Lubrizol Brand Guidelines: A 1928 Cleveland Graphite Firm, Wickliffe & a 2025 Refresh

A Cleveland lubricant for early automobiles.

Lubrizol began in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1928 as The Graphite Oil Products Company. English Wikipedia names six founders: Frank A. Nason and his son Francis A. “Alex” Nason, Thomas W. James, and the brothers Kent H. Smith, Vincent K. Smith and A. Kelvin Smith. Its first product was a graphite lubricant sold with an applicator for early automobiles. The company tells the same story in its own words: its first automotive solutions, made in a small Cleveland garage, were for lubricating the leaf springs of early cars, it said in March 2025.

The name changed as the products did. The firm became The Lubri-Graph Corporation in 1929, moved to Wickliffe, in Lake County east of Cleveland, in 1931, became The Lubri-Zol Corporation in 1934 and settled on Lubrizol in 1943, English Wikipedia says. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange in the 1960s. Toward the end of that decade it turned its research to additives for car engines and fuels, and in the 1980s it developed new additives for passenger-car motor oils, gear oils, hydraulic fluids and viscosity modifiers, while looking at biotechnology, agribusiness and other specialty chemicals as routes beyond transport.

The decisive step outside transport came in 2004, with the purchase of Noveon International. That deal created a second segment, now called Lubrizol Advanced Materials, which makes industrial chemicals for packaging, paints and textiles, ingredients for personal care products such as lotions and shampoos, additives for engineered polymers, and products for makers of medical devices and pharmaceuticals. A third segment, built in December 2014 from the engineered chemistry and drilling-fluids businesses of Weatherford International, did not last: Bloomberg reported in February 2017 that Lubrizol had closed it, according to English Wikipedia. In March 2017 Lubrizol took the majority stake in Lubrizol India, its joint venture with Indian Oil Corporation.

Two segments, long-lived trademarks and a 2025 tagline.

Lubrizol works in two segments. Lubrizol Additives supplies additives for engine oils, other transport fluids, gasoline and diesel fuels, and industrial lubricants; Lubrizol Advanced Materials supplies specialty materials and ingredients for personal care, pharmaceutical and food uses, and coatings. Its long-running trademarks include Carbopol, TempRite, Hycar and Estane, with Performax among its coatings names, English Wikipedia says. The Berkshire Hathaway release of September 2011 described the same mix: lubricant additives for engine oils, fuel additives, and ingredients and additives for personal care products and pharmaceuticals.

On 18 March 2025 Lubrizol launched what it called an elevated brand expression. The Business Wire release listed three parts: a refreshed logo, an enhanced visual identity and a new tagline, “Imagined for Life. Enabled by Science.” The president and chief executive, Rebecca Liebert, said the tagline reflected the company’s effect on everyday life and the science behind it, and the release framed the brand around familiar products, from cars to shampoo to running shoes, rather than around the chemistry itself.

The same release placed the brand on a long timeline. It spoke of nearly a century of work and of optimism for the company’s next hundred years, said Lubrizol serves customers in more than 100 countries, and described the company as a Berkshire Hathaway company whose specialty chemistry serves mobility and modern life. Lubrizol also published a dedicated brand page on its website at the same time.

Wickliffe remains the centre of that story. In May 2026 the city council authorised the mayor to enter a Community Reinvestment Area agreement with Lubrizol so that the company could keep and expand its headquarters there, The News-Herald reported. The mayor told the paper that Lubrizol is the city’s largest employer, with about 800 jobs in Wickliffe and 400 more to come as the company consolidates there.

How specialty chemicals makers present themselves.

Specialty chemicals makers sell mostly to other companies, so their brands rarely appear on a shelf. What they make ends up inside shampoo, paint, crop sprays, plastics and circuit boards under someone else’s name. Their identities have to work for buyers, chemists, investors and job seekers at once, and most of them settle on a similar, restrained toolkit.

The marks tend to be precise sans-serif wordmarks, often a coined or shortened name set in lower case or in a clean capital form, sometimes paired with a small symbol that suggests a molecule, a droplet, a leaf or a ring. Colour usually runs through blues, greens and teals, the shades a reader links with water, science and the outdoors, with one brighter accent kept for highlights and charts. Photography leans on laboratories, gloved hands, pilot plants and pipework, alongside close-ups of the everyday products that the chemistry ends up in.

Websites in the category are organised by end market rather than by chemical family. A visitor picks personal care, home care, coatings, adhesives, agriculture, mining, energy or electronics, and lands on pages of named product ranges. Product finders, technical data sheets, certificates and sample requests sit close to the top of the navigation, because that is what formulators come for. Many groups also run regional sites and separate pages for each business unit.

The rest of the site carries the corporate story. Sustainability reports, innovation pages, purpose statements and annual reports explain strategy to investors and the wider public, while careers pages show researchers, plant teams and graduate programmes. For a designer, the category is a study in clarity: a calm palette, a readable sans and a structure that lets very technical material stay easy to find.

A Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary since 2011, and a record in Rouen.

Lubrizol has belonged to Berkshire Hathaway since 2011. The two companies announced a definitive agreement on 14 March 2011, an all-cash purchase approved unanimously by both boards, which Berkshire described as one of the largest acquisitions in its history. The deal completed on 16 September 2011, after Lubrizol shareholders voted for it and regulators in the United States and elsewhere cleared it, making Lubrizol a wholly owned subsidiary. Both releases said the headquarters would stay in Wickliffe and that the existing management would continue to run the company.

Lubrizol’s French plant in Rouen, Normandy, has the most public record. On 21 January 2013 a decomposition in a tank of zinc dialkyldithiophosphate, a lubricant additive, released mercaptan gas whose smell was noticed as far away as the Paris region and southern England; an official report six months later blamed an operating error, and the company was fined, French Wikipedia says. On 26 September 2019 a major fire struck the Rouen site and a neighbouring logistics site. The French subsidiary was placed under formal investigation on 24 February 2020 over the operation of a classified industrial installation, and in June 2021 the Paris appeal court rejected its request to annul those proceedings, Reuters reported.

For a design guide, Lubrizol shows how an industrial supplier with no consumer products of its own can still build a brand around the everyday things its chemistry ends up in. Compare Dow, another American chemicals maker, from neighbouring Michigan, and DuPont. For this guide we use a deep navy, a clear teal and a warm sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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