A father, a son and amber pint jars.

Purex began as a household bleach in 1922. The brand tells the story itself on its website: it says Purex started in a family garage, where a father-and-son team, Lionel and Roy, used their own recipe to make a bleach that they packed in amber pint jars and sold below the usual price of the day. The company says the bleach was named Purex for its clear, pure qualities. English Wikipedia gives a fuller version of the same start: it names the father as Lionel S. Precourt and his son as Ray, places the garage behind the family home in Los Angeles, and says the Purex name was adopted for the bleach in the year after they began.

The family business grew beyond bleach. Wikipedia says that by 1946 Purex was making a light-duty dry detergent sold under the name Trend, and that in the 1950s and early 1960s it added other household names through acquisitions. Among them, it says, were Old Dutch Cleanser and the SweetHeart soap of the Manhattan Soap Company, and in 1962 a merger with the Brillo Manufacturing Company, maker of Brillo soap pads.

By the early 1980s Purex was a diversified company. The New York Times described it in August 1982 as a maker of household and consumer products, specialty food products, swimming-pool chemicals and equipment, and industrial and commercial cleaning preparations. Wikipedia says the company also took on several household brands of the A. E. Staley Manufacturing Company in 1981, among them Sta-Puf fabric softener and Sta-Flo liquid starch. The Purex brand today still tells the garage-and-amber-jar story as its origin on its own website.

Purex Industries, Greyhound, Dial and Henkel.

The company changed hands in 1982. The New York Times reported on 12 August that year that shareholders of Purex Industries had approved its merger into a new, privately held corporation, also called Purex Industries Inc., organised by the investment firm Gibbons, Green, Van Amerongen through a leveraged buyout, and that the merger was completed immediately afterwards.

Three years later the household business moved again. On 22 February 1985 The New York Times reported that the Greyhound Corporation had agreed to buy the consumer products division of Purex Industries, which it described as a closely held company based in Lakewood, California. The paper listed the division’s products as including Purex bleach, Brillo soap pads and Trend laundry detergent, and said Greyhound, then based in Phoenix, would combine the division with its Armour-Dial business, the maker of Dial soap. Wikipedia says the combination formed The Dial Corporation, and that under Dial the Purex name came to be used mainly for laundry detergents, with the original bleach later dropped.

The German group Henkel came next. Wikipedia says Dial and Henkel formed a joint venture, Dial/Henkel LLC, in 1999, which introduced Purex Advanced laundry detergent, and that Henkel then acquired The Dial Corporation, agreeing the deal in December 2003, citing Advertising Age. Henkel has owned Purex since that acquisition in 2004. By January 2011 The New York Times was describing the Dial Corporation as a division of Henkel, and Wikipedia says Dial later took the name Henkel Corporation, trading as Henkel North American Consumer Goods, with its headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut. The Purex website today calls the brand “part of the Henkel family” and carries a Henkel Corporation copyright line.

Design and documentation.

Laundry and kitchen-wrap brands live on the shelf as packaging first. A detergent jug, a softener bottle and a wrap carton are the parts of these brands that most people handle, and each carries its name, its colours and its pictures on a surface that has to be read quickly from a supermarket aisle and then again at home, beside a washing machine or in a kitchen drawer.

Those surfaces change over time. A label may be redrawn, a bottle reshaped, a carton given a new cutting edge or a new illustration, and the company behind the name may change hands while the name itself stays on the pack. That makes the plain questions worth asking for each brand: who started it, who has owned it since, and how its name, label and advertising have been presented over the years.

Each guide in this group sets out what independent, dated sources record about those questions, marks what rests on a company’s own account by saying so, and treats the colours and typefaces shown here as our interpretation rather than an official specification.

A name for purity, a value promise and new forms.

The Purex identity rests on its name, which the company says was chosen for the bleach’s clear, pure qualities, and on a value position the brand states openly. Its website sets out a “Purex Promise” built on quality products at an affordable price, and tells the founding story through the father and son selling their bleach below the going rate. Packaging has changed with the product: the company describes amber pint jars for the original bleach, and Wikipedia dates Purex liquid laundry detergent to 1975 and its use of a blue plastic bottle to 1981.

Under Henkel the brand has been stretched into new formats. The New York Times reported in January 2011 that Dial had introduced Purex Complete 3-in-1 in 2009, a laundry sheet that combined detergent, fabric softener and an antistatic treatment, and was bringing to the United States a crystal-form softener that Henkel already sold in Germany, Israel, Italy and Spain, as Purex Complete Crystals. The paper said the advertising came from Energy BBDO, the Chicago office of BBDO North America, and that the campaign ended on a coined word, “Purextraordinary,” also used for the 3-in-1 sheets. Eric Schwartz, Dial’s vice president for laundry care marketing in the United States, told the paper that “value” did not mean just low price, and Dan Fietsam, Energy BBDO’s chief creative officer, described the aim as “a brand story of continual innovation.” Wikipedia says the Crystals line is now marketed as in-wash fragrance boosters, and the brand site in 2026 groups its range into liquid detergent, powder detergent, laundry pacs and scent boosters.

For a design guide, Purex shows a name built on a single idea of purity that has moved from an amber jar of bleach to bottles, sheets and crystals and that states its value promise on its own website. Compare it with Persil, Henkel’s German detergent, and with all, another American laundry name that passed to Henkel. For this guide we use bottle blue, amber jar and clear white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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