A chemical company’s consumer product with a cast of cartoon bubbles.

Scrubbing Bubbles began as a mascot rather than a brand name. English Wikipedia says the bathroom cleaner was originally called Dow Bathroom Cleaner, after the Dow Chemical Company that made it, and that the “Scrubbing Bubbles” were the product’s longtime mascots: smiling, anthropomorphic soap bubbles with brush bristles on their undersides, shown working their way across tiles and tubs in a mass of suds. Dow, based in Midland, Michigan, sold the cleaner through its consumer products arm, later organised as DowBrands, alongside plastic wraps and bags.

The Science History Institute in Philadelphia holds Dow’s own advertising archive, the Advertisements from the Dow Chemical Historical Collection, and its digitised items show how the characters carried the product in print. A 1973 colour advertisement in that collection is titled “Dow’s Scrubbing Bubbles Do the Work So You Don’t Have To”, and the catalogue describes it as an advertisement for Dow Bathroom Cleaner featuring the Scrubbing Bubbles mascot with a paper-towel refund offer. A November 1979 advertisement, catalogued as running on page 149 of Family Circle, shows the mascot cleaning a toilet, bathtub and sink under the headline “Give Your Bathroom a Bubble Bath”.

The same collection lists other dated titles for the cleaner, from “We’ll Pay You 10¢ to Stop Scrubbing Your Bathroom” in 1969 and “Dow Bathroom Cleaner’s Double Bubble Offer” in 1974 to “When It Comes to Cleaning the Bathroom We Fight Dirty” in September 1985 and “We Scrub Your Tub. We Work Hard So You Don’t Have To” in 1988. A July 1980 advertisement from Better Homes and Gardens carried a coupon certificate covering several Dow household products at once, including Bathroom Cleaner, Handi-Wrap, Saran Wrap and Ziploc, a reminder that the cleaner sat inside a wider Dow kitchen-and-home range.

A sale from Dow, a federal review and a new name.

On 27 October 1997, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s analysis published in the Federal Register on 3 February 1998, S. C. Johnson and DowBrands signed asset purchase agreements under which S. C. Johnson of Racine, Wisconsin, would acquire DowBrands’ home care and home food management businesses. CNNfn reported the agreement on 28 October 1997, listing the home care brands as “Dow Bathroom Cleaner with Scrubbing Bubbles”, Spray ’N Wash, Fantastik and Glass Plus, and the food brands as Ziploc, Saran Wrap and Handi-Wrap. Dow’s chief executive, William S. Stavropoulos, was quoted calling DowBrands a strategic fit for S. C. Johnson.

The FTC’s review focused on two markets, stain removers and glass cleaners, where S. C. Johnson already owned Shout and Windex. Under the proposed consent order, S. C. Johnson was required to sell Spray ’n Wash, Spray ’n Starch and Glass Plus to Reckitt & Colman. If that sale did not go ahead, the order provided that those businesses would go to a Commission-approved buyer together with DowBrands’ Urbana, Ohio plant and its Yes laundry detergent, Vivid colour-safe bleach and oven cleaner businesses. Bathroom cleaner was not among the markets named, and Dow’s cleaner went to S. C. Johnson. The company’s fact sheet on its acquisitions dates the deal to 1998: “The DowBrands business, which added Ziploc, Saran, Scrubbing Bubbles and fantastik to our family of brands.” English Wikipedia gives the sale as 1997, the year it was agreed.

The change of owner forced a change of name. With the Dow name no longer available on the can, English Wikipedia says, the product was rebranded and took the name of its mascots, becoming Scrubbing Bubbles. The characters therefore moved from the side of the pack to the front of the brand, and the brand now sits in the same S. C. Johnson portfolio as Windex, Drano and Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make products for cleaning the home: sprays, powders, liquids, wipes and the tools that carry them. Household-cleaning brands sit in a crowded aisle, and a single name can cover dozens of formats, from a trigger bottle by the sink to a refill pack bought in bulk, so the identity has to hold together across very different objects.

On the shelf, much of that identity is carried by shape and colour before any word is read: the profile of a bottle or tub, the colour of the liquid seen through it, a cap or trigger in a set hue, and a logo placed in the same spot on every pack. Some brands lean on a character or mascot in their advertising; others rely on a coined name or a single strong colour.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, and how its packs, logos and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A mascot that became the name.

The Scrubbing Bubbles identity is built on its advertising characters. The bubbles are simple shapes — a round white body, eyes and a smile, and a row of bristles beneath. Their recurring line, used in the Dow print headline of 1973 and echoed in 1988, was that the bubbles do the work so the user does not have to.

The television commercials gave the characters voices and movement. English Wikipedia says that in the 1970s the leader of the Scrubbing Bubbles was voiced by Paul Winchell, the voice actor known for Tigger in the Winnie the Pooh cartoons, and that the leader later returned under the name “Scrubby”. It credits the animation to Tissa David, an animator Wikipedia describes as a pioneer in the field, and the campaign to the advertising agency Della Femina Travisano and Partners.

The characters also travelled outside advertising. English Wikipedia, citing MIT’s IHTFP Hack Gallery, records that in 1995 pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology placed three-dimensional replicas of the Scrubbing Bubbles on the outside of the windows of the MIT Media Lab building to mark the lab’s tenth anniversary.

For a design guide, Scrubbing Bubbles shows how a mascot built for television can outlast the corporate name it was created to sell, and become the brand when that name has to go. Compare it with Windex, the glass cleaner that sits beside it at S. C. Johnson, and Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day, another S. C. Johnson cleaning brand built around a character. For this guide we use bubble blue, foam aqua and suds white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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