A Greensboro drugstore, a salve and a borrowed name.

NyQuil comes out of a North Carolina business that began with a salve. The finding aid for the Richardson-Vicks, Inc. Records at the University of North Carolina’s Wilson Library says that the pharmacist Lunsford Richardson moved from Selma to Greensboro in 1890, bought a drugstore on Elm Street with a partner, John Fariss, and in 1894 introduced Vicks Magic Salve. According to company lore, the archive says, Richardson thought his own name too long for a label and used the shorter Vick, after his brother-in-law, a doctor in Selma. The finding aid calls the doctor Joshua Vick; English Wikipedia calls him John Vick.

The business narrowed before it grew. The archive records that Richardson’s eldest son, H. Smith Richardson, joined in 1907 as advertising and sales manager, and that by about 1911 the other remedies had been dropped, the firm had become Vick Chemical Company and its salve had been renamed VapoRub; English Wikipedia dates the VapoRub name to 1912. Smith Richardson became president in 1919. The finding aid lists road signs, store displays, streetcar advertising, “mark out” slogans and free samples sent through Rural Free Delivery among the company’s methods as it expanded north and west. A plant opened in Philadelphia in 1923, the same year VapoRub was exported to England and Mexico.

Over the following decades the Vicks name spread across a family of products. English Wikipedia lists cough drops from 1931, the VapoInhaler from 1941, cough syrup from 1952 and Sinex nasal spray from 1959. In 1938, the finding aid says, Vick merged with the Merrell drug company of Cincinnati, and a run of acquisitions followed. William Preyer, a brother-in-law of the Richardsons, became president in 1938; when he retired in 1948, Edward Mabry, from outside the family, took the post, and Smith Richardson Jr. succeeded him in 1958. In 1960 the company changed its name to Richardson-Merrell Inc., joining the names of the founders of its two biggest divisions. That is the company that put NyQuil on the shelf.

From Richardson-Merrell to Procter & Gamble.

English Wikipedia says NyQuil went on sale in the United States in 1966, citing a page of The Daily Oklahoman from 20 November that year, and the history pages on the Vicks website give the same year. Vicks says the origin of the name is “shrouded in legend” and that many believe it was drawn from the phrase “nighttime tranquility.” The name is written as a single word with a capital Q in the middle, and English Wikipedia’s article gives the product’s full name as Vicks NyQuil.

The ending became a naming system. Vicks says a daytime liquid it introduced in 1976 as DayCare was renamed DayQuil in the early 1990s, and English Wikipedia lists ZzzQuil as a further name in the line; the Vicks website today also lists PainQuil. Vicks dates the brand’s long, list-like advertising tagline to 1979, and its history pages go on to LiquiCaps soft-gels and, from 2018, VapoCOOL versions of NyQuil and DayQuil. One regulatory change touched the range: after the US Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2006 moved pseudoephedrine products behind pharmacy counters, Vicks reformulated NyQuil Sinus that year, English Wikipedia records.

Ownership changed twice in the 1980s. The Wilson Library finding aid says that in 1980 the company narrowed its focus to consumer products, sold Merrell to Dow Chemical and changed its name to Richardson-Vicks Inc. Its range then included cold products such as VapoRub, cough syrup and cough drops alongside Vidal Sassoon and Pantene hair care and Clearasil and Oil of Olay skin care. In the fall of 1985, the archive says, Unilever attempted a hostile takeover, and the Richardson family, holding a controlling block of the stock, sold the business to Procter & Gamble. Procter & Gamble has owned NyQuil since 1985. In March 2015, English Wikipedia records, it sold the US Vicks VapoSteam liquid inhalant business to Helen of Troy; NyQuil remained a Procter & Gamble brand under the Vicks name.

Design and documentation.

The medicine cabinet is a rule-bound place for a packaging designer to work. A pharmacy-aisle carton has to carry a brand name, a product name and a product category on its front face, and it has to do so beside text whose wording, order and minimum type size are set by a regulator rather than by the designer. In the United States that text is the Drug Facts panel, a fixed sequence of headings in a prescribed layout, and every carton, bottle label and blister card in the category has to make room for it.

That leaves the designer a narrower field than in many consumer categories: colour blocking, a wordmark, a band or stripe that signals a line extension, and the shape of the pack itself. Blister packs add a second printed surface, the foil backing. Bottles and caps carry the same system at a smaller scale.

Each guide that follows looks at who started a brand, who has owned it since, and how its cartons, labels and advertising have changed, and it describes products only by name and category as the company lists them.

A suffix, a parent name and an archive of campaigns.

NyQuil’s identity rests on its name. It is a short invented word with a capital Q set inside it, and Vicks has carried the same ending into DayQuil, ZzzQuil and PainQuil. The second layer is the parent mark. The product is sold as Vicks NyQuil, which ties it to Vicks and to the VapoRub jar that the Richardson family built the company on. That parent name is not the same everywhere: English Wikipedia says the brand is sold as Wick in German-speaking countries other than Switzerland, and as Vick in Latin America.

The company has a long advertising record behind it. The Wilson Library finding aid describes the Advertising and Sales Department files, including campaign books, as nearly complete from 1920 to 1960, and Vicks’s own history recalls a 1925 storybook featuring two elves named Blix and Blee, written for parents to read to children. NyQuil’s own advertising added the long, list-like tagline that Vicks dates to 1979.

Since 1985 the brand has sat inside Procter & Gamble’s portfolio with other names that came over in the same Richardson-Vicks purchase, among them Pantene. Its daytime counterpart took the Quil ending in the early 1990s, and the range now spans syrups, LiquiCaps and children’s versions listed on the Vicks website.

For a design guide, NyQuil shows how a single coined suffix can name a whole family of products, and how a parent mark can sit above it on every pack. Compare it with Vicks, its parent name, and Tylenol, another American over-the-counter brand with a long run of corporate owners. For this guide we use night indigo, midnight and vapour green with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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