A Cincinnati soap works and a cherry-almond lotion.

Jergens takes its name from Andrew Jergens Sr., who, the company says, founded the Andrew Jergens Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1882 with Charles H. Geifus. English Wikipedia gives the same founders, place and year, and notes that the business was once known as the Jergens Soap Company. The brand’s website, now run as part of a Kao store, heads its history “From Cincinnati, with love.”

Soap came before lotion. The company says its opening product was a coconut soap, “specially formulated to perform in hard water.” The product that defines the brand arrived in 1901: a cherry-almond lotion, which the company says is now sold as Jergens Original Scent. The website’s current tagline, “Trusted for feel-good moisture since 1901,” dates the brand from that lotion rather than from the founding of the soap works in 1882.

The same year brought a second line of business. English Wikipedia’s article on the Woodbury Soap Company says that the firm, founded in Albany, New York, in 1870 by John H. Woodbury, became a subsidiary of the Andrew Jergens Company in 1901, and that its headquarters moved to Cincinnati. Woodbury’s Facial Soap became known for its advertising. In 1911 the J. Walter Thompson agency gave it the line “A Skin You Love To Touch,” which Wikipedia credits to the copywriter Helen Lansdowne Resor and says Woodbury kept using until the 1940s.

Woodbury’s advertising continued to draw on artists and photographers. Wikipedia reproduces a 1916 Woodbury advertisement featuring a painting by Alonzo Myron Kimball and a 1922 back-cover advertisement in Photoplay with artwork by Clarence F. Underwood, and it says that a 1936 Woodbury advertisement known as “The Sun Bath” was photographed by Edward Steichen. In the 1940s and 1950s, the same article says, Hollywood actresses including Lucille Ball, Judy Garland and Elizabeth Taylor appeared in the soap’s advertisements.

Radio, Burbank and a change of owner.

The Jergens name reached a national audience through broadcasting as well as print. English Wikipedia’s article on the columnist Walter Winchell says that in 1932 he moved to WJZ and the NBC Blue network for the Jergens Journal, a programme that put the brand’s name in its title. Wikipedia’s article on the company illustrates its history with a 1950 advertisement for Jergens Lotion from the film magazine Modern Screen.

Production spread beyond Ohio. Wikipedia says that around 1925 the company operated a soap factory on West Verdugo Avenue in Burbank, California, beside the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks, a site recorded in a 1920s photograph held by California State University, Northridge. That plant closed in October 1992, and production moved back to the company’s headquarters in Ohio.

Ownership left the founding family in 1970, when, Wikipedia says, American Brands, Inc. bought the company, ending the Jergens family’s connection to the brand. The company also tried new categories. From 1976 into the 1980s it produced a fragrant shampoo with a whole sentence for a name, Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific. In their 2011 book Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops?, quoted by Wikipedia, Gael Fashingbauer Cooper and Brian Bellmont describe its pop-art packaging, a deep-pink bottle with chubby multicoloured letters.

The lotion business faced new competition in the same decade. A history of Chesebrough-Pond’s in the International Directory of Company Histories, reproduced by FundingUniverse, says that in the 1970s Jergens was the established name in hand lotion when Chesebrough launched Vaseline Intensive Care lotion against it, presenting hand lotion as a product for all ages.

In 1988 the Japanese group Kao Corporation acquired the Andrew Jergens Company. Kao’s corporate history records the purchase and says the company was renamed Kao Brands Company in 2004. Kao lists Jergens among the overseas brands it brought into the group, alongside the German hair-care brand Guhl in 1979, Goldwell in 1989, John Frieda in 2002 and Molton Brown in 2005. Wikipedia, citing The New York Times of October 2005, says that in 2005 the brand drew wide attention with Natural Glow, a self-tanning lotion that gained attention after appearing on the television talk show Live with Regis and Kelly. Kao has owned Jergens since 1988.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all drugstore skin-care names: cleansers, lotions, creams and ointments sold from the same pharmacy and supermarket shelves. Most began with a single product, often a jar, a tube or a bottle of lotion, and grew into ranges that now sit inside much larger consumer-goods or pharmaceutical groups, sometimes after passing through several owners along the way.

On the shelf, these brands tend to speak a shared visual language. White or pale packaging, plain sans-serif type and short descriptive product names are common, alongside squat jars, pump bottles and squeezable tubes. Many ranges use colour codes to separate one product line from another, so that a band of blue, green or teal does much of the work a picture would do elsewhere. Because the same product is often sold in many countries, the brand name usually has to work on its own, in several languages, without a picture to help it.

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

A surname, a scent and a date.

The Jergens identity rests on three things the company itself keeps in view: the founder’s surname, the cherry-almond scent and the year 1901. The name has been on the company since 1882 and has outlasted the founding family’s ownership, a period inside American Brands from 1970 and ownership by Kao since 1988. The scent links today’s Original Scent lotion to the 1901 formula, and the date appears in the website’s tagline, “Trusted for feel-good moisture since 1901.”

The brand’s history is also a history of advertising formats. The company’s soap stablemate Woodbury carried the slogan “A Skin You Love To Touch,” written at J. Walter Thompson, and ran painted and photographic advertisements by illustrators and by Edward Steichen. Jergens put its own name on a radio programme, the Jergens Journal, presented by Walter Winchell from 1932, and advertised its lotion in the film magazines of the mid-century. In the 1970s Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific showed the company working in a louder, pop-art register, with a sentence for a product name and multicoloured lettering on a pink bottle.

Place matters in the story too. The company still frames its origins in Cincinnati, the city where Andrew Jergens and Charles Geifus set up their soap works and where production returned from Burbank in 1992. Under Kao, Jergens sits within a group that also owns Curél, John Frieda, Goldwell, Guhl and Molton Brown, and its US website is now part of a store selling several Kao brands together.

For a design guide, Jergens shows how a nineteenth-century surname and a single signature scent can carry a lotion brand through a change of category, two outside owners and a long run of changing advertising media, from print and radio to television. Compare it with Curél, its Kao stablemate, and Vaseline, its long-standing rival in hand lotion. For this guide we use cherry red and almond on lotion cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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