A late dinner in Melrose Park, and a mop built from kitchen parts.

Quickie’s story, as the family told it, begins with a dinner that was late. The Philadelphia Inquirer, in a profile by Bob Fernandez published on 25 September 2007, reported that Bedros Vosbikian, who ran a hardware factory, came home one evening in 1950 to his house in Melrose Park and found that his wife, Vartanoush, had not yet served dinner because she was still scrubbing the floors. A year later, the paper said, Vosbikian introduced an automatic sponge mop, and he patented its self-wringing action.

The Inquirer described how the mop was made. Citing an old news clipping, it said Vosbikian built his prototype from a broom handle, a breadboard, a rubber sponge, an aluminium cookie sheet, and wing nuts and bolts. The production version was designed with chrome-plated parts and stainless-steel springs and was aimed at department stores. For years it was manufactured in a two-storey factory in North Philadelphia, near Broad and Lehigh Streets, which is why the paper set Bedros Vosbikian’s mop beside cheesesteaks and the Mummers as a Philadelphia original.

The company’s own dating of its start varies with the source. Newell Brands, the current owner, says Quickie has been making cleaning tools “since 1950”, and a 2009 report in the Robesonian of Lumberton, North Carolina, said the company was “born in Philadelphia in 1950” with the invention of the Automatic Sponge Mop. The private-equity firm Centre Partners, announcing its sale of the business on 20 December 2010, gave an older date: it said Quickie was established in 1919 by Peter Sr., the father of the then chairman, and his brother Thomas Vosbikian.

The next generation shaped the company that followed. The Inquirer said Bedros Vosbikian passed Quickie Manufacturing Corp. to his son Peter Vosbikian, who made the mop the core of a wider cleaning-tools company. The paper described a 1963 publicity photograph in the company archives of Peter, in a suit and a narrow tie, modelling a product called the “Ring-A-Mop”, and the Robesonian said new products quickly followed the first mop, with the company moving into push brooms and related tools.

From North Philadelphia to Cinnaminson, then Jarden and Newell.

The business moved across the Delaware River in the 1970s. According to the Inquirer, Quickie relocated to Cinnaminson, in Burlington County, New Jersey, in the mid-1970s. Less than two years later it signed a contract to distribute through Kmart and expanded into a former macaroni plant in nearby Delran. The company later opened a plant in North Carolina and closed its South Jersey factories, the paper said, while keeping its headquarters in Cinnaminson, in a warehouse-like building a mile off Route 130.

The North Carolina plant is in Lumberton. The Robesonian reported in January 2009 that the plant, on a 37-acre site on Kenny Biggs Road, opened in 1998 and began production in April of that year, to provide space to plan, produce and distribute Quickie products sold across the country. By 2010, Centre Partners said, Quickie also operated production facilities in El Paso, Texas, and Cadereyta, Mexico.

The Inquirer said Peter Vosbikian sold a majority interest to the New York investment firm Centre Partners, and that Michael Magerman, a co-founder of Odyssey Golf, joined Quickie as chief executive in 2005; Centre Partners dates its investment to December 2004. Its release of 20 December 2010 announced the sale of Quickie to Jarden Corporation, with terms undisclosed and with management and employees continuing to run the operation. English Wikipedia’s Jarden article records the purchase later in 2010, alongside Aero Products International. On 14 December 2015, Wikipedia says, Newell Rubbermaid announced that it would acquire Jarden, with the combined company to be known as Newell Brands. Newell now describes Quickie as wholly owned by Newell Brands.

Under Magerman the brand reached into licensing. The Inquirer reported in 2007 that Quickie had launched a scented broom with Reckitt Benckiser, the owner of Air Wick and Lysol, and had signed a licence with Microban International for antimicrobial materials in its products. It named Freudenberg Household Products, which sells O-Cedar and Vileda, and the Libman Company of Arcola, Illinois, as two of Quickie’s main competitors, with Procter & Gamble’s Swiffer pressing on the category from another side.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make the plain tools of household upkeep: mops, brooms, brushes, sponges and scourers, and the traps and baits sold for mice and rats. Cleaning-tool and pest-trap brands in general sit on the same hardware and supermarket aisles, and they are bought quickly, often by someone standing in front of a crowded peg wall, so their identities tend to work at a glance rather than through long copy.

In this category the product itself often carries the brand. A handle colour, the colour of a sponge or scouring pad, a stamped wordmark on a wooden base or a moulded plastic housing can be as recognisable as any logo. Packaging adds another layer: blister packs and header cards that hang on hooks, cartons with a large product photograph, and, for chemical products, the warning panels and directions that regulators require, which take up space a designer cannot reclaim.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, where the products are made and how the packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One name across home, workshop and jobsite.

The products that carry the name today are, in the trade’s own words, sticks and small things. Newell Brands describes Quickie as a maker of mops, brooms, brushes, dusters and scrubbers, “stickware and smallware as the categories are known”, and says it aims for cleaning tools that are “expertly engineered and remarkably simple”.

The name has been stretched into sub-brands rather than replaced. The Inquirer reported in 2007 that the 2-in-1 Bulldozer push broom was Quickie’s biggest revenue item, and that the home-centre chains Home Depot and Lowe’s had sections devoted to Quickie tools. Newell now presents Quickie Bulldozer as a line of tools for DIY projects and heavier jobs at home, and Quickie Jobsite as contractor-grade tools for a professional clean, both alongside the flagship Quickie range. In October 2016 the trade title HCO News reported a further extension, Quickie Commercial Products, a line of brooms, brushes, mops and dusting tools for hospitality, health care, food service and education.

In each case the sub-line name follows the word Quickie. The Inquirer told the company’s history through a single invention, the self-wringing sponge mop that Bedros Vosbikian patented, and quoted his son Peter in 2007 saying the mop “has stood the test of time”.

The family thread also runs through the ownership changes. Peter Vosbikian Jr. was still chairman when Centre Partners sold the company to Jarden in 2010, and in the firm’s release he called the partnership “a key step in Quickie’s evolution.” Since then the brand has sat inside Jarden’s portfolio and then Newell’s, under the name the Vosbikians put on the mop.

For a design guide, Quickie shows how a single household invention can anchor a brand through family ownership, private equity and two corporate parents, with the name extended into Bulldozer and Jobsite lines rather than replaced. Compare it with Libman, the Illinois family broom maker the Inquirer named as a rival, and O-Cedar. For this guide we use broom red and bristle yellow on sponge cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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