Tork Brand Guidelines: The 1968 All-Tork Wiper & Essity’s Professional Hygiene Brand

A wiper meant to replace the cleaning cloth.

Tork dates its story from 1968. That year, the Spanish trade magazine Interempresas reported in August 2018, the brand launched All-Tork, a disposable wiper designed to replace cloths, and innovation became its watchword from then on. The magazine’s report marked the brand’s fiftieth anniversary, which Tork celebrated with office parties, an archive of images from the previous five decades and a video of employees and customers.

From wipers the brand spread into the wider washroom. Its own website now groups the range into hand towels, toilet paper, napkins and tableware, soaps and sanitisers, air fresheners, patient-care rolls and wiping and cleaning papers and cloths, each sold as a dispenser plus the refill made for it. Tork describes itself as helping businesses “for more than 50 years.” The brand travelled early: Interempresas says it reached Spain in 1982. In the same anniversary report the brand’s commercial director for Iberia said the next fifty years would go on developing products and services and on digital transformation, to stay at the front of innovation in the field, the magazine reported. At the time the brand was showing PeakServe, the PaperCircle recycling service and a digital refill service side by side.

Until 2017 Tork belonged to the hygiene business of the Swedish group SCA. Swedish Wikipedia says SCA was founded in 1929 as a forest company and stepped into hygiene in 1975 by buying Mölnlycke; SCA’s own history calls that purchase its first step towards becoming a consumer goods company. Over the following decades SCA kept buying tissue businesses, including the American Wausau Paper in 2015, Swedish Wikipedia notes.

Dispensers, refills and the data behind them.

Tork’s design work is mostly systems design: a dispenser on the wall and the refill that only fits it. A well-documented recent example is Tork PeakServe, launched in the United Kingdom in a press release of 15 August 2017. It uses towels compressed during production and joined in bundles with a hook-and-loop strip, so a cleaner can add a new bundle at any time; the release says it was designed for high-traffic venues such as stadiums. The range also includes SmartOne toilet roll dispensers, Xpressnap napkin dispensers and coreless OptiServe rolls, the Tork website shows.

The second strand is service. Tork PaperCircle, a recycling service that turns used paper hand towels into new tissue products, won the Interclean Innovation Award in 2018 in the associated services and products category, Interempresas reported; the magazine called it the first service of its kind, and Essity makes the same claim today. Alongside it the magazine described Tork EasyCube, a digital service giving real-time information on cleaning and refill needs. Today the brand sells Tork Vision Cleaning. In a release dated 27 June 2025 Tork said Vision Cleaning was marking ten years since launch, and described sensors in dispensers and people counters that tell cleaners when to refill and when to clean.

The same release said that an estimated 1.2 billion people passed through buildings using the technology in 2024, and that five of the world’s ten busiest airports use Tork technology for cleaning; those are Tork’s figures. Essity says Tork has more than 30 million dispensers refilled regularly around the world and operates in about 150 countries, again as company figures.

The brand sells by setting rather than by product. Its website sorts its offer into manufacturing, foodservice, offices, healthcare, passenger terminals and education, and Essity describes the soap and sanitiser range as designed with accessibility and inclusive use in mind. Tork frames its sustainability work under three headings of its own: well-being, “more from less” and circularity.

How washroom brands present themselves.

Washroom hygiene is a design field most people meet without noticing. The hand dryer by the airport gate, the towel dispenser in an office corridor and the soap unit above a stadium basin are chosen not by the people who use them but by architects, facility managers and cleaning contractors. The makers of these products speak first to that professional buyer, and their brands are built to read clearly in a specification sheet or a trade catalogue as much as on a wall.

Much of the work is systems design. A paper towel or soap brand usually sells a dispenser together with the refill made to fit it, so the visible object on the wall carries the name while the paper, foam or gel inside is what is bought again and again. Hand dryer makers sell the opposite way: one machine, mounted once, with filters, covers and accessories around it. Both approaches lean on a small number of named ranges rather than long product lists.

Materials do much of the talking. Stainless steel fittings, white and grey plastics and plain labelling recur across catalogues, for products that may end up in very different washrooms, from a hospital to a hotel lobby. Colour tends to appear in small accents, on a cover, a light or a refill pack, rather than across the whole object.

The category also presents itself in person. Trade fairs such as Interclean and the ISSA Show, where cleaning and facility-management suppliers gather, give makers a place to launch dispensers, dryers and digital refill services, and some fairs run innovation awards of their own. The guides in this series look at how individual makers handle those shared conventions.

A brand carried out of SCA in 2017.

In 2017 SCA split itself in two. Its shareholders voted at the annual general meeting that year to divide the group into the forest products company SCA and the hygiene and health company Essity, SCA’s history says, and Essity was listed on Nasdaq Stockholm on 15 June 2017, according to Swedish Wikipedia. A press release published that month by Healthcare Facilities Today named Tork, with TENA and the medical brand JOBST, as the brands Essity would build on. Essity’s headquarters are in Stockholm; SCA moved its own back to Sundsvall.

Inside Essity, Tork is the brand of the Professional Hygiene business area, one of four alongside Health & Medical, Personal Care and Consumer Tissue. In its 2018 annual report Essity described itself as a leading supplier in professional hygiene and Tork the globally leading brand; the Tork website repeats a “global leading brand” claim, footnoted to its own 2023 sales. Both are Essity’s claims. The name Essity, Swedish Wikipedia says, comes from the English words “essentials” and “necessities.”

Essity makes its products in its own plants; Swedish Wikipedia lists the group’s Swedish production sites at Lilla Edet, home of a paper mill, Falkenberg and Mölnlycke, with product development in Gothenburg.

For a design guide, Tork shows how a professional brand can be built from a dispenser and its refill rather than from a single product. Compare Excel Dryer, which answers the same washroom with warm air, and Ecolab, another supplier of hygiene to businesses rather than homes. For this guide we use navy, white and a soft blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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