Tokyo, 1872.

Shiseido began as a shop rather than a brand. English Wikipedia says Arinobu Fukuhara, a former head pharmacist to the Imperial Japanese Navy, established the Shiseido Pharmacy in 1872, and the company’s own five-minute history says he opened it as a private Western-style pharmacy in the Ginza district of Tokyo. The International Directory of Company Histories, which gives the founder’s given name in the alternative reading Yushin, describes the same shop on the Ginza and says it drew buyers of traditional remedies as well as people curious about Western imports.

The name came from a classical text. Shiseido says the word is taken from a passage in the Yi Jing, or I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, and gives its general sense as “How wonderful is the virtue of the earth, from which all things are born!” The company reads the name as a resolve to create new value for people’s lives. It is a name chosen for its meaning in written characters, not for its sound in a foreign language and it has stayed in use ever since.

The shop soon made its own goods. The International Directory of Company Histories says Shiseido began to manufacture medicines in the 1880s, introduced a toothpaste in 1888 and, in 1897, began selling cosmetic products, beginning with a skin lotion called Eudermine. An essay on Shiseido published by MIT’s Visualizing Cultures project in 2009 says the name Eudermine was formed from ancient Greek for “good skin,” and that the lotion was sold in a corked glass bottle tied with a red ribbon, the liquid itself a vivid red. Colour and container, in other words, were part of the product from the start.

The Ginza address mattered to the image as well. The MIT essay says that the company’s fashionable location in the district and its stylish packaging were key parts of the brand identity of its Western-style goods. The International Directory of Company Histories adds that in 1902 the pharmacy installed a soda fountain, and Wikipedia says this later grew into the Shiseido Parlour restaurant business, which still carries the company name in Ginza today.

The son who built a design department.

The visual identity is usually traced to the founder’s son. The MIT essay says Shinzo Fukuhara (1883–1948), the company’s second president, spent the years 1909 to 1913 in the United States and Europe and came home closely familiar with the advertising and design culture he had seen there, in particular the lyrical style of art nouveau and the later, more geometric art deco. It describes him as one of a generation of Japanese company heads who took a daily, hands-on part in building their firm’s corporate identity, and says that he devoted extraordinary human and financial resources to Shiseido’s design.

He was also an artist in his own right. The essay says Shinzo studied painting, became known for pictorialist photography and founded the photographic societies Shashin Geijutsusha and Nihon Shashinkai; his photographs appeared on the covers of the company’s customer magazine, Shiseido Geppō, including an issue from November 1927. Several of his artist friends, it adds, worked as consultants to the company’s design division, among them the painter Kawashima Riichirō, who had trained in the United States and was later based in Paris.

The structure followed. Shiseido says that in 1916 it spun off its cosmetics department as a separate business and opened a cosmetics shop on the ground floor of a three-storey brick building, with the upper floors given to a design department that handled the company’s graphic work, alongside laboratories. Wikipedia says that around the same year the company’s advertising moved from historical images of Japanese beauty toward Western-influenced figures, with upswept hair and lettering in a block script inspired by art nouveau.

The camellia came out of this period. The International Directory of Company Histories dates the company’s use of its art nouveau-inspired flower logo to 1915. The MIT essay gives the design history: the camellia logo was originally designed by Fukuhara Shinzo and revised to its current form by Yabe Sue in 1924, and the MIT archive shows the mark on a sheet of wrapping paper that Yabe designed the same year. It also credits Yabe, an in-house designer, with the packaging for two perfumes launched in 1919, Ume no Hana (Plum Blossom) and Fuji no Hana (Wisteria).

Around the flower grew a pattern language. The essay describes Shiseido’s signature arabesque designs, which ran through posters, magazines and wrapping paper and were woven into both the cover image and the masthead of Shiseido Geppō in 1928. The camellia, the arabesque line and the magazine together made the company recognisable on paper long before the word “brand” was in common use.

Parent names and the marks they keep.

Group identities in beauty and media work on two levels at once. On the shelf or the newsstand, a reader meets a lipstick, a fragrance, a newspaper or a television channel, each with its own name, typeface and colours. Behind those labels and mastheads sits a parent name that appears in smaller type: on the back of a carton, in the legal line under an advertisement, in the corner of a website footer or on a stock-market listing. The parent identity has a different job. It speaks to investors, employees, regulators and partners rather than to the shopper or the reader, so it tends to be quieter, more typographic and more stable than the brands it carries.

Those parent names also change more often than the labels below them. Groups merge, split into separately listed companies, sell divisions and take new names, and each change brings a new wordmark, a new set of corporate colours and, sometimes, a name chosen to sound neutral across many languages. A house colour can work in both directions: on packaging it can tie a range of products together, while on mastheads it can mark a title as part of a wider family. Reading a group identity well means looking at both layers and at the dates when each one changed.

Chain stores, a Camellia Club and a listed company.

The camellia soon named more than a logo. The International Directory of Company Histories says that in 1923, at the urging of marketing director Noboru Matsumoto, Shiseido began opening a series of franchised retail outlets for its products, each modelled on the Tokyo store. Shiseido says chain stores handling its cosmetics spread nationwide after Shiseido Co., Ltd. was launched in 1927, that its “Miss Shiseido” promotions began in 1934, and that in 1937 it started the Hanatsubaki-kai, or Camellia Club, a membership club for customers. The Directory says the club took its name from the company’s flower logo.

The company grew into a public and international one after the war. Shiseido says its shares were listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1949, and that in 1957, starting with Taiwan, it began setting up overseas sales companies. In 1977, it says, it hosted the “Paris Six” fashion show for up-and-coming French designers, and in 1989 it formally set down its Corporate Ideals. Wikipedia gives the head office today as Higashi-Shinbashi in Minato, Tokyo, while the Ginza building that houses the Parlour keeps the name at its original address.

Through these changes the founding pieces stayed in place: a name from the Book of Changes, a flower drawn by the second president and redrawn by an in-house designer, and a Ginza shopfront. The MIT essay shows how far that identity was carried by paper — wrapping sheets, posters, perfume labels and a monthly magazine — and how closely the company’s leadership was involved in each.

For a design guide, Shiseido shows how a corporate mark can come from a design department rather than an agency, and how a single flower and a repeating line can hold a whole range of goods together. Compare Kao, another Tokyo company whose mark began on an 1890 soap label, and Amorepacific, a Seoul group with its own long family history. For this guide we use camellia red, a lacquer red and ink with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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