A farm-implement start in Iowa.

Maytag did not start with laundry. English Wikipedia says the business was founded in 1893, when businessman Frederick Maytag, his two brothers-in-law and George W. Parsons put up equal shares to start a farm-implement company named the Parsons Band-Cutter & Self Feeder Company. It made threshing machines, band-cutters and self-feeder attachments devised by Parsons, and the article credits the company with a threshing-machine feeder that fed straw more safely into the threshing cylinder at a time when injuries from threshers were common.

Washing machines followed, in Newton, Iowa. English Wikipedia says Maytag produced wringer washers from 1909, and that the line ran until 22 November 1983, when production of wringer washers ended. The English Wikipedia article on Newton says that much of the town’s twentieth-century growth came from the washing-machine industry, and that the company later persuaded the town to rename the address of its headquarters “One Dependability Square.”

The family stayed at the head of the company for several decades. English Wikipedia says Frederick’s son Elmer Henry Maytag became president in 1926 and was followed in 1940 by Fred Maytag II, the founder’s grandson. The article says Fred Maytag II was the last family member involved in the company’s management, and that E. G. Higdon was named president in 1962.

Laundry first, then a full line, then Whirlpool.

The middle of the century set the pattern for the brand. English Wikipedia says washer production resumed in 1946 after wartime work, that Maytag began producing automatic washers in 1949 in a new factory built for them, and that in the 1950s Maytag entered the commercial laundry field, building washers and dryers for self-service laundries. While larger rivals built full lines of kitchen and laundry appliances, the article says, Maytag chose to concentrate on washers and dryers and to market ranges and refrigerators built by other companies under its own name, a practice it had stopped by 1960.

From the 1980s the company widened again through acquisitions. English Wikipedia lists the Hardwick Stove Company in 1981 and Magic Chef, including the Norge Appliance Company, in 1986, after which the business took the name Maytag Corporation and began selling a full line of appliances. In 1988 it acquired Chicago Pacific Corporation, which owned Hoover in the United States and the United Kingdom, and in 2001 it acquired the Amana Corporation. Before 1997, the article says, Maytag’s own laundry research and development team created the Neptune line of front-load washers, later joined by a matching dryer.

The independent company came to an end in 2006. English Wikipedia says Whirlpool Corporation completed its acquisition of Maytag Corporation on 1 April 2006, and that on 10 May 2006 Whirlpool announced the closure of the Maytag laundry plants in Newton, Herrin, Illinois and Searcy, Arkansas, along with the former headquarters in Newton, by 2007. Brand administration moved to Whirlpool’s headquarters in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and the Maytag name was from then on used on appliances designed by Whirlpool. English Wikipedia says Whirlpool sold Hoover to Techtronic Industries in 2007.

The newest Maytag laundry comes from Whirlpool plants. English Wikipedia says the Maytag Commercial Heritage top-load washer and matching dryer introduced in August 2026 are built at Whirlpool’s laundry plants in Clyde and Marion, Ohio, which Whirlpool’s manufacturing page lists as its washer and dryer factories.

Design and documentation.

American major-appliance brands — the washers, dryers, ranges, refrigerators and dishwashers that stand in a kitchen or laundry room for many years — can carry long and layered histories. A name on the front of a machine may have started with a single workshop or inventor, then passed through several corporate owners, mergers and renamings while the badge itself stayed in place.

That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly, one by one: who started it and where, which companies have owned it and when, where its machines are made today, and how its logo, colours and advertising have changed along the way. A brand that began as an independent maker may now be one label among several inside a larger appliance group, and the same name may be used differently from one country or decade to the next.

Each guide in this group separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its factories and its visual identity — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A brand carried by a character.

Much of Maytag’s identity is carried by a person rather than a product. English Wikipedia says the character known as “Ol’ Lonely,” the lonely Maytag repairman, was created for Maytag by copywriter Vincent R. Vassolo of the Leo Burnett advertising agency. The English Wikipedia article on the actor Jesse White says he played the repairman in Maytag television commercials from 1967 to 1988, playing a repairman with nothing to do. English Wikipedia says the campaign was designed to remind consumers of the brand’s reputation for dependability, and Maytag ads quoted there spelled it out, describing Ol’ Lonely’s predicament as “testimony to the durability and reliability of Maytag appliances,” or adding, “Not all Maytag repairmen are this lonely, but we’re trying.”

The character outlasted several actors. English Wikipedia says that in 1986 the repairman was joined by Newton, a basset hound named after the company’s home town; that Gordon Jump took over as Ol’ Lonely in 1989, in an advertisement titled “Biker”; and that Hardy Rawls took the role after Jump retired in 2003, in print advertising and personal appearances. Paul Berval played the role in French-language Quebec. In April 2007, under Whirlpool’s ownership, Maytag named Clay Earl Jackson as the new repairman, and in January 2014 it introduced a new “Maytag Man,” played by Colin Ferguson, who instead of waiting for calls plays the part of the appliance itself, under the slogan “What’s Inside Matters.” The earlier tagline, “The Dependability People,” was introduced in the 1970s and, Wikipedia says, retired in the mid-2000s.

For a design guide, Maytag shows how a brand can be carried by a character and a single idea for decades, from the Newton factory through the move to Whirlpool, with the same uniformed figure updated rather than replaced. Compare it with its parent brand Whirlpool and with Hoover, which came to Maytag in 1988 and which Whirlpool sold in 2007. For this guide we use repairman blue, badge red and night denim with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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