Two builders, an office-coffee route and a drip brewer.

Mr. Coffee came out of the building trade. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, published by Case Western Reserve University, says Vincent G. Marotta and his longtime friend Samuel L. Glazer went into construction together in 1949, building suburban homes and, from 1957, shopping centres, among them the Great Lakes Mall in Mentor, Ohio. ABC News, reporting in August 2015, described the two as high-school friends.

The encyclopedia says that when mortgage money became harder to find, Marotta diversified, and in 1968 he and Glazer entered the coffee-distribution business, placing industrial coffee machines in offices, petrol stations and other businesses that agreed to buy coffee by the case. From there Marotta turned to a machine for the home. In the encyclopedia’s account, North American Systems, Inc. was founded in Shaker Heights, a Cleveland suburb, in 1970, and Marotta worked with two former Westinghouse engineers, Edmund Abel and Erwin Schulze, to develop the Mr. Coffee machine in 1971; it was patented and production began at a plant in Beachwood. English Wikipedia gives the second engineer’s given name as Edwin.

The principle was simple. English Wikipedia describes how the machine heated just the water, held in a reservoir above the pot, and let it drip through a basket of ground coffee into a carafe below, rather than cycling brewed coffee back over the grounds as a percolator does. Marotta made the same contrast in an interview with NPR’s Linda Wertheimer in October 2005, calling the percolator an outmoded way of making coffee.

The machine reached the market in 1972, ABC News reported. The company’s own timeline, as archived in 2011, dates the introduction to the same year and says the Mr. Coffee team was introduced by North American Systems founder Vincent Marotta, Sr. and partner Samuel Glazer in Cleveland. The name itself is a form of address — a title and a noun — that turns the appliance into a character, and the company’s later advertising leaned on that.

Joe DiMaggio, a filter line and a long run of features.

The brand found its face in 1973. NPR, introducing its 2005 interview, noted that Joe DiMaggio had retired from baseball in 1951 intending to leave public life, and that in 1973 he returned to American living rooms for Mr. Coffee. Marotta told the programme he tracked down DiMaggio’s unlisted number in San Francisco and rang him on a Saturday morning; DiMaggio already knew the product because he had won one as a prize in a golf tournament the week before, but turned the offer down. Marotta and his wife flew to California the next day, and over lunch at the Fairmont Hotel the deal was settled with a handshake. In Marotta’s telling, DiMaggio stayed with the brand for a long run.

ABC News, drawing on Marotta’s daughter Sue Parente, told the same story in 2015 — the golf-tournament prize, the refusal, the trip west and a handshake with “no lawyers”. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History says DiMaggio became the official spokesman in televised commercials in 1973. ABC also published a 1977 family photograph of Marotta and DiMaggio sitting on a large Mr. Coffee machine in Chicago.

The company grew around the brewer. The encyclopedia says that in June 1974 North American Systems bought the Fairfield Coffee Filter Division of Tomlinson Industries in Bedford Heights, then moved to Bedford Heights and added a plant in Los Angeles. The company’s timeline says Mr. Coffee coffee filters arrived in 1975; that a “coffee saver” feature, brewing the same amount of coffee with fewer grounds, was added during the 1977–78 coffee shortage; that programmable timers followed in 1980; and that the Pause N’ Serve feature, which lets a cup be poured before the pot has finished, came in 1986. The encyclopedia adds that during the 1980s the company went to court over trademarks against rival products named Mr. Automatic and Mrs. Coffee.

Where the machines are made has moved more than once. The encyclopedia says North American Systems shifted some manufacturing to China in 1985, and that after later ownership changes production moved from Ohio to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Matamoros, Mexico, in 2000, and then wholly to China after Sunbeam’s 2001 bankruptcy.

Design and documentation.

Small kitchen appliances and tableware reach people through a few repeated surfaces. An appliance is usually first met as a printed box on a shop shelf, with a photograph of the product, a name in large type and a short line about what it does. Once the box is opened, the name moves to a smaller badge: a moulded or printed mark on a lid, a hinge, a front panel or a control dial, sitting beside the switches and settings the owner will use every day.

Tableware works differently. Cutlery and flatware are often sold in a fitted box or a presentation case, with a pattern name printed on the lid or a card, while the maker’s mark is stamped small on the back of a handle. Plates and glasses may carry a backstamp or an etched mark that most people never look at.

Because of that, a name in this trade can travel a long way from the company that first used it. Each guide here sets out what can be checked about who started a brand, who owns it now and where its products are made, and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

New owners, new campaigns, the same honorific.

Marotta and Glazer sold the company in 1987 to an investment partnership headed by a former Revere Ware executive, the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History says, and it became Mr. Coffee, Inc. In 1994 it was bought by Health-o-Meter Products of Bridgeview, Illinois, which became Signature Brands in 1997 and moved its headquarters and production to Glenwillow, Ohio. In 1998 Signature was bought by Sunbeam, later part of American Household, Inc. The encyclopedia dates Jarden’s purchase to 2004; English Wikipedia says Jarden acquired American Household in January 2005. Newell Brands has owned Mr. Coffee since 2016, when Newell Rubbermaid completed its acquisition of Jarden.

Through those changes the advertising kept returning to the name. The company’s archived timeline says a “What’ll he think of next?” line ran in 1992, treating Mr. Coffee as a person with ideas; that a hot tea maker called Mrs. Tea arrived in 1995, extending the honorific to a companion product; and that in 2000 print advertising played up a sleek new look while television commercials ran a mock documentary about the coffeemaker’s “facelift”. For the brand’s 30th birthday in 2002, the company says, a print campaign featured the television host Carson Daly and the snowboarder Chris Klug, and in 2003 a “Coffee Moments” repositioning campaign brought in the country singer Toby Keith as spokesperson.

The brand now sits inside the Newell appliance business alongside Oster and Crock-Pot, and in the same group as Rubbermaid and Sharpie.

For a design guide, Mr. Coffee shows how a product name written as a form of address can turn an appliance into a character, and how one spokesman’s handshake can fix that character for a generation of buyers. Compare it with Sunbeam, the company that bought it in 1998, and Crock-Pot, another 1970s countertop name now held by Newell. For this guide we use brew red, roast and crema with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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