A spray can, a new fibre and a borrowed name.

Krylon dates its history to 1947, when, the company says, the Philadelphia businessman Howard E. Kester founded Krylon, Inc. The brand’s own account ties the idea to work at DuPont: Kester was inspired by the chemical company’s development of a formula that combined gas and liquid in a single spray can, and he set out to apply paints and coatings that way instead of with a brush.

The name came from DuPont as well. According to the company, shortly after Kester brought his idea to market, DuPont introduced nylon, and Kester admired it enough to borrow the word. He replaced the first “n” in nylon with the first and last letters of his own surname, a K and an r, and the result was “Krylon” — a coined word that carries the first and last letters of its founder’s surname. The company says sales grew quickly from 1950 on, as householders took to spray paint for small projects at home.

That origin story still opens the brand’s “About Us” page, which describes Krylon as one of the well-known names in aerosol paints. The company describes its audience as DIYers, crafters, artists and professionals, and its site splits into separate consumer and industrial sections, with editions for the United States and Canada.

From Borden to Sherwin-Williams, and a seat in a consumer brands group.

Krylon spent part of its history inside Borden, the American food and chemicals group, before changing hands. Sherwin-Williams’ own history of its general industrial business says that in 1990 the company bought Krylon and Illinois Bronze from Borden, strengthening its aerosol and acrylic lines. The same history places the deal in a run of brand purchases: Dutch Boy in 1980 and Cuprinol, the wood-treatment maker, in 1991. Sherwin-Williams has owned Krylon since 1990.

Inside Sherwin-Williams, Krylon belongs to the consumer side of the business. English Wikipedia, citing PCI Magazine in 2024, lists it in the Consumer Brands Group alongside names such as Dupli-Color, Dutch Boy, Minwax, Purdy, Thompson’s WaterSeal, Valspar and Ronseal. That group develops, makes and distributes paints and coatings sold to outside retailers as well as through the company’s own paint stores. On its website the brand signs itself the Krylon Products Group, and its pages carry the line “Create, Restore & Protect”.

The range is organised by job. The site groups products under all-purpose spray paint, rust preventive, craft, specialty, clear coatings, adhesives, professional coatings, automotive and brush-on paints. Named lines include Fusion All-In-One, which the company presents as a no-sanding, no-priming spray paint and which gained six new shades in April 2023; COLORmaxx, sold on colour choice; Rust Tough, launched in June 2022 for metal; and Krylon Classic, which the company describes as a fast-drying lacquer-based spray paint. In August 2026 the brand introduced Harmony, which it describes as a water-based spray paint designed for indoor home projects.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell the things that sit around a tin of paint rather than the paint itself: masking tape, brushes, primers, wood stains, clear finishes and spray paint. In a hardware aisle they compete for attention on crowded shelves, so their identities are carried by a few repeated signals — the colour of a roll of tape, the band of colour on a can, a label that customers can find again on the next visit.

Wood-finish brands also have to show colour that is not their own. A stain only makes sense once it is on wood, so swatch cards, sample boards and finished projects often do as much of the visual work as the logo. Tape brands, by contrast, can make the product itself the signature, with one colour of roll standing for the whole name.

Many of these names have changed hands over the years, and the business behind a familiar label may now be part of a much larger coatings group. Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how it presents itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A coined word, a colour calendar and a can on the shelf.

The brand’s first asset is its name. Krylon was coined, the company says, by swapping letters into the word nylon. The brand sets it in front of each product line — Krylon Fusion All-In-One, Krylon COLORmaxx, Krylon Rust Tough, Krylon Harmony — so that the parent name and the sub-brand read together on every can.

Colour itself is the brand’s main marketing language. Krylon announces an annual Color of the Year through its press room, usually in the autumn before the year it names: Spanish Moss was announced in October 2022, Bluebird in October 2023 and Hammered Black in October 2024. The company named Satin Rolling Surf for 2022, Spanish Moss for 2023, Bluebird for 2024 and Hammered Black for 2025, describing the last as a departure that responded to a renewed interest in gothic and brutalist design. Seasonal colour collections, such as the 2026 fall collection promoted on its home page, follow the same pattern, and the site sorts its projects by surface — glass, metal, plastic, wood and laminate. Its home page also runs the line “Live Colorfully” and invites visitors to “Show Your True Colors”, keeping the emphasis on colour choice rather than on the can itself.

The brand also keeps a project-and-tutorial voice, with how-to pages on spray painting and galleries of finished pieces aimed at crafters and home decorators. That editorial layer, alongside the professional and industrial ranges sold under the same word, lets one short name stretch from craft tables to job sites.

The parent company sits in the background. Sherwin-Williams, based in Cleveland, Ohio, sells Krylon through outside retailers as well as its own paint stores, and the brand’s website and press room speak in the Krylon name. Its product names carry their own marks too: Rust Tough comes with the company’s own Anti-Rust Technology label, and Fusion All-In-One and Harmony both carry registered marks.

For a design guide, Krylon shows how a coined word built from its founder’s surname can carry a whole family of products, and how an annual colour announcement keeps a mature aerosol brand in the news. Compare it with Minwax, the wood-finish brand in the same Sherwin-Williams consumer group, and Rust-Oleum, its spray paint counterpart at RPM. For this guide we use nozzle black, spray red and chrome with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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