A Düsseldorf powder and a two-syllable name.

Persil is a product of Henkel & Cie, the company founded in 1876 and based in Düsseldorf. In a history published on 22 December 2006 for the brand’s centenary, Henkel says it combined a washing agent with perborate as a bleaching agent, so that oxygen released in the wash formed small bubbles, did the work of the washboard and made bleaching linen in the sun unnecessary. The company called the result a “self-acting” laundry detergent and dates its launch to 6 June 1907.

German Wikipedia adds that the first advertisement for Persil appeared on that day in the Düsseldorfer Stadtanzeiger, telling readers that a new washing product was coming soon and that announcements would say when it could be bought. From 1908, it says, Henkel offered a guarantee to cover damage caused by using the product, and Persil was sold only in its original carton rather than loose.

The name is a syllable word. Henkel says it was formed from the two most important chemical raw materials in the product, perborate and silicate, and English Wikipedia notes that persil also happens to be the French word for parsley. German Wikipedia says that coincidence made the Imperial Patent Office hesitate for years before accepting the word as a trademark. An early slogan, “Persil bleibt Persil” (Persil remains Persil), is dated to 1913 on a tin can pictured in the same article; the centenary history gives the English version as “Only Persil is Persil.”

Production soon moved beyond Düsseldorf. German Wikipedia says the foundation stone of a Henkel branch plant in Genthin was laid on 4 August 1921 and that Persil was made there from March 1923.

One name, two owners, and a 1927 agreement.

Persil is one brand name owned by two companies in different countries. English Wikipedia describes it as a laundry detergent made and marketed by Henkel of Germany and by Unilever, with Unilever holding the name in the United Kingdom, Ireland and France and in a number of other markets, and Henkel everywhere else.

The split goes back to licensing before the First World War. German Wikipedia says that in 1909 Henkel granted ten-year licences to use the Persil name abroad: in France to the Société d’Electro-Chimie and in the United Kingdom to the soap maker Crosfield. In France, the Marseille businessman Jules Ronchetti had already launched a soap called “Le Persil” in 1906; during the war Electro-Chimie agreed with him to stop selling detergents under the Persil name, and Ronchetti then sold his “Le Persil” mark to the English firm Lever Brothers. When Lever bought Crosfield in 1919, the article says, it also gained the British Persil licence, which was then about to expire.

Both Wikipedia editions, the French trade title La Revue des Marques among their sources, say the dispute ended in 1927 with a contract that reserved the Persil name to Lever in France and the United Kingdom and to Henkel in the rest of the world. Lever Brothers later became part of Unilever. English Wikipedia says that Henkel sells its formula in France as Le Chat, in Italy, Greece and Cyprus as Dixan and in Spain as Wipp, while Unilever’s Persil sits alongside Omo, Surf and Rinso as a local name for its own international detergent.

In Germany the brand had a separate post-war history. German Wikipedia says the Genthin plant, expropriated in 1945, kept the Persil rights for the East and that a detergent called Persil was made there until 1968, after which the plant’s Spee brand took over in the GDR; Henkel bought the Genthin works back after reunification.

Henkel’s own line developed through numbered versions. The company dates Persil 59, a synthetic detergent suited to washing machines, to the late 1950s, and Persil 65 to 1 January 1965, followed by Persil Color in 1991 and the concentrated pearls of Persil Megaperls in 1994. In North America Henkel introduced Persil ProClean in the United States in March 2015, English Wikipedia says, and after Henkel acquired all’s then owner Sun Products in 2016, Wisk was withdrawn in favour of Persil.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all sell laundry care: detergents, fabric softeners, stain removers and products for delicate clothes. They sit side by side on the same supermarket shelf, often in the same aisle, and a shopper usually picks one out in a few seconds, from several steps away.

That is why a laundry brand’s identity tends to live on the pack. Bottle and box colours, the shape and placement of a logo, the name of a scent printed across a label and, for some brands, a mascot or a familiar face from television advertising all do the work of recognition. The same name can also appear on a liquid, a powder, a pod or a dryer sheet, so the visual system has to hold together across very different containers. Within a single range, colour can also be used to tell one version apart from another at a glance.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who launched the brand, who has owned it over time and how its packs and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A white lady, a green pack and a red word.

Persil’s visual history is built around white, the colour of the washing it promised. Henkel’s centenary history singles out the White Lady, created in 1922, as a defining advertising image, and says she appeared on placards and metal signs until the beginning of the 1960s. German Wikipedia names her designer as the Berlin graphic artist Kurt Heiligenstaedt and describes her white dress and Florentine hat. Henkel adds that when she returned to Persil advertising in 1950 for the first time since the Second World War, she gave many Germans a sense that a lasting peace had arrived.

The figure moved off the poster and into the street. German Wikipedia says that from the late 1920s electrically lit advertising columns with clocks were put up showing the White Lady, and the Persil clocks became fixtures of German town squares; several survive or have been rebuilt, and Düsseldorf still has a number of them. An illuminated Persil sign stands on top of the Wilhelm-Marx-Haus in Düsseldorf, where, the article says, the letters sit on a lift that is lowered by day and raised after dark to show the name in all four directions.

Early campaigns were theatrical. German Wikipedia records men dressed in white carrying white umbrellas through Berlin for Persil in 1908, walking advertisements in oversized Persil packs, and skywriting aircraft writing the name in smoke into the 1930s. In 1932 Henkel produced a feature-length cinema film, Wäsche – Waschen – Wohlergehen. The article dates a Persil television spot, broadcast by Bayerischer Rundfunk on 3 November 1956 and starring Beppo Brem and Liesl Karlstadt, to the start of advertising on German television.

The pack itself settled into a colour code. According to German Wikipedia, a green background was introduced at the end of the 1950s, and from 1970 the name was set in red, bold sans-serif lettering. English Wikipedia’s infobox shows two different logos side by side, one used by Henkel and one by Unilever, so the same word is drawn two ways depending on where the pack is sold. Henkel announced a global relaunch of the brand and its packaging in April 2007 for the centenary, with the slogan “Persil – Pure into the future.”

For a design guide, Persil shows how a coined chemical name, a single advertising figure and a fixed pair of pack colours can carry one brand across a century and two owners; compare it with Unilever, which holds the name in Britain, and all, the American detergent Henkel added in 2016. For this guide we use Persil red, pack green and white with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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