A Green Bay paper company and a new name.

Puffs began, like its sister towel, as a Charmin product. Procter & Gamble bought the Charmin Paper Company of Green Bay, Wisconsin, in the late 1950s; English Wikipedia, citing the company history Rising Tide, published by Harvard Business Press in 2004, dates the purchase to 1957, while the timeline on the Puffs website gives 1958. The paper company had been the Hoberg Paper Company until 1950, when it took the name of its toilet tissue, and among its products was a facial tissue sold under the Charmin name.

That tissue was soon renamed. The Puffs website says that in 1960 P&G introduced Puffs Basic Facial Tissues, which replaced Charmin Facial Tissues. Wikipedia lists Puffs, with Bounty and Pampers, among the brands related to Charmin, and P&G, headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, has owned Puffs from its introduction to today.

For much of its early life Puffs was not sold everywhere in the United States. The company’s own history page, as archived in 2008, says Puffs Facial Tissue expanded into the Northeast in 1988 and became available across the entire United States in 1990, three decades after its launch. In 1999, the same timeline says, Puffs was launched in Canada, and the brand’s website still noted in 2008 that its product copy was valid only in the United States and Canada.

The range grew in steps along the way. The 2008 timeline lists Puffs Extra Strength, expanded nationally in 1991, and the Puffs Plus line, introduced nationally in 1987 and made thicker in 1998. The brand’s website now lists three tissues: Puffs Plus Lotion, Puffs Ultra Soft, and, since 2007, Puffs Plus Lotion with the Scent of Vicks.

Prints, cubes, travel packs and new cartons.

Puffs has told much of its history through its boxes: the brand’s own timeline marks its milestones by package as well as by product. In 1968, the archived history says, Puffs introduced Puffs Prints, printed tissues, and in 1977 it introduced an upright Cube package size.

The pack sizes multiplied in the 1990s. In 1993, the timeline says, Puffs introduced Large Count packs in the United States, two or more boxes wrapped together, and Puffs To Go travel packs for pockets and bags. In 1997 it launched a Puffs Designs Cube nationally. The timeline lists “motion cubes” in 2005, and in 2008 it recorded new carton designs for the range.

The pattern has continued. Today’s history page on the Puffs website ends its timeline with a single entry under the current decade: updated packaging design. The current site organises the range under two headings, lotion tissue and non-lotion tissue.

The company’s own words for what holds this together are a rhyme. The Puffs website’s history page is headed with the line “A nose in need deserves Puffs indeed,” and introduces the timeline in verse: “The history of Puffs is splendid and sweet, and our passion for noses is hard to beat.” It describes the brand’s mission as keeping noses soft “with air puffed cushions.” The same rhyming voice runs through the brand’s writing, from its history page to the archived introductions of its cartoon characters.

Design and documentation.

Paper towels, tissues, paper cups and food wraps share a design question. The product itself is usually plain paper, plastic or foil, so much of a brand’s identity is carried by the package around it: a printed wrapper around a roll, a carton or cube of tissues, a sleeve of cups, a box with a cutting edge. That package sits on a shelf beside its rivals and has to tell one name from another at a glance.

The identities in this category therefore tend to rest on things printed on the pack and seen in advertising: a drawn character, a slogan, a run of colours or patterns, a box shape. Many of these names have also passed between owners over the decades, through acquisitions and mergers of the paper and packaging companies behind them, so a character or a slogan can stay in use long after the company that introduced it has gone.

Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its packaging and advertising have changed over time, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

The Puffs Pals and a rhyme.

Since 2000, the Puffs website says, the brand has had characters of its own, the Puffs Pals. On the 2008 website each was introduced in a short rhyme about colds, weather and noses. The brand’s website, as archived in November 2008, presented a cast that included Tom, Sam, Stan, Karen, Winnie, Oliver, Daisy, Peter and Jenny, and described them as “charming — much like you.” Tom, one of its verses said, was a master of snowmen whose nose was chafed by the winter wind. The site’s history page dates a new Pals campaign to 2016, and the current website introduces a newer group — Theo, Jordan, Linda, Dakota and Sasha — each with an after-school pastime, a favourite season, a “sneeze style” and a joke.

The current Pals page gives each child a small scene. According to the website, Theo plays pretend with his dog, Spot; Linda paints with her Puffs pals; Dakota plays make-believe in the garden; and Sasha keeps reading after lights out by flashlight. The jokes are about noses and sneezes. The 2008 version of the site, as archived, offered the Pals pages with a link to a French-language version, and its footer linked to the brand’s own history timeline.

The Pals carry the brand’s advertising as well as its website. A press release from BBB National Programs, dated 8 November 2022, describes two short, whimsical Puffs Ultra Soft commercials featuring animated characters, titled “Linda’s Little Nose” and “Fire Department,” with side-by-side comparisons between Puffs and the “leading” competitor. Acting on a challenge from Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Kleenex, the National Advertising Division recommended that P&G discontinue or modify the two commercials, and P&G said it would comply.

The documented parts of the Puffs identity are a short name; a rhyming slogan; a cast of cartoon characters, renewed in 2016 and again on today’s website; and a run of boxes, from printed tissues in 1968 and the upright Cube of 1977 to the updated packaging of the 2020s, that the brand counts among its milestones.

For a design guide, Puffs shows how a brand with a near-invisible product can build its identity from its packaging, its verse and its characters, and keep refreshing all three. Compare it with Kleenex, its rival in the tissue aisle, and Charmin, whose facial tissue Puffs replaced. For this guide we use cushion blue, pastel pink and tissue white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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