A mail-order business, a new name and a promise taken from the Iroquois.

Seventh Generation was established in 1988 in Burlington, Vermont, the date and place Unilever gave in 2016 when it agreed to buy the company. It began as a mail-order catalogue. The company’s own timeline, as it stood on its website in 2016, says that Alan Newman acquired a catalogue business called Renew America and combined it with a progressive mail-order catalogue, and that Jeffrey Hollender then partnered with Newman to support the newly named Seventh Generation, which sold environmentally friendly products. English Wikipedia’s article on Hollender, citing The New York Times, says the two men partnered in 1987 to buy the catalogue business, which became part of Seventh Generation a year later; both are named as co-founders.

Newman was already a Vermont business founder. English Wikipedia says he moved to Burlington in 1970 and helped start Gardener’s Supply Company in 1983, and he later co-founded the Burlington brewery Magic Hat. Hollender, born in New York City, had built and sold an adult-education business before he turned to environmental products, and he became the public face of the company for many years.

The name is the company’s statement of purpose. Seventh Generation says it takes its name from the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy, which it quotes as saying: “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” Its 2016 timeline opens with that line, describing the company as “born with a promise,” and Unilever’s announcement that year summarised the company’s commitment as “caring today for seven generations of tomorrows.”

From catalogue to supermarket shelf, and into Unilever.

The catalogue gave way to branded products sold in shops. Seventh Generation’s own timeline records its entry into retail through Star Markets supermarkets in the Boston area with three branded products: a liquid laundry detergent, a chlorine-free bleach and a dishwasher detergent. The range later widened well beyond cleaning. By 2022, Vermont Business Magazine listed laundry, dish and household cleaners, baby products including Free & Clear diapers, training pants and wipes, recycled paper products, recycled plastic trash bags, deodorant and body wash, and period care products among its lines.

The company has also presented itself through its corporate reporting.

On 19 September 2016, Unilever announced that it had signed an agreement to acquire Seventh Generation, Inc., which it called a North American home and personal care products company based in Vermont; terms were not disclosed. The deal was completed on 20 October 2016, and Unilever has owned the company since then. At the time, Seventh Generation’s chief executive was John Replogle, who said in the announcement that the company was proud to join Unilever, and Unilever’s North America president, Kees Kruythoff, placed the new brand alongside Ben & Jerry’s and Dove in what he called Unilever’s portfolio of purpose-driven brands. In the same announcement, Nitin Paranjpe, president of Unilever’s Home Care business, described Seventh Generation as having long been “a disruptor in the US marketplace.” The company remains based in Burlington; by April 2022 its chief executive was Alison Whritenour.

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.

Seven leaves, molecules and a white canvas.

The current identity dates from April 2022. Vermont Business Magazine reported on 7 April 2022 that Seventh Generation had unveiled what it called the biggest brand evolution in its history, with a new logo and packaging rolling out across its full product portfolio in the United States through that month. The company’s in-house creative team worked with the London office of Design Bridge on the new visual identity, and Transform magazine described the agency’s design as one that “embraces the tension between nature and science.”

The logo carries the name’s meaning into a mark. According to the company’s announcement, the new logo “incorporates seven overlapping leaves, inspired by the next seven generations for which the brand advocates,” and the leaf design is described as a primary building block of the brand. On the packs, the company said, molecular-inspired visuals are set on a clean, white canvas to show the ingredients in each product and how they work. Chief marketing officer John Moorhead said the aim was to modernise the visual identity and more consistently communicate how the products perform, while chief executive Alison Whritenour said the new design was meant to better reflect what she called the plant-based formulas in each product.

The packaging has long carried information as well as branding. Vermont Business Magazine’s report described the company’s packs as a vehicle for educating consumers, with voluntary ingredient disclosure printed on them, so the 2022 redesign had to hold lists of ingredients alongside the new leaves and molecules.

For a design guide, Seventh Generation shows how a company name taken from a principle can be turned into a literal mark — seven leaves for seven generations — and carried across a wide range of everyday packs. Compare it with Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day, another American household-cleaning brand, owned by S. C. Johnson, and Ben & Jerry’s, a fellow Vermont company in the Unilever portfolio. For this guide we use forest, leaf green and white canvas with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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