A new fabric softener and a bear to sell it.

Snuggle is a fabric softener that Unilever introduced in the United States in 1983. Writing in Adweek in April 2014, Robert Klara described the launch as Unilever’s challenge to Procter & Gamble’s Downy, which had been on sale since 1960 and whose advertising, he wrote, leaned on pictures of happy families and babies. English Wikipedia, citing the same article, gives 1983 as the year of introduction and lists the product today as dryer sheets and liquid softener, the liquid in concentrated and ready-to-use forms.

The brand’s distinguishing asset from the start was a character rather than a formula. Adweek said Unilever hired the puppet maker Kermit Love, who later worked with Jim Henson on Sesame Street, to create the Snuggle Bear, a small teddy bear who appeared in every commercial and, in the words of a mascot-marketing consultant the magazine interviewed, cuddled the sheets, the towels and even the logo. English Wikipedia’s article on Kermit Love also credits him with building the Snuggle Bear puppet for the softener’s advertisements. The brand’s current website credits the bear’s creation to the Jim Henson Company.

The bear’s voice belonged to Corinne Orr, an actress whose earlier work included the female voices of the animated series Speed Racer; both Adweek and the brand’s own site name her as the original voice. The Snuggle website, as archived in 2005, said the bear was born in 1983, the year of the launch; the brand’s current site says he was introduced to the world in 1986, the year English Wikipedia also gives. Adweek illustrated its 2014 article with a commercial from 1986 set beside one from 2014, noting how closely the two resembled each other.

The company also places the bear outside the television set. Its current site says he appeared in the 1987 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the archived 2005 site said the bear helped launch a “Bedtime Story Month” with the National Center for Family Literacy. The same 2005 site told the story of the brand’s range through the bear, crediting him in a light-hearted way with the idea for Snuggle dryer sheets to go with the original liquid.

From Unilever to Sun Products to Henkel.

Snuggle stayed with Unilever for twenty-five years. In September 2008, according to a Business Wire announcement cited by English Wikipedia, the private-equity firm Vestar Capital Partners acquired Unilever’s North American laundry business — covering the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico — including Snuggle, Wisk, all, Surf and Sunlight. The former Unilever brands were combined with Huish Detergents, a detergent maker founded by Dan Huish in 1975, in which Vestar had taken a majority stake in 2007, to form The Sun Products Corporation, based in Wilton, Connecticut.

Under Sun Products the bear stayed at the centre of the advertising. Adweek wrote in 2014 that the bear, by then owned by Sun Products, was back in his familiar setting, pitching the brand’s new Scent Booster Pacs. The magazine said Sun had updated the character subtly — his fur and snout were a little different — and that the bigger change was that he was now animated digitally and active on social media. It contrasted that approach with a 2003 Unilever campaign that had taken the bear out of the laundry basket and put him poolside in Rio in Ray-Ban sunglasses, a turn The New York Times columnist Stuart Elliott summed up as the bear “becoming a devil-may-care bear”.

The next change of owner came in 2016. On 24 June 2016, Reuters reported, the German consumer-goods group Henkel agreed to buy Sun Products from a Vestar fund, adding the detergents all and Sun and the fabric conditioner Snuggle to the Düsseldorf group that owns Persil. Henkel said in a news release dated 2 September 2016 that it had closed the acquisition on 1 September 2016, naming all, Sun and Snuggle among the brands it had bought. Henkel has owned Snuggle since 2016.

English Wikipedia says Sun Products’ operations moved to Stamford, Connecticut, in 2017 to be combined with Henkel’s Dial business, and that the combined unit was renamed Henkel North American Consumer Goods in 2018. The brand’s current website is published by Henkel Corporation, describes Snuggle as a member of the Henkel family of brands, and sells it in the form of fabric softeners, dryer sheets and scent boosters; English Wikipedia lists its markets as the United States, Canada and South Korea.

Design and documentation.

Laundry and kitchen-wrap brands live on the shelf as packaging first. A detergent jug, a softener bottle and a wrap carton are the parts of these brands that most people handle, and each carries its name, its colours and its pictures on a surface that has to be read quickly from a supermarket aisle and then again at home, beside a washing machine or in a kitchen drawer.

Those surfaces change over time. A label may be redrawn, a bottle reshaped, a carton given a new cutting edge or a new illustration, and the company behind the name may change hands while the name itself stays on the pack. That makes the plain questions worth asking for each brand: who started it, who has owned it since, and how its name, label and advertising have been presented over the years.

Each guide in this group sets out what independent, dated sources record about those questions, marks what rests on a company’s own account by saying so, and treats the colours and typefaces shown here as our interpretation rather than an official specification.

A brand that is also a character.

Snuggle’s identity is unusual among laundry brands because its centre is a performer. The bear has had at least three owners, several voices and a change from a hand-made puppet to digital animation, yet Adweek could still set a 1986 commercial beside a 2014 one and find them almost the same. Adweek presented the 2003 detour — the bear in sunglasses by a pool in Rio — as a cautionary tale about moving a mascot out of its setting, and described the return to the laundry basket under Sun Products.

The brand has kept refreshing the character without changing what he is. The current website says the bear had kept the same look since the 1980s before a recent makeover, and presents the new version as always smiling. The site organises its storytelling around him in a section called the Bear Den, which includes a scented-candle collaboration with Homesick and a partnership with Peanuts built around a shared symbol: Linus’s blue blanket and the bear’s own. The campaign line for that partnership, “Must be the scent of Snuggle”, ties the bear, the colour blue and the idea of comfort into one message, and the company describes a pop-up experience in New York in which visitors could hold a blanket washed with Snuggle Blue Sparkle.

Names do the rest of the work. The archived 2005 site introduced fragrances such as Sunkissed Breeze, Emerald Stream and Spring Blush through the bear’s adventures, and today’s range uses names such as Blue Sparkle and Morning Breeze. The pattern is consistent: a soft, domestic word for the brand, a friendly character to carry it, and scent names that read like weather or bedtime stories.

For a design guide, Snuggle shows how a single mascot, returned to the same domestic setting after a brief detour, can hold a brand together through a sale by Unilever, a stint at Sun Products and ownership by Henkel. Compare it with Downy, the Procter & Gamble softener it was launched against, and all, the detergent that has shared its owners since 2008. For this guide we use blanket blue, sky blue and teddy cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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