A Rochester latex company, a move to Delaware and a name made of two words.

Playtex began as a product name inside a latex company. English Wikipedia’s Playtex article says Abram Nathaniel Spanel founded the International Latex Corporation, known as ILC, in Rochester, New York, in 1932, to make latex goods such as bathing caps, swimwear and baby pants. In 1939 the company moved to Dover, Delaware. It made no adult clothing until 1940, when, after patenting a method of manufacturing latex girdles that would not split at the seams from a small tear, it introduced the Living Girdle, advertised with pictures of women playing tennis and leaping.

The war interrupted the business. Wikipedia says that after Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion of Malaya cut Allied manufacturers off from their main sources of latex, ILC halted consumer production, and sales did not resume until 1946. To keep going, the company set up an industrial division to find government and military uses for latex. Wikipedia’s article on ILC Dover adds that International Latex supplied latex products such as boats, life rafts and canteens during the war.

The brand name dates from the reorganisation that followed. In 1947, according to both Wikipedia articles, International Latex split into four divisions, and Playtex was one of them. The name, Wikipedia says, is a portmanteau of “play” and “latex”, joining the material the company worked in to a word of leisure. Another of the four divisions, the ILC Dover article says, eventually became ILC Dover, which under a 1965 prime contract designed and made the spacesuits worn in the Apollo programme; Wikipedia’s Playtex article says that industrial business was spun off in 1967.

The early brand was built partly on the shop floor. Wikipedia says Playtex’s post-war marketing helped move undergarments from custom tailoring to manufactured sizes, and that the company introduced large floor displays with fitting charts so that shoppers could find their own size without a fitting. Wikipedia also records that ILC was sold to the Stanley Warner Corporation in 1954, and in 1955 Playtex was advertising undergarments on network television.

One name, several owners: apparel, gloves, infant care and feminine care.

The feminine-care business grew out of a consumer subsidiary. English Wikipedia says Playtex created Playtex Products Inc. in 1960 to make baby products, tampons and other household goods, and that Playtex introduced tampons during the 1960s. It dates the Gentle Glide tampon to 1973, the year Playtex patented a plastic tampon applicator, and records that through the following decades Playtex competed directly with Tampax. In the 1980s, Wikipedia says, Playtex was among the tampon manufacturers sued in connection with toxic shock syndrome.

The parent changed hands many times. Wikipedia lists the sequence: Joel Smilow became chief executive in 1969; Esmark acquired Playtex in 1975; Esmark sold it to Beatrice Foods in 1985; and in 1986 an investor group led by Smilow bought the company. In 1988 Playtex split into two companies, Playtex Apparel and Playtex Family Products. The apparel company was sold to the Sara Lee Corporation in 1991, and when Sara Lee spun off its clothing businesses in 2006, the Playtex bra and shapewear line passed to HanesBrands. Wikipedia adds that HanesBrands was itself acquired by Gildan Activewear in December 2025.

The family-products side followed a separate path. Wikipedia says Playtex Products went public in 1994, bought the Hawaiian Tropic sunscreen company in 2007, and was acquired the same year by Energizer Holdings. In 2015 Energizer separated its personal-care brands into a new company, Edgewell Personal Care, based in Shelton, Connecticut, alongside razors such as Schick. Edgewell then sold the Playtex businesses category by category: household gloves to Freudenberg Household Products in October 2017, and infant and pet care to Angelcare of Montreal in 2019, according to Wikipedia.

The feminine-care business was the last to move. On 12 November 2025 Edgewell announced a definitive agreement to sell its feminine care business — Playtex, Stayfree, Carefree and o.b. — to Essity, a hygiene and health company based in Sweden. On 2 February 2026 Edgewell announced that the sale was complete, with a transition services agreement running for at least a year. Essity has owned the feminine-care Playtex business since 2026. English Wikipedia’s Essity article says the company was formed in 2017 as a spin-off from the Swedish forest-products group SCA and is headquartered in Stockholm.

The name itself is held apart from all of these businesses. Wikipedia says the Playtex trademark in the United States and Canada belongs to Playtex Marketing Corp., which licenses it separately for each product category, and Edgewell’s own trademark notice described Playtex as a trademark used under licence.

Design and documentation.

Pad and tampon packaging is designed to be picked up quickly and carried without attention. Cartons and soft packs tend to use calm colours, rounded type and simple graphic shapes, and many are sized to sit in a bathroom cabinet or slip into a bag. The individual wrapper has become part of the design as well: a small printed sleeve or a twisted paper or film pouch that keeps each item closed, often in a colour that matches the outer pack.

Much of the information on these packs is organised by colour. Sizes and flow levels are commonly coded with a distinct tone or a row of drop symbols, so a shopper can tell variants apart on a crowded shelf without reading every line. Shapes, applicator types and liner lengths are shown with small diagrams rather than photographs.

Packs also carry text that design does not control: usage leaflets, material lists and statutory wording that differ from market to market. Each guide in this group sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its name, packs and advertising have changed, keeping to what dated sources record.

A material, a word of leisure and a name that outlived both.

The identity begins with the name. When International Latex chose Playtex in 1947, Wikipedia says, it joined “play” to “latex”. Under the owners that followed, the word has appeared on tampons, bras, infant-care products and household gloves, and Wikipedia says those categories are now licensed to different companies by a single trademark holder.

The early identity was visible on the shop floor. The floor displays and fitting charts that Wikipedia describes for the post-war girdle and bra business let shoppers find their own size without a fitting, and the move onto network television in 1955 put the name in front of a national audience. Those were apparel decisions, and that side of the brand has followed its own course since 1988 under Sara Lee and HanesBrands; Wikipedia says the Cross Your Heart bra has been marketed since 1954 with the line “lifts and separates”.

The feminine-care brand works through sub-names. Wikipedia names Gentle Glide, dated to 1973, and Playtex Sport, which it describes as aimed at young athletes. Edgewell’s trademark notice listed Gentle Glide as a mark in its own right, alongside Stayfree, Carefree and o.b. In October 2026 the Playtex tampon website is organised around the Sport range, with a period tracker, a blog and pages on tampon use, and carries a copyright line for Essity Hygiene and Health AB.

The palette in this guide is an interpretation rather than a record. The orchid and plum stand for the feminine-care packaging as we read it, the teal nods to the swimwear and bathing caps of the company’s early years, and the pale cream recalls the latex itself. None of these is a published specification.

For a design guide, Playtex shows how a coined name can be carried beyond the company that coined it, travelling through apparel, infant care and feminine care under several owners while the word itself stays the same. Compare it with Tampax, its long-standing rival in tampons, and Schick, a fellow Edgewell brand, or with Kotex and Stayfree. For this guide we use orchid and deep plum with a teal accent on latex cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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