Richard Drew’s two tapes.

Scotch is a tape brand whose story 3M tells through one employee, Richard Drew. According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 2007, Drew was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, attended the University of Minnesota and went to work as a lab technician at 3M, then a sandpaper manufacturer. While delivering trial batches of sandpaper to a local auto body shop, the Hall of Fame says, he saw painters struggling to mask car parts, because paint peeled off when the tape was removed.

Drew’s answer, in the Hall of Fame’s account, was a tape made of cabinetmaker’s glue and treated crepe paper. Automakers found it suited to masking areas during painting and began to place orders, and the tape was marketed as Scotch masking tape in 1925. 3M’s own history page lists 1925 as the year of masking tape, describing Drew as a 3M lab assistant whose idea led to the Scotch brand tape product.

The name has its own story. English Wikipedia, citing 3M company history, says an early version of the masking tape carried adhesive only along its edges, and that a frustrated painter told Drew to take it back to his “Scotch” bosses — meaning, in the slang of the day, stingy — and tell them to put more adhesive on it. The name stayed with the improved tape and was later applied across 3M’s tape line.

The second tape followed five years later. 3M’s Scotch milestones say that in 1930 Drew, “a young 3M engineer,” developed Scotch Cellulose Tape, later renamed Cellophane Tape, as an attractive, moisture-proof way for grocers and bakers to seal packages wrapped in cellophane. The Hall of Fame and 3M both tie its early success to the Great Depression, when people used it to mend household items rather than replace them; the Hall of Fame lists books, window shades, toys, clothing and even paper currency.

Dispensers, war work and Magic Tape.

Much of Scotch’s visual history is about how the tape is held and cut. 3M’s 75th-anniversary pages for the brand say that in 1932 the company introduced a heavy-duty countertop dispenser, designed by John A. Borden, a 3M sales manager; it was made of cast iron and weighed almost seven pounds. In 1939, the same pages say, Scotch introduced the handheld “snail” dispenser, created by the industrial designer Jean O. Reinecke; the first version was stamped sheet metal, and a moulded plastic model followed a year later.

The war interrupted the consumer business. 3M says that from 1941 to 1945 almost all tape production was diverted to the war effort, with the company developing tapes for sealing, identifying parts, holding, protecting and insulating, and that double-sided tape joined the transparent tape family in those years.

The next major product came in 1961. 3M’s milestones describe Scotch Magic Tape as a matte-finish tape that is virtually invisible on light-coloured paper and envelopes, and that, unlike glossy tapes, can be written on with pen, pencil or marker. At about the same time, 3M says, Scotch Cellophane Tape was renamed Transparent Tape. The anniversary pages list Scotch Removable Tape in 1984, GiftWrap and MultiTask tapes and the Pop-Up dispenser in 1997, and, in 2005, the year of the brand’s 75th anniversary of transparent tape, a new Contour dispenser that 3M described as the snail’s first major makeover in 60 years. Its current site describes a redesigned snail dispenser in 2013 in the same terms.

The tape also found its way into culture. 3M’s anniversary pages recall a 1978 Saturday Night Live sketch, “Scotch Boutique,” about a shop that sold nothing but Scotch tape, and say that in 2004 the Museum of Modern Art in New York included Scotch tape in its “Humble Masterpieces” exhibition of everyday objects.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are everyday office and writing names: the pens, pencils, markers, paper goods and desk tools that sit in drawers, pencil cases and stationery aisles. Office and writing brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger stationery or consumer-goods groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to an art supply store or a corporate supply catalogue.

An office or writing brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a name, a familiar barrel, cap or colour and a logo printed small on the side, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: 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 its products are made and how its marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

The plaid, by 3M’s account.

The brand’s most recognisable device arrived after the war. In a 75th-anniversary page titled “Mad About Plaid,” 3M wrote that Scotch tape packaging “was not always plaid,” and that the plaid design was introduced to Scotch tape packages in 1945, marking the end of the war and the resumption of shipments to American homes, schools and businesses. The original and still most common plaid colour, 3M said, is red, though the design has been used in a variety of other colours.

The brand also had a character. The same 3M page says Scotty McTape debuted as a spokescharacter in television commercials in the 1950s, as Scotch Cellophane Tape became an advertiser on the new medium, and served as the brand mascot for more than two decades. Today the footer of the Scotch brand’s website states that “3M, Scotch, Magic and the Plaid Design are trademarks of 3M,” which places the plaid alongside the name itself as part of the brand’s protected identity.

Scotch belongs to 3M, the company founded in 1902 in Two Harbors, Minnesota, as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, and headquartered, its history page says, at the 3M Center in Maplewood, Minnesota, since its first office building there was completed in 1962. On its brand site, 3M frames Scotch around resourcefulness — “adapting, making do and doing more with what you’ve got” — and says the brand exists “to help people discover the magic of being hands on.” Its product range runs well beyond office tape, from masking and painter’s tapes and packaging tapes to glues, mounting products, scissors, laminators and dispensers, and it sells a line of coloured and patterned tapes under the Expressions name.

For a design guide, Scotch shows how a pattern can do the work of a logo: a plaid that 3M says has wrapped the tape since 1945 and that it now lists as a trademark in its own right. Compare its 3M sibling in our Post-it brand guidelines and another American office brand in our EXPO brand guidelines. For this guide we use plaid red, tartan green and weave gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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