A Chicago wax and a made-up name.

Simoniz is a car-wax name that has changed hands many times since its beginnings in Chicago. The fullest account of its early years comes from the company that owns the name in the United States today. In a company history on its professional website, as archived in 2012, Simoniz USA says the business came into being in 1910, when George Simons, who had developed a cleaner and a carnauba wax product for car finishes, organised the Simons Manufacturing Company together with Elmer Rich of the Great Northern Railway.

According to the same account, in 1912 Elmer Rich and his brother, R.J. Rich, acquired full ownership of the firm. They changed its name to the Simoniz Company and put its office and a backroom factory on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, a stretch the company says was known at the time as Automobile Row. English Wikipedia’s article on Simoniz repeats these dates and names, citing the company history as its source.

The company credits Elmer Rich with a slogan, “Motorists Wise, Simoniz”, and says it was spread through continuous radio advertising once radio became a mass medium.

The name also left the shelf and entered everyday speech. English Wikipedia says that “Simoniz” and “simonizing” came to be used for waxing a car, and cites the Merriam-Webster dictionary entry for the verb.

The company history lists the early products as Simoniz Kleener and Simoniz Wax, sold as two separate steps, and says that in 1957 it launched Vista, a one-step cleaner and wax that combined the two. It also says an Institutional Division was set up in 1954 to sell floor waxes, finishes, polishes, cleaners and sponges to businesses and public buildings, so the Simoniz name was used on floors as well as on cars.

Morton, Union Carbide, First Brands — and Britain.

From the 1960s the Simoniz name moved through a series of larger corporate owners. The Simoniz USA history says that in 1965 Morton International bought the controlling interest in the Simoniz Company and added products of its own to the line, and that in 1976 Simoniz was acquired by Union Carbide, which introduced further car-care products under the name, including Super Poly, Body Guard, Double Wax and Simoniz II.

The next change came as Union Carbide broke itself up in the mid-1980s. A company history of First Brands Corporation published on the Reference for Business site says that Union Carbide’s Home and Automotive Products division was bought by a group of its own managers, backed by outside investors, and that the new company, organised as First Brands, took control of the STP business, the Glad bag line, Prestone antifreeze and Simoniz waxes. The deal was concluded in mid-1986, that history says, and also included product lines and factories in Asia, Canada and Europe. First Brands set up its headquarters near the airport in Danbury, Connecticut.

The United States line of the brand then moved to a smaller specialist. The Simoniz USA history says that in 1988 First Brands licensed Syndet Products, Inc. to make and distribute Simoniz products for the car-wash trade, a licence that later grew to cover detail shops and janitorial cleaning products. In 1997, the company says, Syndet bought the Simoniz brand from First Brands and renamed itself Simoniz USA, Inc. English Wikipedia gives the same dates and describes Simoniz USA as a privately held maker of automobile and janitorial cleaning products based in Bolton, Connecticut. Simoniz USA has owned the brand in the United States since 1997, on the company’s account.

In Britain the Simoniz name has followed a different path. Tyrepress reported on 28 November 2007 that Holt Lloyd would use The Aftermarket Show to promote “its Simoniz, Holts and Redex brands”, with a stand built around its Simoniz Valeting range of products such as Back to Black and alloy-wheel cleaner. Holt Lloyd’s own website today names Simoniz as one of a family of four consumer brands it owns, alongside Holts, Prestone and Redex, and describes Holt Lloyd as a British company that develops, tests and manufactures products in the UK for export.

Holt Lloyd’s own parent has also changed. PE Professional reported on 27 June 2024 that KIK Consumer Products, a portfolio company of Centerbridge Partners, had agreed to sell its auto care business — sold under the Prestone brand in North America and the Holts brand in the United Kingdom — to Recochem, a Montreal-based maker of transportation and household fluids.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell antifreeze, engine additives, waxes and polishes, and they meet buyers on the same shelf of a car-parts store or a supermarket aisle. Products of this kind are usually chosen in a few seconds, standing in front of rows of jugs, bottles, tins and tubs, so the pack does much of the work that a showroom or a salesperson would do for other goods.

A car-care brand’s identity is carried less by a single product than by its containers: the shape and colour of a plastic jug, the label wrapped around a small additive bottle, the lid of a round wax tin or the cap of a polish bottle. Names on those packs may also outlast the companies that created them, passing from founders to larger groups and from one market to another.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One name, two markets.

Simoniz is a case of a brand name that has held its shape while the companies behind it changed again and again. The company says the name began with George Simons’s firm in Chicago; it was then carried through Morton International, Union Carbide and the First Brands management buyout, and was then sold to the car-wash supplier that had been making it under licence.

The result is a brand that today has more than one home. In the United States, Simoniz USA in Connecticut sells the name across car washes, detail shops, retail and janitorial products, according to its own account. In Britain, the name sits in Holt Lloyd’s family of car-care brands, as Tyrepress recorded in 2007 and as Holt Lloyd says today. A shopper in each country can therefore meet a Simoniz bottle or tin that comes from a different company.

The constant across all of this is the word itself. The slogan “Motorists Wise, Simoniz”, the use of “simonizing” for waxing a car, and the Vista one-step product of 1957 all put the coined name at the centre, rather than any single picture or mascot.

For a design guide, Simoniz shows how a single product word can carry a brand through several owners and across an ocean, even when different companies sell it in different countries. Compare Turtle Wax, another Chicago car-wax name, and Prestone, an antifreeze brand that shared First Brands as an owner with Simoniz from 1986. For this guide we use a wax-tin red, carnauba cream and showroom black with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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