DuPont, a Tufts team and an angled neck.

Reach did not begin at a toothpaste company. English Wikipedia’s article on the brand, citing a report in the Chicago Tribune of 1 April 1976, says the toothbrush came from the chemical company DuPont after four years of research by a “bio-dental team” from Tufts University headed by Percy H. Hill Jr., a consultant to a company called Applied Ergonomics. The same 1976 report, as Wikipedia quotes it, set out what made the brush look different: an angled, four-sided handle for gripping, an extended neck, and a compact head topped with bristles cut at two levels.

The launch was regional before it was national. Wikipedia, again citing the 1976 Chicago Tribune article, says DuPont began promoting the brush in April 1976 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, before moving on to Chicago, with advertising in newspapers and on television.

When Dr. Fresh announced its purchase of the North American toothbrush business in December 2012, its release said the Reach brand “debuted in 1972” as the idea of two engineers and a dentist who took their cue from professional dental instruments. A report in Branding in Asia on 1 November 2016 also gave 1972 as the launch year. The brand’s current website, run under the Reach name, puts its own start in 1977, when, it says, Reach introduced the angled neck to the toothbrush. Each of those dates is attached to the source that gives it, and all three describe the same idea: the angle between handle and head.

The angle recurs across the record. It is the feature named in the 1976 newspaper description, the feature Dr. Fresh described in 2012 as having brought “a new angle, look and feel” to the category, and the feature the brand’s own site still uses to explain the name.

The brand also grew beyond the toothbrush. Wikipedia describes Reach as an American brand of oral hygiene products that came to include dental floss and mouthwash as well as brushes, and the archived Reach floss website of June 2015 lists several floss products sold under the name before they moved to another brand.

Johnson & Johnson, Dr. Fresh, High Ridge Brands and Perrigo.

DuPont did not keep the brand for long. Chicago Tribune columnist George Lazarus wrote on 13 August 1991 that when DuPont was “unloading” Reach in 1977, Procter & Gamble tried and failed to buy it, as did Warner-Lambert, the maker of Listerine; the winner of that contest was Johnson & Johnson. An earlier Lazarus column, of 17 March 1988, also dates Johnson & Johnson’s entry into toothbrushes to its 1977 acquisition of Reach from E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. Wikipedia, citing Kerry Segrave’s 2010 history America Brushes Up, says Johnson & Johnson introduced the brand nationally in 1978.

Under Johnson & Johnson, Reach sat beside other oral care names. The 1988 Chicago Tribune column describes the company preparing a second toothbrush, Prevent, a renamed brush that came with its purchase of Dental Hygiene Co. of Santa Clara, California. The same column notes that Lever had recently brought out a toothbrush under the Aim name, borrowed from its toothpaste, which shows how crowded the shelf had become by the late 1980s.

The brand was later divided by product and by region. Wikipedia records that in June 2015 Johnson & Johnson told consumers on the Reach floss website that the floss had been renamed; the archived page from 30 June 2015 reads “REACH FLOSS IS NOW LISTERINE FLOSS” and shows the floss products under the Listerine name. The toothbrushes had already gone. A PR Newswire release dated 18 December 2012, issued from Buena Park, California, announced that Dr. Fresh LLC had acquired Reach manual toothbrushes from the Johnson & Johnson Healthcare Products Division of McNEIL-PPC, with rights for the United States, its territories, the Caribbean and Canada, and without the floss or other interdental products. Dr. Fresh, founded in 1998, was then a portfolio company of Moelis Capital Partners, and its other brands included Firefly and Binaca.

Asia-Pacific followed a separate path. Branding in Asia reported on 1 November 2016 that LG Household & Health Care, the South Korean company, had acquired the Asia-Pacific Reach business from Johnson & Johnson, and quoted LG describing the purchase as part of building its oral care business overseas, with Australia, New Zealand and India named as markets.

In North America the brand changed hands twice more. A PR Newswire release from Stamford, Connecticut, dated 3 January 2017, announced that High Ridge Brands, a portfolio company of Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, had acquired Dr. Fresh, listing Reach with Firefly, Dr. Fresh, Binaca and Dazzling White among its brands. Then, on 2 April 2020, Perrigo announced from Dublin that it had completed the acquisition of High Ridge Brands’ oral self-care assets, naming Reach, Dr. Fresh and Firefly, and linking the deal to its purchase of Ranir in July 2019. Perrigo has owned the North American Reach toothbrush business since 2020.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sit on the same few shelves of a pharmacy or supermarket: mouthwash, toothbrushes, toothpaste and eye drops. They belong to a category in which the pack has to carry a great deal in a small space, and in which many of the names have passed through several owners while staying on the shelf under the same word.

Each format sets its own limits. A mouthwash bottle is a tall, see-through container, so the colour of the liquid inside often becomes part of the look, and the label wraps around a curved surface. A toothbrush is usually sold in a blister pack, a clear plastic shell over a printed card, where the brush itself is on show and the card has to hold the name, the head and the range. Eye drops come in a very small bottle inside a folding carton, so the carton front does most of the work, and the type has to stay legible at a few centimetres across.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the name, who has owned it since, and how its packs and advertising have changed — and leaves out anything that cannot be dated.

A cartoon character, designer collaborations and a word that names a shape.

A character has carried much of the advertising. Advertising Age wrote on 13 December 2006 that Mr. Reach, the character with the flip-top head, had appeared in television spots for the brand in the 1980s and 1990s. Wikipedia, citing the Australian trade title B&T Weekly in 2007, says the character was created in Australia in 1986 and credits the animator Phil Meatchem, adding that Mr. Reach went on to appear in markets including Japan and the United States.

The character outlived his original campaign. The same Advertising Age piece described an online game built by Fuel Industries for Johnson & Johnson, “Mr. Reach: In the Mouth of Mystery”, in which the round-headed hero travels from Canada to Europe and Aruba, solving puzzles with Reach products. In October 2015, after the toothbrushes had moved to Dr. Fresh, a Marketwired release announced that Mr. Reach, the character of the brand’s 1980s campaign, was back with his flip-top head in a new video for the Reach Complete Care range, which included a rinse. Two owners, nine years apart, chose the same mascot.

Industrial design has also been part of the story. In a designboom interview published on 29 August 2014, Davin Stowell, founder of the New York consultancy Smart Design, listed the Reach Wondergrip toothbrush of 1993 for Johnson & Johnson among his studio’s projects, describing it as a brush shaped for a child’s hand. Wikipedia also records a “Reach by Design” programme from 2010, citing Glamour, in which interior designers Celerie Kemble and Tom Delavan and the stylist Brad Goreski created toothbrush designs for the brand, followed in 2011 by Jeff Lewis and Shoshanna Gruss.

The current site keeps the story short. Its About page tells the angled-neck story in two sentences, and its range is organised into lines named Advanced Design, Essentials and Sonic. The site and the press releases of 2012, 2015, 2017 and 2020 write the name in capitals, REACH, while the newspaper columns of 1988 and 1991 use ordinary title case.

For a design guide, Reach shows how a product name can double as a description of a shape, and how a cartoon can carry that idea across owners and decades: a chemical company’s brush, sold at auction to Johnson & Johnson, explained by a figure with a flip-top head and kept alive by Dr. Fresh and Perrigo. Compare it with Oral-B, the rival brush brand of the same era, and Listerine, the name Reach floss took in 2015. For this guide we use brush blue and deep navy on rinse ice with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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