A grandfather, a cloth nappy and a research division.

Pampers is a Procter & Gamble brand, and it was born inside the company’s research operation rather than bought in from outside. English Wikipedia describes it as an American brand of baby and toddler products marketed by P&G, a range that today runs from nappies to wipes.

The story the company tells begins with one engineer. Victor Mills, a chemical engineer who had joined Procter & Gamble straight from university, headed the company’s Exploratory Development Department after the Second World War, according to English Wikipedia’s article on him. That department was responsible for finding new lines of product, and Wikipedia credits Mills with conceiving and leading the development of Pampers during the 1950s. The same engineer worked on the production of Ivory soap and Duncan Hines cake mix, and his last project was the development of Pringles.

Pampers’ own history page dates the idea to 1956, when, the company says, Mills was frustrated with cloth nappies while caring for his grandson. Wikipedia’s article on the brand tells the same story of a grandparent who disliked changing cloth nappies, and says Mills assigned fellow researchers in P&G’s Exploratory Division in Miami Valley, Ohio, to look into making a better disposable one. It names Norma Lueders Baker among the researchers who created the product alongside Mills. Wikipedia’s article on the diaper as an object says the product was conceptualised in 1959 and launched in 1961.

The name came from advertising rather than the laboratory. Wikipedia credits “Pampers” to Alfred Goldman, creative director at the agency Benton & Bowles. According to the company’s timeline, the first Pampers reached the stores in 1961.

That arrival created a practical puzzle. On its heritage page, Pampers says that in the 1960s its nappies went into department stores, supermarkets and drug stores, but that nobody knew quite where to shelve them: they turned up in the convenience section, the food aisle, the paper-products aisle and the drug section.

Tapes, gels, sizes and a wipes business.

Most of the brand’s history since then is a sequence of changes to the product itself. The safety pin went first. Wikipedia records that Pampers filed for a patent on adhesive tabs and release strips in 1971, and the company’s own timeline marks 1971 as the year tapes replaced pins. During the same decade, the company says, it added a Toddler size, an Extra Absorbent Daytime version, an improved newborn nappy, Quilted Pampers and a size for premature babies.

The shape changed in the 1980s. Wikipedia says P&G took out its first patent for double gussets in a nappy in 1973, and that in 1982 Pampers introduced an elasticised wingfold design with elastic leg gathers and refastenable tapes, a step towards the hourglass shape that P&G had first put on its sister brand Luvs in 1976. In 1986, Wikipedia and the company both record, thin nappies made with absorbent gelling material arrived. In 1987, according to Wikipedia, Pampers and its rival Huggies both introduced frontal tape systems.

The 1990s brought new names and new categories. Wikipedia lists Ultra Dry Thins, a period of separate nappies for boys and girls in the early part of the decade that ended with a return to unisex designs, and Pampers Trainers, launched in 1993 and short-lived. Pampers did not sell training pants again until it introduced Easy Ups. The company dates its entry into the wipes business to 1993 as well. In 1996, Wikipedia says, P&G acquired the Baby Fresh wipes business from Kimberly-Clark, which had been ordered to sell it after buying Scott Paper. In 1998 P&G introduced Baby-Dry Size 6, promoted in advertising with the paediatrician T. Berry Brazelton.

Later lines were defined by name as much as by construction. The company dates a colour-changing wetness indicator to 2007, and in 2018 it launched Pampers Pure. In Europe, Wikipedia notes, the nappies sold in the United States as Cruisers and Swaddlers carry the names Active Fit and New Baby. In 2010 parents’ complaints about a reformulated version sold as Dry Max led to a lawsuit and a review by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make nappies, baby-care products, baby food and infant formula. Brands of this kind in general sit in a particular corner of the shop: the same aisle often holds products made by large household-goods and nutrition companies alongside smaller names, and a long-running brand may have passed between several owners over the decades while keeping the name, the colours and the characters that parents already know from the shelf.

A baby brand’s identity is usually carried by its packaging, its name and its imagery rather than by the product itself, which is rarely seen until the pack is opened. Drawn babies, photographs of infants, animal characters and soft colours appear across the category, and a mascot or illustration can stay on a pack long after the company behind it has changed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packs and characters have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name from an ad agency, characters of its own.

Pampers’ identity starts with a word chosen for its feeling rather than its function. Alfred Goldman’s name, coined at Benton & Bowles, describes how the product is meant to make a baby feel, not what it is made of, and it has stayed in place through every technical change described above.

Around that name, Pampers has built its identity out of sub-brands. Swaddlers, Cruisers, Baby-Dry, Easy Ups and Pure each name a stage of childhood or a promise about the product, so that the master brand can stay constant while the range underneath it shifts. The European names Active Fit and New Baby show the same structure at work, with local names hung beneath one constant mark.

The prints on the nappies themselves have become part of the design story. For years licensed characters appeared on them, and Wikipedia lists Sesame Street and its Latin American version, Plaza Sésamo, among the brand’s sponsorships. In 2023, Wikipedia records, Pampers stopped using licensed designs for its motifs, and on the Swaddlers line it began using two characters of its own, Shiloh the elephant and Freddy the duck.

Advertising has taken the brand into television and, in places, sport and music. Wikipedia says Pampers commercials have appeared during soap operas co-produced by Procter & Gamble and during parenting programmes, and that P&G sponsored Make Room for Baby on the Discovery Health Channel. In Romania the brand has sponsored the tennis player Simona Halep, and in Poland it has worked with the singer Luna, who represented the country at Eurovision in 2024.

The retail history adds a final point. When the first Pampers reached shops in the 1960s, the company says, stores did not yet have a single aisle for them.

For a design guide, Pampers shows how a brand born in a research department can build its warmth through a name, a family of sub-brands and, more recently, characters it owns outright. Compare it with Luvs, its stablemate at Procter & Gamble, and Huggies, the Kimberly-Clark brand it has competed with for decades. For this guide we use Pampers teal and soft mint with warm yellow and a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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