A Philadelphia towel family and a 1914 trade name.

Martex began as a towel name in Philadelphia. The textile history site of NC State University’s Wilson College of Textiles traces it to the Margerison family, who came to Philadelphia from England and stayed in related trades. Two brothers, W. H. (William) and A. E. (Ernest) Margerison, began making towelling in the late nineteenth century, and a third brother, Joseph H. Margerison, received United States patents in 1903 and 1904 for a terry fabric and for a loom to weave it, the site says. A portrait of the family patriarch, Henry Margerison, hung in the mill office.

The business was known as Columbia Towel Mills, according to the 1913 edition of Davison’s Textile Blue Book as cited by NC State, and it worked in terry, the looped cotton cloth that American shops then sold as Turkish towelling. NC State says the firm showed a working loom at an exhibition in Philadelphia, weaving looped towels finished with a chenille border.

The name came later. NC State gives 30 September 1914 as the date the company began using the Martex trade name, and 16 March 1915 as the date it was registered. The advertising trade journal Printers’ Ink, cited on the same page, described the company’s national advertising as the step that lifted it from a regional name to a national one, and treated that as unusual in the towel business. NC State adds that the company bought John & James Dobson, Inc., another Philadelphia textile business, in 1922 to add production, with W. H. Margerison as vice president and general manager and A. E. Margerison as assistant general manager.

In 1928 the Philadelphia business passed south. NC State says it was sold to the West Point Manufacturing Company, and the company history published in the International Directory of Company Histories, reproduced by FundingUniverse, says West Point bought the business of a Philadelphia maker of terry towels that year, “which brought with it the valuable Martex trademark brand name.” West Point was a Georgia firm, reorganised under that name in 1880 by the Lanier family, according to the same history, and it had been making towels at its own Fairfax mill since 1916.

West Point, Pepperell and Stevens.

For most of the twentieth century Martex was a West Point brand, and the company around it kept growing. In March 1965 West Point Manufacturing merged with the Pepperell Manufacturing Company, the sheet maker of Biddeford, Maine, behind the Lady Pepperell name, to form West Point-Pepperell, the FundingUniverse history says. Within two years, it adds, each of the company’s name brands — Carlin, Martex and Lady Pepperell — had its own full line of products for the bed and the bath, so Martex was no longer a towel name alone.

In 1988 West Point-Pepperell bought J. P. Stevens & Company, a rival whose history went back to a woollen mill opened by Nathaniel Stevens in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1813. In 1989 the financier William Farley won control of West Point-Pepperell after a hostile contest lasting five months, the same history says, and in December 1993 the business was refinanced and merged with several of its subsidiaries to form WestPoint Stevens. The WestPoint Stevens history lists Martex among the company’s bed and bath brands, alongside Lady Pepperell, Stevens and Vellux.

Martex was the name WestPoint Stevens put in front of the public. In February 1995, the company history says, it launched an advertising campaign for its Martex bed and bath line under the title “The Bare Necessities.” The phrase lasted beyond the campaign: a WestPoint Home brand listing cited by English Wikipedia later included a Martex Bare Necessities line, next to Martex Luxury, Martex Purity and Martex Atelier.

The parent company did not survive in that form. In June 2005 a federal bankruptcy judge in New York approved the sale of WestPoint Stevens to Carl Icahn’s American Real Estate Holdings, choosing Icahn’s offer over a rival bid from the financier Wilbur Ross, the Associated Press reported, adding that the company based in West Point, Georgia, would sell its remaining assets and cease to exist. The business that carried the brands forward is WestPoint Home, which English Wikipedia describes as headquartered in New York City, with manufacturing and distribution facilities in the United States and overseas, and which lists Martex among its brands.

Design and documentation.

Towels, sheets and bedding are sold mostly through packaging and labels rather than through the product itself. A bath towel usually reaches the shelf folded and banded with a paper wrap or a hang tag, while sheets and pillowcases are sold in a clear bag, a printed sleeve or a card-backed pack that shows the size, the fibre and the colour name at a glance.

Once the wrapping is thrown away, the brand lives on in the sewn-in label: a small woven or printed tag in a hem or a seam that carries the name, the fibre content and the care instructions. For many households that tag is the only place the brand name is ever seen again.

Store-brand bedding adds another layer. A name that appears only in one chain’s stores may be owned by the retailer, licensed from another company or made for it by outside suppliers, and the label alone rarely says which.

Each guide in this group separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself — who started the name, who owns it now, where its textiles are made and how its labels and packs have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A magazine towel, a flowing script and a family of lines.

The earliest documented Martex identity is an advertising one. NC State says national advertisements ran as early as 1916 in Good Housekeeping, showing things a reader could make from a Martex towel, among them a “combing jacket” worn by a young woman to protect her clothes while she combed her long hair. The same page points to a 1923 advertisement carrying a flowing “Martex” trademark, and to New York department-store advertising through the 1920s: Lord & Taylor offered Martex Turkish towels in The New York Times in November 1920, and John Wanamaker advertised Martex bath mats in the same paper in January 1927.

Today Martex is sold through WestPoint Home’s own online shop, which presents it on its home page as one of its “family of brands,” next to Vellux, Southern Tide and Tablevogue. The Martex range there runs across towels, bath rugs, sheets, pillows, comforter sets and mattress pads, organised into named lines such as Restore, Easy Living and Brrr, the last a group of cooling sheets, pillows and pads. WestPoint Home says its family of brands has been “woven into the story of home,” and says it oversees each stage of production, from sourcing fibre and spinning yarn to weaving, processing, cutting and stitching.

Through all of this the word itself has stayed in place while the companies behind it changed: a family mill in Philadelphia, a Georgia towel maker, the merged West Point-Pepperell, WestPoint Stevens and, after the 2005 sale, WestPoint Home.

For a design guide, Martex shows how a single trade word, registered in 1915 and pushed by national magazine advertising, can outlast the mills and owners behind it. Compare Fieldcrest, another American bed and bath name, and Peacock Alley. For this guide we use mill blue, brick red and terry white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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