Seven investors, a Green Bay mill and tissue on a wire loop.

Quilted Northern began as plain Northern Tissue, made at Northern Paper Mills in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Georgia-Pacific’s history of its Green Bay operations, as archived in June 2016, says the mill was founded on 29 March 1901 with money from seven men from Green Bay and Milwaukee, and built where the Fox and East rivers meet. Its first product, the company says, was called Sanitary Tissue: packs of flat sheets, each bundle pierced with a wire loop so it could be hung from a nail. The same timeline dates the birth of the brand now sold as Quilted Northern to 12 April 1902.

The company’s account follows the mill through the following decades. In 1919, it says, Northern products were advertised in five national magazines, among them The Saturday Evening Post and the Literary Digest. On 19 January 1935 the Northern name went onto napkins, and that year the brand’s advertising took up a complaint of the day, calling Northern Tissue “splinter-free.”

A cub became the brand’s mascot in the 1940s. According to the timeline, the advertising agency Young & Rubicam began looking for a new illustrator for Northern Tissue in 1941 and found him in its own Michigan Avenue building in Chicago: Ross Wetzel, who had worked as an artist for Disney from 1938. Wetzel created Fluffy the Northern Cub. Drafted during the Second World War and posted to California, he kept drawing the Northern advertisements at night, with the agency sending him the layouts to finish. After the war he moved into television animation, and in 1947 or 1948, the company says, he made a television commercial for Northern Tissue, a black-and-white cartoon of Fluffy in a tree. The last piece in the mill archives signed by Wetzel dates from about 1951.

The company dates a run of ownership changes to the 1950s. In 1953, the timeline says, the Marathon Corporation of Menasha, Wisconsin, merged with Northern Paper Mills, and the line began to add colour: Kolorpak napkins that year, coloured Northern Tissue in 1954 and coloured towels in 1955. Multi-packs of three and four rolls, in white and assorted colours, began shipping on 16 April 1956. In 1957 the American Can Company of New York acquired Marathon, and until 1964 the mill was known as “Northern Paper Mills, a Marathon division of American Can Company.”

American Can, James River, Fort James and Georgia-Pacific.

The Northern name passed through three more owners before reaching its present one. Georgia-Pacific’s Green Bay timeline says that in 1982 the James River Corporation acquired the Dixie/Northern sector of American Can, including the Green Bay mill; English Wikipedia, citing the same page, describes the purchase as the Dixie/Northern division. James River had been founded in Richmond, Virginia, in 1969. The timeline says Northern went national in 1984 using the company’s mill at Old Town, Maine, after moving to a six-roll pack the year before. In 1991, it says, Green Bay made a recycled line under the Northern bathroom tissue, Brawny towel and Northern napkin names.

The word “quilted” came late. The timeline says Northern Tissue became “quilted” in 1993 with the addition of a new emboss pattern, and that Quilted Northern Ultra went on sale in 1996. In 1997 the brand’s “Quilted Northern Quilters” began demonstrating how the tissue was “Quilted to Absorb,” the company says. That year James River merged with the Fort Howard Paper Company of Green Bay to form the Fort James Corporation, a deal the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times reported on 6 May 1997.

Georgia-Pacific, of Atlanta, Georgia, then bought Fort James. The Los Angeles Times reported in November 2000 that the purchase had been approved, naming Quilted Northern among Fort James’s brands, and Georgia-Pacific dates its completion to 27 November 2000. Georgia-Pacific has owned Quilted Northern since 2000. The New York Times reported on 14 November 2005 that Georgia-Pacific was to be sold to Koch Industries, and English Wikipedia says the deal closed on 23 December 2005; Georgia-Pacific has been a Koch subsidiary since.

Georgia-Pacific’s 2016 page on its Green Bay operations listed Quilted Northern Ultra Plush among the products made at the city’s mills, alongside Angel Soft. English Wikipedia describes Quilted Northern as one of Georgia-Pacific’s premium tissue brands. Georgia-Pacific called it “the 100-plus-year-old Quilted Northern brand” in an April 2023 announcement.

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.

From the Northern Girls and Saul Bass to Keep It Quilted.

Quilted Northern’s packaging has carried pictures for much of its life. Georgia-Pacific’s Green Bay timeline says that in 1958 the illustrator Frances Hook’s “American Beauties” began appearing in Northern Tissue advertisements, and that on 23 March 1959 the first rolls featuring the girls were shipped from the mill. The company calls them the “Northern Girls.” In 1964, it says, photographs of children known as the “Living Dolls” appeared on new Northern Tissue packages.

In 1968 the packs changed again: the timeline says Northern products underwent a “facelift,” with Saul Bass’s trivet design appearing on packages of Northern Tissue, towels, facial tissue and napkins. English Wikipedia, in its article on Bass, lists a Dixie logo of 1969 among the work of Saul Bass & Associates; Dixie and Northern were then both part of American Can. The Northern Girls returned to the packaging in 1974, the timeline says, and it records Northern Tissue being embossed in 1975.

Recent advertising has used humour and then music. Adweek’s AgencySpy reported on 1 May 2015 that the agency Droga5 had launched a campaign billing Quilted Northern as “Designed to be Forgotten,” based on brand research suggesting people only think about toilet paper when it fails. The spots, directed by Bennett Miller through the production company Smuggler, gave voices to the objects that “see all and forget nothing” in a bathroom — a toy alligator on the sink called Daddy Gator, a toilet-roll holder called Sir Froggy and a family portrait called Great Grandpa Thaddeus. shots listed the campaign in May 2015 as six spots.

In September 2022 Adweek reported a new campaign, “Keep It Quilted,” from the agency Argonaut, which turned away from the category’s potty humour toward a shopper who attends to small comforts, and which showcased a new visual identity system from the brand design agency Soulsight. Georgia-Pacific said in April 2023 that the campaign had debuted in late 2022 with a new look for the packaging. On 1 August 2024 the company launched a revamped Keep It Quilted campaign in which a trio called the Quilted Queens, in white quilted jackets, sing “We Quilt This City” in an ’80s-style rock video.

For a design guide, Quilted Northern shows how a single word can be added to an old name and become its identity, carried from the emboss on the sheet to a jacket in an advertisement. Compare it with Charmin, another bath tissue born in Green Bay, and Brawny, named at the same mill. For this guide we use quilt blue, stitch gold and cotton cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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