A satchel, a railway line and a move south.

Orkin dates its start to 1901, when Otto Orkin, one of six children in a Latvian immigrant family in eastern Pennsylvania, began selling rat poison door to door. English Wikipedia places that start in Walnutport, Pennsylvania, and its account rests largely on a company history by Margaret O. Kirk, published by Rollins in Atlanta in 2005. The Rollins history page puts it in a single line: in 1901 “Orkin began operations,” with Otto Orkin, “The Rat Man,” selling poison door to door.

According to Kirk, Orkin carried his preparations in a black satchel, in measured paper bags printed with the word POISON and a skull and crossbones, and he charged only when a customer wanted more. The nickname became a trading name: the business was known as “Orkin The Rat Man.”

The business followed the railway. Kirk writes that Orkin used the Lehigh line to travel and chose to go south, arriving in Richmond, Virginia, in 1909, where he added an extermination service to his poison sales. For several years the business remained officially registered at a post-office address in Easton, Pennsylvania; Kirk dates a proper office in downtown Richmond to 1912. In Richmond Orkin also began to sell the idea of the trade itself, presenting extermination in his publicity as a matter of good sanitation rather than something to be embarrassed about.

A government job then brought the next move. Kirk records a 1925 contract with the US Army Corps of Engineers to deal with rats at the Wilson Dam in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and says that Orkin stopped in Atlanta on the way and decided to move there. The Atlanta Journal reported on 17 January 1926 on the “war on rodents” of a new Atlanta concern: the Orkin Exterminating Company, which had opened in the Candler building on 2 January with Otto Orkin as president and his nephew Theodore Oser as vice president of sales. In Virginia the older name, “Orkin The Rat Man,” stayed in use until 1956.

A diamond, a uniform and a cartoon spray can.

The mark that still identifies the company arrived within months of the Atlanta move. Kirk writes that in August 1926 the red and white Orkin diamond began to appear on advertisements and company letterheads, replacing The Rat Man. In the late 1930s Otto Orkin centralised a network of branches that had largely run themselves, so that billing went through Atlanta and every office presented itself as part of one company. In 1947, according to Kirk, Orkin issued company-wide uniforms for its service technicians, with the red diamond on hats, jackets and shirts.

Television added a character. In the 1950s Orkin advertised with “Otto the Orkin Man,” a cartoon aerosol spray can with its own jingle; an advertisement in The Palm Beach Post on 15 March 1959 told readers to “call ‘Otto’ the Orkin Man.” Kirk writes that the character then spread from the screen to the caps worn by technicians and to the trucks, which carried Otto as well as the diamond. The company also moved its headquarters to West Peachtree Street in Atlanta in 1951.

Ownership changed in 1964. Rollins had begun in 1948 as Rollins Broadcasting, when the brothers John W. Rollins and O. Wayne Rollins bought a radio station in Radford, Virginia, and by the early 1960s it owned radio and television stations and an outdoor advertising business. The New York Times reported on 20 June 1964 that Rollins proposed to acquire Orkin, and the Rollins history page lists the purchase of Orkin Exterminating Company that year; Kirk dates it to April 1964. Rollins renamed itself Rollins, Inc. in 1965 and, the company says, moved its headquarters from Wilmington, Delaware, to Atlanta in 1967. Kirk records that Wayne Rollins’s son Gary Rollins was named president of Orkin in 1978.

Under Rollins the name went further afield. The Rollins history page dates the opening of Orkin franchising to 1995; that the 1999 acquisition of PCO Services in Canada was later rebranded Orkin Canada; and that an international franchise began in Mexico in 2000. Rollins also kept several acquired businesses under their own names, including Western Pest Services, HomeTeam Pest Defense, Critter Control and Northwest Exterminating, so Orkin sits within a family of pest control brands owned by Rollins.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group come to the house rather than sitting on a shelf inside it: they clear drains, treat pests, dry out flooded rooms, clean carpets and move furniture and boxes from one home to the next. Home-service names sit at many different points in the trade, from businesses that grew out of a single tool or a single truck to names now run through franchise networks or owned by much larger groups.

Most people meet these brands only when something has gone wrong or something is about to change, so a service brand’s identity is carried less by a product than by what turns up at the door: a painted van or truck, a technician’s uniform, a telephone number that is easy to remember and, for some, a jingle or slogan repeated for decades on radio and television.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding, its owners over time, how its vehicles, names and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Diamond, mascot, uniform and fleet.

Orkin’s visible identity works in four places at once. The red and white diamond sits on letterheads and advertising, as it has since 1926. The uniform carries it onto a doorstep: the trade magazine Made to Measure described the familiar Orkin uniform in 2008 as a white collared shirt with the Orkin logo and red epaulets, worn with pressed khaki or grey trousers. The fleet takes it onto the street: Light and Medium Truck profiled the company’s white pickups with the red diamond in May 2009, and Autoblog reported in December 2011 that the final Ford Ranger built at Ford’s St. Paul plant had already been sold to Orkin.

The fourth place is the mascot. The Orkin Man moved from the cartoon spray can of the 1950s to a human figure, with later campaigns, according to English Wikipedia, casting him as an expert, as an “Exterminator Robot” and as a scientist under the line “Pest Control Down to a Science.” In April 2022 the company retired the name: Adweek reported on 27 April that the Orkin Man had become the Orkin Pro, a gender-neutral update introduced in the opening ads from its new agency of record, DDB Chicago. The name has also appeared outside advertising. The O. Orkin Insect Zoo at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., opened in September 1993 with a contribution from the company, and Orkin employees have given school talks on insects under the Orkin Man name since the 1950s, Kirk writes.

For a design guide, Orkin shows how a nickname, a diamond and a cartoon can be carried by the same red across letterheads, shirts, caps and truck doors, while the mascot changes with the times. Compare it with Terminix, the Memphis pest control name that grew out of a hardwood flooring company, and SERVPRO, another American home-service name recognised by its vans. For this guide we use diamond red, navy and khaki with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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