A family company that put its brands ahead of its own name.

Just For Men belongs to a company most shoppers have never heard of. English Wikipedia describes Combe Incorporated as an American personal-care company founded in 1949 by Ivan Combe, based in White Plains, New York, and owned by the Combe family. Its brands include Just For Men, Grecian Formula, Sea-Bond and Vagisil, and Wikipedia notes that Combe promoted those brand names rather than the company name. The company history published by FundingUniverse, drawn from the International Directory of Company Histories (volume 72, 2005), makes the same point: Combe was little known because it preferred to promote its brands rather than its corporate name.

That history fills in the early years. It says the business was incorporated in 1949 as the Eastco Chemical Company — the name combined “East”, for its location, with “Co” for Combe — and that it started in offices in Manhattan before Ivan Combe, tired of commuting, moved them to White Plains in 1952. Wikipedia gives the same move. In the 1950s the company built its reputation on the acne cream Clearasil, which it later sold; Wikipedia dates the sale to 1961, and FundingUniverse to 1960. The money and experience from that sale, the FundingUniverse history says, set Combe up to look for its next product.

That product was a men’s hair colour, and it came to Combe from outside. According to FundingUniverse, a preparation called Grecian Formula 16 had been struggling to find distribution as a women’s product when its owners approached Combe, which took it on under a licensing deal in 1961. Combe marketed it to men, and it became the company’s foundation in the category; Wikipedia still lists Grecian Formula among Combe’s brands. The same history says that in 1971 Combe hired Dr. Herbert Lapidus to head a research and development unit, and that he would play a major part in the company’s new products over the next three decades.

Manufacturing followed. Wikipedia says Combe opened its own plant in Rantoul, Illinois, in June 1974, and FundingUniverse adds a second site in Puerto Rico, opened in March 1980; in 2005 the company maintained manufacturing facilities in Illinois and Puerto Rico. In the same period, the history says, the founder’s son Chris Combe joined the company in 1975 to head a new international division, and sales offices opened in countries including the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Japan and Australia.

Gray Fighter, a five-minute colour and a beard gel.

Just For Men came out of a product that never reached the shelves. The FundingUniverse history says that after Grecian Formula 16’s ingredients came under review by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1978, Lapidus began developing a gradual colouring agent based on peroxide. The first result, named Gray Fighter, took five minutes to apply but was too complicated for consumers, and it was never introduced. Lapidus reworked the dye into a five-minute, single-application product, and the company named it Just For Men.

Both FundingUniverse and Wikipedia date the launch to 1987. The name did the positioning work in three words: the product was a hair colour, and it was addressed to men. The FundingUniverse history says Just For Men took some sales from Grecian Formula 16 but helped to open up a larger market, as more men chose to colour grey hair.

The range then widened. According to FundingUniverse, Combe added a gel to colour beards and mustaches in 1993, introduced a five-minute permanent colour for women called Just 5 in 1997, and in 1999 used the older name for Grecian 5, another five-minute permanent colour. Wikipedia lists the Just For Men lines in 2026 as including Original Formula, Control GX, AutoStop, Mustache & Beard and Touch of Gray, alongside beard-care products, and says the colours run across more than a dozen shades from Sandy Blond to Jet Black.

Ownership has stayed in the family. Wikipedia says Ivan Combe died in 2000, citing his obituary in The New York Times of 17 January 2000, and that his son Chris succeeded him. In October 2002, Wikipedia records, Combe acquired J.B. Williams, adding Brylcreem, Aqua Velva and Cepacol to its brands; the FundingUniverse history dates the deal to 2004. In December 2020 Combe announced a majority investment in the hair-care brand Virtue Labs. Combe has owned Just For Men since 1987.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are mass hair-care, dandruff-shampoo and home hair-colour names, the kind sold from drugstore and supermarket shelves rather than salons. Many of them have passed through several owners, from the families or chemists who started them to large consumer-goods groups and, in some cases, to smaller companies that buy older brands and keep them on sale.

On a crowded shelf, a hair-care brand is usually recognised before it is read. A bottle colour, the shape of a cap, a logo set in a particular letterform or a slogan repeated over decades can carry the name further than any single formula. Home hair colour adds its own visual language: the box with a model’s face, the shade chart with numbered and named colours, and the promise that the result will match the picture.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded the brand, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its packaging and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Two former athletes, a mock broadcast and a running joke.

The brand’s best-known advertising put sports at the centre. Wikipedia says Just For Men’s television advertising in the United States featured the former basketball player Walt Frazier and the former baseball player Keith Hernandez playing sportscasters, a pairing it sources to a report by Richard Sandomir in The New York Times on 8 January 2008. The format borrowed the language of a game broadcast: two commentators calling a man’s grey beard or hair as if it were a bad play, then celebrating the change once the colour was applied.

Wikipedia describes one spot from January 2008 in detail. In it, Frazier and Hernandez visit a grey-bearded Emmitt Smith, the former American football running back, in a mock rest home for retired players, where Frazier delivers the lines “Your ’stache is trash!” and “The beard is weird!” Short rhyming verdicts of that kind gave the campaign its voice: blunt, comic and built around a man’s friends rather than his partner.

The brand has stayed close to sport in its sponsorships too. Wikipedia lists the PGA Tour’s “Right on Target Shot” segment and the WWE segments “Rewind” and “Slam of the Week” among events it has sponsored. A name that speaks only to men was matched by advertising built on former professional athletes.

The identity also answers the brand’s own history. Grecian Formula, Combe’s older men’s colour, had found its market by being marketed to men after struggling as a women’s product, the FundingUniverse history says. Just For Men made that choice explicit in its name, and its later extensions — the 1993 beard and mustache gel, then lines such as Touch of Gray and Control GX — kept the same plain naming, describing what each product was for rather than inventing a mood or a fantasy around it.

For a design guide, Just For Men shows how a three-word name can carry a whole positioning, with the advertising left to do the talking through sports commentators and short, rhyming lines. Compare it with Clairol, whose mid-century campaigns sold home colour to women with a question, and Head & Shoulders. For this guide we use steel navy and brass on stone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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