A small company’s product that outgrew it.

Rain-X began as a single product: a treatment for glass, sold to drivers to apply to their windscreens. English Wikipedia says it was introduced in 1972 by Howard G. Ohlhausen of the Unelko Corporation, and that the name was registered as a trademark by Unelko in the same year. The original product, sold as Rain-X Original Glass Treatment, is described in the textbook Chemistry by Kenneth Whitten and co-authors (Cengage Learning, 2009) as a hydrophobic silicone polymer, which English Wikipedia cites when it explains how the product is meant to make water bead on glass.

Unelko’s own account of itself comes from its website, as archived in 2010. There the company describes itself as a maker of water repellents, surface treatments and protective coatings, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, with a sister company, Unelko NV, which it says had moved from Gavere to Zingem in Belgium to serve customers in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The same page says the company started with a small laboratory and a new idea for glass care, and refers to “the sale of its … Rain-X business to Quaker State Corporation in 1997”. After that sale, Unelko says, it formed the Unelko Group to work on other surface-care products under its own names.

The Rain-X name therefore left the company that created it in 1997, while Unelko itself continued. That split is worth keeping in mind for anyone reading old packaging or advertising: the Rain-X of the 1970s and 1980s was a Unelko product, and the Rain-X of later decades belongs to a different line of owners entirely, which have run it alongside other car-care names.

The product range also changed shape. An archived Rain-X site map from January 2008, cited by English Wikipedia, groups the brand into seven product categories: wiper blades, glass and windscreen treatments, plastic cleaners, windscreen washer fluid, car washes, car wax, and bug and tar washes. The original glass treatment, English Wikipedia says, is sold in small bottles and also as wipes or towelettes, so the brand meets drivers in several different pack formats on the same shelf.

Quaker State, Shell and ITW.

The buyer in 1997 was Quaker State, the motor-oil company. Its own ownership then changed quickly. English Wikipedia says that in 1998 Pennzoil’s motor-oil and products business was spun off as an independent company, which acquired Quaker State and became the Pennzoil-Quaker State Company; and that Shell Oil Company, the US subsidiary of Shell, acquired Pennzoil-Quaker State in 2002, a date the article sources to Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Under Shell, English Wikipedia says, Rain-X was marketed by SOPUS Products, the Shell Oil Products US business that held the former Pennzoil-Quaker State brands. Outside the United States the arrangements differed. In Britain, the article says, Rain-X products had been distributed by a SOPUS subsidiary called Auto Expressions, and on 9 June 2010 Kraco Enterprises announced that it would acquire that company from Shell, according to a Motor Sports News Wire report the article cites.

On 1 March 2011 Illinois Tool Works (ITW) acquired SOPUS Products’ car-care business, according to an ITW news release distributed through PR Newswire, which English Wikipedia cites. Illinois Tool Works has owned Rain-X since then. The brand sits within ITW Global Brands, a division of the group; the ITW Global Brands website, as archived in 2012, listed Rain-X alongside Black Magic, Gumout, Blue Coral, Slick 50, NOS and No Touch, so Rain-X shares a parent with several other names on the car-care aisle.

A separate professional line followed its own path. English Wikipedia says industrial Rain-X products for car washes were produced by Ecolab, which introduced a Rain-X protectant for commercial car washes in 2005 and announced a Rain-X product for wheels for the professional car-wash trade on 6 December 2010. Ecolab sold its vehicle-care business to Zep Inc. on 1 December 2012, according to a Zep release of 3 December 2012; the article says the sale also took in the Armor All Professional, Black Magic, Blue Coral and other professional names. For a reader, the result is that the Rain-X name has appeared on retail bottles, wiper-blade packs and commercial car-wash equipment under more than one company at the same time.

The product has also turned up outside the car. English Wikipedia cites an Australian defence-science report on coatings for submarine antennae that examined Rain-X among other products, and several scientific papers, in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Nucleic Acids Research and Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, in which laboratory researchers used it to treat glass surfaces.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make things people put on, or in, their cars: waxes and polishes, cleaners and detailing products, treatments for glass, and accessories such as floor liners. Car-care and auto-accessory brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from businesses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger industrial or consumer-goods groups, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a petrol-station shelf to a specialist detailing shop.

A car-care brand’s identity is usually carried by a bottle, a label, a colour or a name rather than by the product itself, because what is inside the bottle is rarely seen. The company behind the name may also have changed hands, moved its production or licensed the name to others along the way. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where it makes its products and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One name, several owners.

Rain-X is a useful case of a brand whose name stayed fixed while almost everything around it changed. It was created by one company in 1972, sold to an oil company in 1997, carried through two further changes of corporate parent by 2002, marketed by a Shell business until 2011 and then bought by Illinois Tool Works. Through all of that the brand kept its hyphenated name and its association with glass, while the range grew from one bottle into wiper blades, washer fluid, washes and waxes.

The 2008 site map grouped the products by the job each one does — glass, wipers, washer fluid, washes, wax, bug and tar — and every group carried the same Rain-X name. The brand’s look is therefore best read from its packaging and advertising as they appeared at a given date, under a given owner.

The ownership story also explains why the brand can look slightly different from one market to another. In Britain, distribution passed through a Shell subsidiary and then to Kraco Enterprises in 2010; in professional car washes, the name travelled with Ecolab’s vehicle-care business to Zep in 2012; and in retail, the name has stayed with ITW Global Brands since 2011. A designer working from old photographs of bottles or wiper-blade packs should date each one, and note which company was selling it, before treating it as a reference.

For a design guide, Rain-X shows how a single product name can be stretched across a whole car-care range and carried through several owners while keeping its original job in view. Compare Armor All, another car-care name whose professional line went to Zep in the same 2012 sale, and Meguiar’s, a polish brand covered in the same group of car-care guides. For this guide we use a windscreen blue, clear glass and a signal amber with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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