A Philadelphia paper firm that kept its name off the roll.

Scott began as a company, not a brand. The Scott Paper Company was founded in Philadelphia in 1879 by the brothers E. Irvin Scott and Clarence R. Scott, according to English Wikipedia, the Pennsylvania Center for the Book at Penn State, and the company history in the International Directory of Company Histories, which places the start in the autumn of that year. That history says the firm first made coarse paper goods such as bags and wrapping paper, and moved into toilet tissue as indoor bathroom plumbing spread.

For more than two decades the Scott name stayed off the product. The Pennsylvania Center for the Book says the brothers did not want the family name attached to toilet paper, so they sold their tissue to private dealers, who packed and sold it under many brand names of their own. English Wikipedia gives the same explanation in plainer terms: because of the nature of the product, dealers sold Scott rolls to consumers under many different names.

A brand of its own came through a purchase. In 1902, the company bought the Waldorf name from one of its customers, and the International Directory of Company Histories says Waldorf was still sold in American grocery stores into the 1980s.

The decisive change came from the next generation. In 1903, under Arthur Hoyt Scott, Irvin Scott’s son, the company began marking its toilet paper with the Scott name, as Scott Tissue. Both the Penn State essay and the company history credit Arthur with a simple philosophy: make only a few products, sell them as cheaply as possible, and keep them in front of the public with prominent advertising. The Penn State essay also credits him with an early slogan, “Soft as old linen.”

The tissue was converted at Chester, Pennsylvania. The Penn State essay describes a Scott plant there where large parent rolls were converted into small perforated rolls, and the company history says new machines were installed at Chester in the early 1920s.

ScotTissue, ScotTowels and a Scot- prefix.

Paper towels followed tissue. English Wikipedia and the International Directory of Company Histories both date Scott’s move into paper towels to 1907, and Wikipedia says the company added facial tissues in the 1930s. By the 1950s the product names shared a family resemblance: the company history names ScotTissue and ScotTowels, Scottie facial tissues and Scotkins napkins, each built on the founders’ surname.

Advertising was central from Arthur Scott’s time onward. The Penn State essay reproduces a 1930 Scott Tissue advertisement from Good Housekeeping, and says the company placed its advertising in magazines, in drugstores and in the newspapers of the day. The company history says Scott kept its plant running and laid off no one during the Great Depression.

Scott spent the middle of the century securing its raw materials. Under Thomas McCabe, who became president in 1927, it bought a pulp mill in Nova Scotia; in 1936 it joined the Mead Corporation to form the Brunswick Pulp & Paper Company in Georgia; and it later acquired mills in New York and Wisconsin and, through mergers in the 1950s, timberland and mills in Washington, Alabama and Maine, according to the company history and English Wikipedia.

Some of its promotions were inventive. In 1966, the International Directory of Company Histories says, Scott sold disposable paper dresses in grocery stores, made from a paper fabric it called Dura-Weve, to promote its new coloured tissues. The same history says Scott introduced a plastic wrap in the late 1950s. English Wikipedia says the company’s Cut-Rite waxed-paper brand went to Reynolds Metals in 1986.

The portfolio also took in other tissue names. English Wikipedia lists Scott Tissue, Cottonelle, Baby Fresh, Scottex and Viva among the company’s brands before 1995. By the early 1980s, the company history says, Cottonelle toilet tissue and Viva towels competed with Procter & Gamble’s premium lines, while ScotTissue and ScotTowels were positioned as mid-range value brands. For many years the company was run from Scott Plaza in Tinicum Township, Delaware County, a complex built for it whose buildings were completed between 1961 and 1969, English Wikipedia says.

Household paper and wrap.

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 Philadelphia to Kimberly-Clark.

The company narrowed before it was sold. In 1967 Scott had bought S.D. Warren, a maker of fine book papers, and in December 1994 it sold that business, English Wikipedia says. The same year it appointed Al Dunlap chairman and chief executive, according to the International Directory of Company Histories, and began selling operations outside its tissue business.

The merger followed quickly. The Los Angeles Times reported on 13 December 1995 that Kimberly-Clark had completed its purchase of Scott Paper the previous day, after shareholders of both companies voted to approve it; the deal had been announced on 17 July. To settle objections from federal and Texas authorities, the paper said, Kimberly-Clark agreed to sell Scott’s Scotties facial-tissue business and its Baby Fresh, Wash a-bye Baby and Kid Fresh baby-wipes businesses.

The Scott name outlived the company. The International Directory of Company Histories says the combined business took the Kimberly-Clark name, closed Scott’s headquarters, and kept most of Scott’s brands; English Wikipedia says the merged company maintained the Scott Paper product names. Kimberly-Clark, founded in Neenah, Wisconsin, in 1872, has been based in Irving, Texas, since 1985, according to English Wikipedia, and has owned the Scott brand since the merger closed in December 1995. In 1995 the Los Angeles Times listed Scott bathroom tissue alongside Viva towels and Kleenex among the consumer products the enlarged company would focus on.

The brand’s American website, as archived in February 2026, sells Scott 1000 toilet paper, Scott ComfortPlus and Scott paper towels, and carries a notice that the marks are trademarks of Kimberly-Clark Worldwide. It also runs household articles on cleaning, moving and family routines.

For a design guide, Scott shows how a family name that was once kept off the product became the product, and how a short prefix could organise a whole range of tissue, towel and napkin names. Compare Cottonelle, which began in Scott’s stable, and Kleenex, its sister brand at Kimberly-Clark. For this guide we use Philadelphia navy, old linen and brick red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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