A Procter & Gamble shampoo in a squat green bottle.

Pert began as a Procter & Gamble shampoo. The brand’s own press room, archived in 2010 under its then owner, Idelle Labs, says that Pert shampoo made its debut in 1980, and the fashion and beauty site Racked, in a history of the brand published in February 2017, gives the same year. English Wikipedia also dates Pert to 1980, citing that press room.

The early product was simply called Pert and was sold as a shampoo. Racked’s writer, Cheryl Wischhover, noted that its early commercials nonetheless spoke of a “cleaning-conditioner,” and that it came in a squat green bottle — a softer green, she wrote, than the vivid shade the brand later wore. In those years it was marketed to women. The commercials of the early 1980s that Racked described showed women bouncing on trampolines and doing aerobics, in the fitness fashions of the period, with the emphasis on bouncy hair.

The change that gave the brand its longer name came in 1987. Racked says that P&G, which owned Pert at the time, relaunched it that year as Pert Plus, a shampoo and conditioner in one bottle. The brand’s archived press room tells the same story in its own words: the brand “became known as Pert Plus” in 1987, when its 2-in-1 shampoo-plus-conditioner formula was introduced, and it presented the idea as a time saver for busy people who wanted a single bottle in the shower.

The pitch stayed with active women for a while. Racked describes a 1989 commercial in which a woman playing tennis has no time to keep both a shampoo and a conditioner in her gym locker. The name Pert Plus, with the word “Plus” standing for the conditioner in the bottle, became the brand’s public name in the United States for the next three decades, and English Wikipedia still files the brand under it.

Outside North America the same idea travelled under other names. English Wikipedia says that Procter & Gamble markets the 2-in-1 product as Pert 2 in 1 in Australia and New Zealand and as Rejoice in Asia, so the Pert name on a North American shelf and the P&G products abroad now belong to different companies.

Athletes, a reformulation and three changes of owner.

In the 1990s the brand widened its audience. Racked says Pert went after a sporty market of both sexes, with commercials featuring the beach volleyball player Gabrielle Reece, the soccer player Mia Hamm and the baseball player Mike Piazza, and that it also launched Pert for Kids. In 1999, according to the same account, Pert Plus was reformulated and backed by a new advertising campaign, including a commercial in which a man stopped people on the street in Las Vegas and gave them shampoo sessions on the sidewalk.

Procter & Gamble then let the North American brand go. In a release dated 10 March 2010, the Phoenix investment firm Najafi Companies said that its portfolio company Innovative Brands LLC had acquired Pert Plus and the Sure antiperspirant brand from The Procter & Gamble Company in 2006, and had since marketed both in North America, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. English Wikipedia describes the 2006 purchase as one of North American trademark rights. Under Innovative Brands, Racked says, the brand added a Pert Plus for Men line, which included a 3-in-1 product that added body wash to the shampoo and conditioner; the brand’s own press room of 2010 likewise mentions a line for men and new 3-in-1 lines.

The same 2010 release announced the next sale. Najafi said Innovative Brands had agreed to sell its Pert Plus hair care and Sure businesses to Helen of Troy Limited, the personal care and household products company, with the deal expected to close in late March 2010; Racked dates the sale to Helen of Troy to 2009. Helen of Troy ran Pert through Idelle Labs, the name that appears on the brand’s website from 2010 and 2015.

Under Helen of Troy, Racked says, the brand committed fully to its male customers. The company dropped the separate men’s line, because the brand’s buyers by then were already largely men, and that in 2011 it ran commercials in which men with animal heads found themselves in awkward situations with the women in their lives, under the tagline “Don’t be an animal.” Those ads, the same article says, were later abandoned.

In February 2017 Helen of Troy relaunched the brand. Racked reported that the relaunch brought in a new spokesman, the UFC fighter Elias Theodorou, with his long hair, a focus on social media and a set of visual changes described in the next section, and that a brand representative, Gil Kross, hoped it would draw a younger generation of men to the product.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all sell soap, body wash or shampoo, and they sit at very different points in the trade. Some still belong to the company that first registered the name; others have passed through several owners, been licensed out, or been revived years after their original makers stopped using them. A single name can move from one parent group to another without the product on the shelf changing much at all.

In this category a brand’s identity is carried by a small set of surfaces: the paper or film wrapper around a bar, the printed label on a pump bottle or a squeeze tube, and the advertising that surrounds them. Those surfaces are redrawn often, and a wordmark, a colour or a slogan may outlast several owners, factories and formulas.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who has owned it and since when, where the product is made and how its packaging and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A green bottle, a shorter name and new owners.

Racked described the 1980 bottle as squat and green, and by 2017 its writer could speak of “Pert Plus green” as a colour readers would recognise, comparing it with a pair of bright green boxing shorts worn at the relaunch event. The 2017 relaunch changed nearly everything else about the pack. According to Racked, the company replaced the curvy bottle, which had sat among family hair care products in drugstores, with a more angular shape meant to place it in the men’s aisle, and it shortened the name from Pert Plus to Pert. At the time, the article noted, the brand’s social media accounts still used a mixture of the old and new names, and the company was moving them all to Pert.

The brand changed hands again in 2021. On 8 June 2021, in a release distributed by GlobeNewswire, HRB Brands LLC, a portfolio company of the private equity firm Tengram Capital Partners, announced that it had acquired a portfolio of personal care brands from Helen of Troy, among them Brut, Pert, Sure and Infusium. The same release said the business, previously High Ridge Brands, was taking the name HRB Brands, and listed its existing brands as including Zest, VO5, Coast and Rave. Pert thus joined Coast and Zest under one owner.

On 3 October 2024, in a release on Business Wire, Tengram announced the sale of HRB Brands to Sodalis Group, which it described as a European-based beauty and personal care platform; Tengram said it had acquired HRB in April 2020. Sodalis’s chief executive, Fabio Granata, said in the release that the company, born in a small Italian province, was entering the American market with a direct affiliate, Sodalis USA. Sodalis Group has owned the brand since that 2024 sale, and today the Pert website carries a 2025 copyright notice for Sodalis USA, LLC. The site sells a range of 2in1 shampoo-plus-conditioner products, says Pert “was created to champion proud, hardworking men of all ages,” and calls the people who use its products “ex-PERTs” — a play on the name that the brand uses on its site today.

For a design guide, Pert shows how a brand can keep one colour while rewriting its name, its bottle and its audience around it. Compare it with Prell, another Procter & Gamble shampoo that now belongs to a smaller owner, and VO5, the hair care name that sits alongside Pert in the same American portfolio. For this guide we use bottle green, bright green and foam white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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