Medline Brand Guidelines: From a 1910 Apron Factory to a 2025 Nasdaq Listing

Three generations of a Chicago supply family.

Medline counts two beginnings. The family business dates from 1910, when A. L. Mills set up the Northwestern Garment Factory, making aprons for the stockyards, English Wikipedia says, citing the company’s own history. In 1912 he founded Mills Hospital Supplies, making surgical gowns and nurses’ uniforms for hospitals, and in the 1920s his son Irving Mills took over and added the distribution of general medical supplies to the garments. In 1961 Irving sold that company to Cenco.

The company that exists today began in 1966, when A. L. Mills’s grandsons Jim and Jon Mills left Cenco and founded Medline, starting with about 12,000 square feet of warehouse space and a single loading dock in Evanston, Illinois, Wikipedia says. Manufacturing came early: a first textile plant opened at Covington, Indiana, in 1968, and in 1972 Medline bought an injection-moulding company to form its first non-textile division, Dynacor.

The business widened over the next decades. In 1995 it opened its first site for assembling sterile procedure trays, in Waukegan, Illinois, and in 1996 it entered the distribution business; Wikipedia counts more than 50 distribution centres across North America. For most of its life Medline was privately held; Forbes ranked it 15th on its 2022 list of the largest privately held companies in America, Wikipedia says. The company was later known as Medline Industries, LP, before becoming Medline Inc.; its headquarters are in Northfield, Illinois, and Charlie Mills is its chair, Wikipedia says.

Gloves, gowns, dressings and Curad.

Medline sells to hospitals, surgery centres, care homes, physicians’ offices and home-care providers, and through retailers, with some 2,000 direct sales representatives in 2016, Wikipedia says. Counts of its catalogue vary: in 2016 the company said it offered over 550,000 products, while in December 2025 CNBC described its range as about 335,000 medical and surgical supplies, “from gloves, masks and scalpels to wheelchairs,” sold to customers in more than 100 countries, with more than 43,000 workers at the end of 2024. Its chief executive, Jim Boyle, told CNBC: “We are the largest company you’ve never heard of, and we happen to be everywhere.” Its annual report for 2025 counted about 45,000 employees, Wikipedia says, which also describes operations in more than 125 countries and territories, among them Canada, Mexico, Germany and Japan.

Wound care is one of the ways it reached shoppers. In 2001, according to Wikipedia, Medline began making private-label wound-care products for chains including CVS, Walgreens and Target. In April 2007 it bought the Curad first-aid brand from Beiersdorf, its entry into the retail market under a brand of its own; the Curad range covers bandages, surgical tape and liquid bandage. In 2009 it launched pink exam gloves under the Generation Pink name and turned the original “Pink Glove Dance” video into a breast-cancer awareness campaign, Wikipedia says.

Where it is made is mixed. Medline has its own plants, from the Covington textile works of 1968 onward, but CNBC reported in 2025 that “the majority of the company’s products are sourced or manufactured in Asian nations, particularly China.” The navy and steel blue used in this guide are our own choice, not company colours.

How the category presents itself.

Wound-care, ostomy and continence companies sell mostly to nurses, surgeons and pharmacists, and their visual language tends to reflect that audience. Brochures and websites in the category often favour soft-focus close-ups of skin and dressings, clean white backgrounds and pale, calm colours, with the product shown in use rather than as an object. Nurses appear again and again: at hospital bedsides, in clinics and in community care, changing a dressing or talking with a patient at home.

Ostomy and continence brands face a different task. Their users live with the products every day, so the imagery usually moves out of the clinic and into ordinary life: discreet lifestyle photography of people with a stoma swimming, hiking, travelling or at work, with the pouch rarely in view. Packaging across the category tends towards pastel tones, plain product names and clear labelling that has to read on a ward shelf and in a home bathroom alike.

The trade also has its own calendar. Companies meet clinicians at congresses such as the conference of the European Wound Management Association (EWMA) in Europe, the Symposium on Advanced Wound Care (SAWC) in the United States and the annual meeting of the Wound, Ostomy and Continence Nurses Society (WOCN), where stands, posters and education sessions carry much of a brand’s presence. Swedish Wikipedia records that Mölnlycke prepared a position document on its Safetac technology together with EWMA.

The companies in this guide range from a Swedish textile mill of 1849 and a Dijon family group to British ostomy specialists and American medical-technology firms. Each guide sets out what can be checked — who founded the company, who owns it and where it says its products are made — and separates documented facts from the company’s own claims.

From family firm to public company.

The ownership changed in 2021. In June that year a consortium of private-equity firms — Blackstone, Carlyle and Hellman & Friedman — agreed to buy the company, The Wall Street Journal reported on 5 June 2021; CNBC later described the deal as the purchase of a majority stake. In October 2023 Jim Boyle became chief executive, according to the company’s June 2023 announcement cited by Wikipedia.

Medline then went public. It listed on Nasdaq under the symbol MDLN on 17 December 2025, in what CNBC called the biggest initial public offering of the year anywhere. Boyle told CNBC that the listing gave the company “a way to amplify our voice.”

The company has also been in court. In 2011 Medline settled a whistleblower suit brought in 2007 under the False Claims Act, Wikipedia says, citing Reuters. From 2019 residents of Lake County, Illinois, filed lawsuits over ethylene oxide emissions from a Medline facility, the Chicago Tribune reported; Wikipedia says that litigation was still pending in early 2025. On 11 June 2026 a fire destroyed a Medline distribution centre in Tracy, California; the building was a total loss, the blaze was reported to be one of the largest warehouse fires in the history of the United States, and the cause was under investigation, Wikipedia says, citing KCRA, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

For a design guide, Medline shows how a supply company can grow very large with a low public profile — “the largest company you’ve never heard of,” in its chief executive’s words. Compare Hollister, another Illinois healthcare company with a long private history, and B. Braun, the German maker of medical products. For this guide we use a navy, a pale sky and a steel blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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