Two former Glidden men and a store built for the trade.

Kelly-Moore Paints was founded in 1946 in San Carlos, California, by William E. Moore and William Kelly. The fullest account of the start is the obituary of Moore that the San Francisco Chronicle published in November 2004. It says Moore had worked for the Glidden paint company, both in the laboratory and as a salesman, and that after naval service in the Pacific during the Second World War he came home determined to start his own business. He moved to San Carlos convinced, in the paper’s words, that there was a place for “a paint store for painters,” and he persuaded Kelly, his old boss at Glidden, to come out of retirement and help him set it up.

The Chronicle says Moore bought Kelly out in 1952 but never changed the company name, which is how a firm run by one founder kept both names on its signs for the rest of its life. In the early years it was a family business: the obituary says Moore’s wife, Desiree Moore, kept the books, and it quotes Moore recalling that at night the couple drove around together collecting payment from contractors for the products delivered.

The customers he had in mind were the painting contractors who were turning the fields and orchards of the San Francisco Peninsula and the Santa Clara Valley into tracts of new homes after the war. The Chronicle describes the company’s stores as unusually large and says they served as free warehouse space for contractors who often worked out of their garages. It also records Moore’s view of his trade: he saw himself more as a salesman than a technician, and he was quoted as saying that companies do not go broke because they cannot make paint, but because they cannot sell it. Moore retired as president in 1984 and, the obituary says, remained chairman of the board until his death.

Professional management, regional alliances and a move to Texas.

English Wikipedia, drawing on a company history published by Encyclopedia.com, says Joseph P. Cristiano became chief executive in January 1985. Under his leadership, it says, Kelly-Moore bought Preservative Paint Co. of Seattle in 1994, adding stores in Washington and Alaska, and in 1995 acquired K-M Universal, which brought a factory in Tempe, Arizona. The same source says Moore and his wife set up an employee stock ownership plan in 1998.

Wikipedia also describes a period of regional alliances. In 1999 Kelly-Moore partnered with M.A. Bruder & Sons, a Pennsylvania paint company whose territory did not overlap with its own, so that the two could serve national accounts between them. In 2000 Diamond Vogel Paints joined the arrangement, followed later by the Los Angeles paint maker Dunn-Edwards, and the group was known as Paints America. Herb Giffins succeeded Cristiano as president and chief executive in January 2003. Citing a Mercury News interview from April 2013, Wikipedia says the company closed all of its Oregon stores in 2011 and later left Washington State as well.

The centre of the business then moved east. SFGate reported in April 2023 that Kelly-Moore had relocated its manufacturing to Hurst, Texas, in 2017, and that its corporate offices were moving from San Carlos to Irving, Texas. Ownership had changed the year before: the San Mateo Daily Journal reported on 1 October 2022 that the investment firm Flacks Group had bought the company, and Wikipedia, citing a Business Wire release of October 2022, says Flacks managing partner Charles Gassenheimer became chief executive. SFGate’s report of January 2024 named the owner that bought the brand in 2022 as Pleuger Chemicals.

In January 2024 the company announced that it would cease operations and close all of its stores, as ABC7 San Francisco reported on 13 January and SFGate on 14 January. According to SFGate, the company said Chapter 11 bankruptcy was not a viable option, and that it would fill existing orders from its distribution centre in Union City, California, before ceasing operations permanently; both reports linked the decision to decades of asbestos lawsuits over its former cement and texture products, which the company said had been phased out by 1981.

Design and documentation.

The paint brands in this group sit at very different points in the trade. Some are long-established manufacturers whose names have passed through several owners, and whose cans are sold through hardware chains, dedicated stores and trade counters; others are younger companies that sell mainly online or from a handful of showrooms, often built around a short, edited list of colours rather than a vast library.

A paint brand’s identity is carried by more than a logo. It lives in the can and its label, in the fan deck and the swatch card, in the names given to colours, in the store or website where people choose them, and in programmes that pick out a colour for the year. Because the company behind a name may have been sold, merged or closed, and because paint can be made far from where it is marketed, the plain questions are worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where the paint is actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A brand for the professional painter, then a name in history.

Kelly-Moore’s identity was built around a customer rather than a look. Moore’s founding idea, as the Chronicle recorded it, was “a paint store for painters,” and the company’s own website, quoted by ABC7 in January 2024, still positioned it the same way: it said Kelly-Moore was “neither mom and pop, nor big box,” and described its business as enabling a great painting experience with service for every customer. The stores were central to that positioning: the Chronicle described them as large enough to double as storage for contractors, and English Wikipedia, drawing on a published company history, says Moore had an essential role in planning and designing the company-owned stores. The name on the sign also kept the founding partnership in view, since Moore never dropped Kelly’s name after buying him out in 1952.

The company sold its paint under named product lines. English Wikipedia lists product names including AcryPlex, DuraPoxy, Envy and Kel-Pro. Its history also ties it to other names in the trade: its founders came from Glidden, and in the Paints America years it worked alongside Dunn-Edwards and M.A. Bruder to serve national accounts.

The company’s geography changed over its history. It began in San Carlos during the post-war building of the San Francisco Peninsula, expanded through acquisitions in Washington, Alaska and Arizona in the 1990s, moved its manufacturing to Hurst, Texas, in 2017 and its offices to Irving, Texas, in 2023, and announced the closure of all its stores in January 2024. When ABC7 reported the closure, it noted that the company had been founded in San Carlos in 1946 by William Kelly and William Moore.

For a design guide, Kelly-Moore shows how a paint brand can be defined by who it serves and where it sells, with the store and the trade counter doing the work that a colour campaign does for others. Compare Dunn-Edwards, its former Paints America partner, and Glidden, the company where its founders started. For this guide we use contractor navy, shop red, primer putty and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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