires; that land later became the towns of Goodyear and Litchfield Park in Arizona. The company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 5 August 1927, Wikipedia says, and was a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from 1930 to 1999.

A messenger’s foot and an airship over the stadium.

The mark at the centre of the brand is the Wingfoot. Goodyear says the winged foot in its corporate logo is the foot of Mercury, the Roman messenger of the gods and patron of travel and commerce, and that Frank Seiberling was inspired by a statuette of the deity. The name recurs across the group: English Wikipedia lists a subsidiary is called Wingfoot Commercial Tire Systems, and its airship base outside Akron is Wingfoot Lake.

The second icon flies. Goodyear says it began building airships for the military during the First World War and, in 1925, began producing blimps for its marketing. On its blimp website, the company describes the Goodyear Blimp as “an icon in motion.”

The fleet has changed shape. English Wikipedia says Goodyear began retiring its GZ-20 airships in 2014 and replacing them with the semi-rigid Zeppelin NT, and that Wingfoot One was christened on 23 August 2014 at the Wingfoot Lake Airship Hangar near Akron. The same source names the fleet as Wingfoot One, Wingfoot Two and Wingfoot Three.

The airship skill also reached New York’s streets. Goodyear says that from 1928 through 1980 it made balloons for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, including characters such as Superman, Mickey Mouse and Snoopy.

Racing is the third strand. The company says that when Henry Ford wanted to test his cars by racing in the early 1900s, he called Goodyear, and English Wikipedia lists Goodyear as a tire supplier for NASCAR, NHRA drag racing and sports car racing, and in earlier decades for Formula One and the Indianapolis 500.

Colour completes the picture. English Wikipedia notes that Goodyear F.C., a football club formed by workers from the company’s former factory in Lurgan, Northern Ireland, plays in “Goodyear’s classic blue and yellow colours” and uses the Goodyear logo as its badge.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all tyre names. A tyre brand reaches people in an unusual way: its name is moulded into the rubber itself, so the lettering on a sidewall, the shape of a tread and the colours of a shop sign or a racing livery often do more of the identity work than any single advertisement. Many of these names have also travelled far from where they began, through mergers, new owners and factories in other countries.

That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started the business, which companies came together to form it, who owns it now, where its head office sits and where its tyres are made. A brand that began as a repair business, a rubber works or a family firm can end up as one name among several inside a much larger group, while still carrying the mark it was given decades earlier.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its factories and the history of its marks — and attributes each claim to the source it comes from.

A family of tire brands under one Wingfoot.

Goodyear has collected other names along the way. On its history page, the company lists Kelly tires as a sister brand from 1935, Fulda from 1962, majority control of Poland’s Dębica from 1995 and Dunlop through a joint venture from 1999, and it says it also sells tires under the Sava brand in Europe. English Wikipedia adds that in January 2025 Goodyear announced the sale of the Dunlop brand to Sumitomo Rubber Industries.

A further change came in 2021. English Wikipedia records that Goodyear announced on 22 February 2021 an agreement to acquire the Cooper Tire & Rubber Company, and that the transaction closed in June 2021. Goodyear has owned Cooper Tires since then.

Home has stayed in Akron. English Wikipedia says the original Akron plant was turned into a Technical Center for research and design in 1978, and that a new headquarters complex opened in the city in 2013. Abroad, the same source records a plant investment in Dalian, China, in 1994, alongside the earlier factory in Canada.

For a design guide, Goodyear shows how a founder’s chosen symbol — a winged foot borrowed from Roman myth — and an advertising airship can carry a brand further than any single product. Compare Bridgestone, the Japanese tire maker that bought another Akron rubber company, Firestone, in 1988, and Cooper Tires, now part of the Goodyear group. For this guide we use a deep blue, a warm yellow and a navy with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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