A masking-tape brand from 1925 and a coloured offshoot.

ScotchBlue is a sub-brand: a blue painter’s tape sold by 3M under its Scotch name. Its parent brand began with tape for painters. In 3M’s account of the Scotch centenary, published on its news centre and reposted by CSRwire in March 2025, the company says that in 1925, when 3M was known as a sandpaper manufacturer, the engineer Richard Drew was delivering samples to automotive repair shops and saw workers struggling to get a clean finish on two-tone paint jobs, because the paint kept peeling off with the tape. Using crepe paper and cabinetmaker’s glue, 3M says, he made a different kind of tape, and it was marketed as Scotch masking tape. Five years later, in the same account, Drew developed transparent Scotch cellophane tape.

The 2025 centenary story describes how far the Scotch name has travelled since then, from packaging and office tape to tapes for construction, manufacturing and electronics. It lists a handful of what 3M calls the most notable products in the Scotch portfolio: Scotch Magic Tape, which 3M says was launched in 1961, gift-wrap and heavy-duty packaging tapes, and, among them, ScotchBlue PROSharp Painter’s Tape.

By 2007 the blue tapes had become a family of their own. A 3M press release dated 27 April 2007, under the headline “Scotch-Blue Cuts Corners (and Hinges) to Save You Time,” introduced “the newest member of the Scotch-Blue family” — Scotch-Blue Painter’s Tape for Corners and Hinges, die-cut and perforated into pre-cut pieces to fit around window corners and door hinges. The release pitched the line at do-it-yourself painters and named other members of the family, including a Scotch-Blue tape for delicate surfaces and a multi-surface tape from which the new die-cuts were made. In 2007 the name was still written with a hyphen.

A St. Paul company and tapes made around the United States.

ScotchBlue belongs to 3M, whose press releases carry a St. Paul, Minnesota dateline. The brand sits inside the company’s consumer business: when 3M announced a new ScotchBlue tape in May 2025, the spokesperson quoted was Heather Green, introduced as president of the Consumer Business Portfolio at 3M, and the release came out under the name “Scotch Painter’s Tape.” That phrase is now the umbrella under which 3M markets its painting tapes, with ScotchBlue as the name on the blue rolls themselves.

The same 2025 release shows how the line is built. It introduced ScotchBlue PROSharp Painter’s Tape with Edge-Lock+ Technology, which 3M described as tape that seals out paint “to leave consistently sharp lines,” for indoor and outdoor surfaces from painted drywall and countertops to window glass, wood trim and siding. Green framed it as a tape for professionals: “Professional painters know the best paint jobs start with Scotch,” she said. The release also quoted Drew Michael Scott, presented as a Scotch Painter’s Tape ambassador and home renovation expert, and directed readers to the brand’s own website, scotchblue.com.

3M connects the Scotch name to American factories in general terms. Its 2025 centenary story says that Scotch brand tapes and products are made in facilities around the United States, “from Cynthiana, Ky., to Menomonie, Wis., and Hutchinson, Minn.” — the last being where, the company says, every roll of Scotch Magic Tape is made. That statement is made for the Scotch brand as a whole.

The brand also appears in 3M’s storytelling outside product launches. In September 2026 the 3M news centre ran a story headlined “After a tornado, ScotchBlue Painter’s Tape became an unexpected sign of resilience,” about Meridian Elementary School in Blue Mound, Illinois, where a tornado had caused significant damage to the school.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell the things that sit around a tin of paint rather than the paint itself: masking tape, brushes, primers, wood stains, clear finishes and spray paint. In a hardware aisle they compete for attention on crowded shelves, so their identities are carried by a few repeated signals — the colour of a roll of tape, the band of colour on a can, a label that customers can find again on the next visit.

Wood-finish brands also have to show colour that is not their own. A stain only makes sense once it is on wood, so swatch cards, sample boards and finished projects often do as much of the visual work as the logo. Tape brands, by contrast, can make the product itself the signature, with one colour of roll standing for the whole name.

Many of these names have changed hands over the years, and the business behind a familiar label may now be part of a much larger coatings group. Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how it presents itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A colour inside a name, and a name inside a brand.

The name does the work of a logo. It joins the parent brand to a colour, so that the word on the pack describes the tape inside it: Scotch, and blue. The way it is written has tightened over time. 3M’s 2007 release spelled it with a hyphen, “Scotch-Blue,” in the headline and throughout the text; by the 2025 launch it was written as one closed-up word, ScotchBlue, with a trademark symbol after it, and the product names that follow it are stacked in the same compact style: PROSharp, with the first three letters in capitals, and Edge-Lock+, a technology name with a plus sign added to mark a newer version of an earlier Edge-Lock tape.

The colour connects the line back to the parent brand without borrowing its pattern. The Scotch brand is identified with a tartan plaid, which is set out in our Scotch guide; ScotchBlue instead takes its identity from the colour of the tape — the blue of the roll itself. Its sub-lines are named for the job, from “for Corners and Hinges” to “for Delicate Surfaces” in the 2007 family.

The way 3M talks about the line has shifted towards the trade. The 2007 release spoke to “do-it-yourselfers” and novice painters who wanted the “clean, straight lines and edges” that it called the signature style of professional painters. The 2025 release opened with professionals instead, and paired a 3M executive with a renovation presenter as the brand’s public faces. In both, the product is presented as preparation: masking before the paint goes on.

For a design guide, ScotchBlue shows how a sub-brand can be built from two words a shopper already knows, a parent name and a colour, and kept recognisable by the colour of the product itself. Compare it with FrogTape, the green painter’s tape owned by Shurtape, and with the plaid-wrapped parent brand in our Scotch guide. For this guide we use painter’s blue, deep blue and wall white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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