Edna Emme, a salon range and a French play on words.

TRESemmé is a haircare brand that began as a salon line in the United States in the late 1940s. Sources give two years for the start. The St. Louis Community Foundation and English Wikipedia say the Godefroy Manufacturing Company launched it in 1947, while the brand’s own heritage page says it was founded in 1948. Both accounts agree on where it was first sold: to beauty salons. English Wikipedia says the range later moved on to supermarkets and pharmacies as it grew.

The name belongs to a person. The brand is named after Edna L. Emme, a hair specialist who, according to the St. Louis Community Foundation, was born in St. Louis, started work in the mid-1920s in her sister’s salon and rose from the production floor to become vice-president of Godefroy. The foundation says she also founded the National Hairdressers and Cosmetologists Association and was elected its president five times. The foundation’s account says it was Godefroy that took TRESemmé “into beauty salons across the nation.”

TRESemmé tells the story with Emme at its centre. Its heritage page calls her the founder of the brand, says she launched it at Godefroy as a salon range, and says she spoke at the White House in 1938 on the role of women in business; those are the company’s own words about its history. The page also says the family used the phrase “You’ve got the Emmé in you” to mean courage.

The spelling is a play on words. The St. Louis Community Foundation traces it to the French très aimé, “well loved”; English Wikipedia, citing a Hindustan Unilever page, describes the name as a phonetic respelling of the French that takes in Emme’s surname. The company’s page puts it as a play on the French for “much-loved.” Written as one word, with the first four letters in capitals and an accent on the final e, the name ends with its namesake’s surname.

From Godefroy to Alberto-Culver, and on to Unilever.

The brand left Godefroy for Alberto-Culver, the company Leonard H. Lavin founded in 1955 when he bought the small beauty-supply firm that made Alberto VO5 hairdressing, according to the International Directory of Company Histories (2001). Sources differ on when TRESemmé changed hands. That directory places the purchase in the late 1950s, describing TRESemmé at the time as “a regional line of hair colors” that later grew to include a professional mousse; English Wikipedia gives the year as 1968.

Unilever came next. English Wikipedia, citing The New York Times, says Unilever agreed in September 2010 to buy Alberto-Culver, and Chain Drug Review reported on 11 May 2011 that the purchase had been completed. The brands that moved across included TRESemmé, Nexxus, St. Ives, Simple and Noxzema. To win clearance from the US Department of Justice, Unilever agreed to sell Alberto VO5 and its own Rave hair brand, the trade paper said. Unilever has owned TRESemmé since 2011, when that deal closed.

The salon link has stayed at the centre of the brand’s marketing. English Wikipedia records “Professional. Affordable.” as a line used in the mid-2000s, and says TRESemmé was the official haircare sponsor of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York from 2006.

Packaging has been reworked in recent years. Cosmetics Business reported in January 2023 that Unilever’s UK and Ireland business was relaunching TRESemmé with reformulated products and new pack designs that it said were meant to match the brand’s salon credentials. The range was cut to three pack sizes, 300ml, 680ml and 900ml, with the smallest and largest made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic. The article quoted Benoit Roger-Machart, senior marketing director for beauty and personal care at Unilever UK&I, who described TRESemmé as giving shoppers salon-quality results at home.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all mass-market haircare names: TRESemmé, Pantene, Herbal Essences, Garnier Fructis, Aussie, Not Your Mother’s and John Frieda. Haircare brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still carry a founder’s story to ranges that now belong to much larger consumer-goods groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner chemist to a supermarket aisle.

A haircare brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a name, a colour and the promise on the label, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its shampoos and conditioners are actually made.

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 has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A salon story told across many markets.

Advertising has also brought the brand scrutiny. In September 2020 the South African pharmacy chain Clicks removed TRESemmé products from its shelves after an advert on its website described an image of African hair as “frizzy and dull” and an image of white hair as “normal,” the Sunday Times reported on 8 September 2020. Clicks removed the advert and apologised, the paper said, and English Wikipedia, citing the broadcaster eNCA, says TRESemmé apologised as well. English Wikipedia also records that other South African retailers took the products off their shelves that month.

The heritage story is told across Unilever’s country sites. TRESemmé’s Australian page opens with “Bringing you salon quality hair at home since 1948” and sets out Emme’s career before turning to the products. The brand name is often typed without its accent or capitals, as “Tresemme”; the brand’s own site is tresemme.com, with sections for each country.

The same page sets out the idea the brand still leans on: it says Emme had the vision to bring professional-quality hair care from the salon to women at home, at a time when professional products were sold only in salons. That is the company’s own account, and it is the thread that runs from the 1940s salon range to the supermarket shelf.

For a design guide, TRESemmé shows how a person’s surname, folded into a French phrase and set partly in capitals, can carry a brand from the salon trade of the 1940s through two changes of owner. Compare Pantene, the Swiss-born haircare brand now owned by Procter & Gamble, and John Frieda, another haircare name that comes from a person. For this guide we use salon black, studio white and champagne with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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