A cleanser from Clorox’s own research.

Soft Scrub did not arrive at Clorox by acquisition. The Clorox Company’s heritage timeline, as archived in 2021, says that in the 1970s “our scientists developed” two products of their own: Twice as Fresh air freshener and Soft Scrub cleanser. The same timeline describes the 1970s as the decade in which the newly independent company, no longer part of Procter & Gamble, widened its portfolio through purchases and in-house work.

The purchases came quickly. Clorox lists the acquisition of the drain cleaner Liquid-Plumr in 1969, the spray cleaner Formula 409 in 1970, Kitchen Bouquet in 1971, Hidden Valley ranch dressing mixes in 1972 and Kingsford charcoal in 1973. The in-house work had a new home from 1973, when, the timeline says, the company set up a formal research and development function and built a technical centre in Pleasanton, California. Its timeline also says its new dry bleach, Clorox 2, was created in its own laboratory in the same decade.

Soft Scrub sat in that laboratory-built group, while the company’s purchased brands included the spray cleaner Formula 409. Adweek, writing in 1997, described the product as a liquid abrasive cleanser, a category that sits on the same shelf as scouring powders such as Comet and Bar Keepers Friend. The brand name itself pairs two plain English words, “soft” and “scrub”, and the product line has kept the word “Cleanser” at its centre.

Until 2004 Soft Scrub was a Clorox brand, owned alongside the company’s namesake bleach and, from 1990, alongside Pine-Sol, which Clorox bought from American Cyanamid that year. In 1997 the brand was handled by the agency DDB Needham, whose San Francisco office worked on its advertising.

DDB Needham, a share exchange and Henkel.

In July 1997 the trade magazine Adweek reported on a change of direction. In a story dated 14 July 1997, the reporter Jane Irene Kelly wrote that DDB Needham was launching an all-print campaign for The Clorox Co.’s Soft Scrub liquid abrasive cleanser, aimed at consumers who owned and maintained premium surfaces in their homes. The campaign line was “Some things scratch. Some don’t.”, and the opening ads were scheduled for the September issues of consumer magazines, on newsstands in mid-August. Adweek noted that Clorox had previously advertised Soft Scrub on television and had chosen print to reach a more upscale audience; Kathleen Kusek, a management supervisor at DDB Needham in San Francisco, told the magazine that Soft Scrub’s users were more upscale than those of typical home cleaning products.

The brand’s change of owner came out of a larger transaction. The German consumer-goods group Henkel was a major shareholder in Clorox, as Clorox itself described it in 2004. In December 2003, as Advertising Age and the Associated Press reported at the time, Henkel agreed to buy The Dial Corporation, the American maker of Dial soap. On 6 October 2004 Clorox announced a definitive agreement with Henkel KGaA under which it would exchange full ownership of a subsidiary for Henkel’s holding of Clorox shares. The subsidiary was to contain Clorox’s insecticides business, including the Combat, Home Mat and Home Keeper brands; the Soft Scrub cleanser business; Clorox’s interest in a Spanish and Portuguese joint venture with Henkel; and cash. Clorox said it would provide transitional services, including some interim production of Soft Scrub.

Clorox announced on 22 November 2004 that the exchange was complete and that the subsidiary holding the insecticides and Soft Scrub businesses had passed to Henkel. English Wikipedia, citing The New York Times of 8 October 2004, links the share exchange directly to Henkel’s purchase of Dial. Henkel has owned Soft Scrub since 2004.

Today the brand sits in Henkel North American Consumer Goods, the trade name of Henkel Corporation, which Wikipedia says was known as The Dial Corporation until 2017 and is based in Stamford, Connecticut. Its stablemates there include Persil, Dial, Purex, Renuzit and Snuggle. The Soft Scrub website describes the brand as “proud to be a member of the Henkel Family”.

Design and documentation.

Household cleaners are usually met on a shelf rather than in an advertisement, so much of their identity is carried by the container itself. A cleaner can arrive as a squeeze bottle, a jug with a handle, a round canister of powder with a perforated or sliding lid, an aerosol can, or a bottle topped with a trigger sprayer, and each of those forms leaves a different amount of room for a name, a mark and a line of instructions.

On a bottle or a jug the label usually wraps the body, with the brand name set large and the product description below it. On a powder canister the name tends to run around a cylinder, so it is read in part as the can turns. A trigger sprayer adds a coloured head and a nozzle above the label, which often becomes part of how a product is recognised from across an aisle.

Each guide in this group looks at where a name began, who has owned it over time and how its labels, canisters and advertising are described in the sources, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A descriptive name and a line built around one word.

The Soft Scrub identity starts with its name, two short English words that say what the product is for. The 1997 DDB Needham line, “Some things scratch. Some don’t.”, built its message around surfaces, and Adweek reported that Clorox chose to run it in print, in the September issues of consumer magazines, to reach people who owned and maintained premium surfaces at home, after earlier television advertising for the brand.

The product names follow the same plain pattern. The current Soft Scrub site lists Soft Scrub Cleanser, Soft Scrub Cleanser with Bleach and Soft Scrub Gel Cleanser with Bleach, each built by adding a word or two to the core name, and extends the brand to an in-tank toilet product called Duo-Cubes. The site also offers a “Surface Selector”, an interactive guide that matches products to materials around the home, continuing the theme of surfaces that the 1997 campaign set out.

The change of owner did not change the name. Under Clorox, Soft Scrub was developed in-house next to brands the company had bought; under Henkel it became one of the cleaning and laundry brands of Henkel North American Consumer Goods in Stamford, alongside Persil and Dial. Clorox’s 2004 agreement provided for a period of interim production by Clorox after the handover, and the brand’s website now names Henkel as its parent.

For a design guide, Soft Scrub shows how a descriptive name can carry a cleanser through a change of parent company, and how a single advertising line can turn a product category into a story about the surfaces it is used on. Compare it with Comet, the Procter & Gamble scouring powder launched in 1956, and Persil, the Henkel detergent that shares its American owner. For this guide we use cleanser blue, lemon and soft white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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