A paint dealership, a varnish maker and a family that ran both.

Valspar traces its history to 1806 and a paint dealership in Boston, Massachusetts. English Wikipedia says that in that year Samuel Tuck opened a shop called “Paint and Color,” which changed owners and names several times over the following decades and was eventually acquired by Augustine Stimson. In 1832, Wikipedia says, Lawson Valentine incorporated Valentine & Company in Boston as a varnish manufacturer, and the two businesses later merged under the name Stimson & Valentine.

The partnership changed shape over the next generation. Wikipedia says Otis Merriam joined as a principal owner in 1855 and Lawson’s brother Henry Valentine joined in 1860. By 1866 Stimson and Merriam had both retired, and the firm was again called Valentine & Company. Lawson Valentine hired Charles Homer, brother of the painter Winslow Homer, as the company’s chemist. In 1870 the business moved to New York City and acquired the Minnesota Linseed Oil Paint Company, and around then, Wikipedia says, it began developing varnishes for vehicles to compete with English imports. Henry Valentine succeeded his brother as president in 1882, taking over operations that by then reached Boston, Chicago, New York and the west coast.

The brand name came from the next generation of the family. Wikipedia says L. Valentine Pulsifer, Lawson Valentine’s grandson, joined the company in 1903 after studying chemistry at Harvard, and after about three years of work produced a clear varnish that was in production by 1905. That varnish was called Valspar, and it was the company’s main product for decades, sold with the advertising line “The varnish that won’t turn white.”

A corporation named after a varnish, a move west and a sale to Cleveland.

The product name became the company name in 1932. Wikipedia says the Valspar Corporation was formed that year, with Valentine & Company kept as a subsidiary. It also lists some of the varnish’s reported users from the early twentieth century: Robert Peary’s expedition of 1909, the US military during the First World War, and Charles Lindbergh on his 1927 transatlantic flight.

Mergers then moved the company’s base twice. In 1960, according to Wikipedia, Valspar merged with Rockcote, the business of Ralph Baudhuin, which gave it more manufacturing in the Midwest and a headquarters in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. In June 1970 it merged with Minnesota Paints and moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Minnesota Paints’ former president, C. Angus Wurtele, became chairman in 1973. Wikipedia says Valspar’s main focus before the 1980s was its consumer business, and that it then made a series of acquisitions, starting with Mobil’s coatings division in 1984. Further purchases followed, including the Enterprise Paint Companies in 1987, the McCloskey Corporation in 1989 and Hi-Tek Polymers in 1991. Richard Rompala, formerly of PPG Industries, became president in 1994, chief executive in 1995 and chairman in 1998, and Wikipedia says he took the business, until then mainly North American, into China, Hong Kong, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. In 2005 Valspar bought Samuel Cabot Incorporated, maker of the Cabot stains, and in December 2006 it acquired the powder coatings business of H.B. Fuller.

Valspar’s independent history ended with the sale to Sherwin-Williams. Wikipedia says the Cleveland company announced the deal on 20 March 2016 and completed it on 1 June 2017, and Sherwin-Williams’s own history timeline records the acquisition under 2017. Sherwin-Williams has owned Valspar since then, and English Wikipedia lists Valspar among the brands of its Consumer Brands Group, alongside names such as Dutch Boy, Krylon and Minwax. Valspar’s automotive refinish business sits in Sherwin-Williams’s Performance Coatings Group, Wikipedia says.

Design and documentation.

The paint brands in this group sit at very different points in the trade. Some are long-established manufacturers whose names have passed through several owners, and whose cans are sold through hardware chains, dedicated stores and trade counters; others are younger companies that sell mainly online or from a handful of showrooms, often built around a short, edited list of colours rather than a vast library.

A paint brand’s identity is carried by more than a logo. It lives in the can and its label, in the fan deck and the swatch card, in the names given to colours, in the store or website where people choose them, and in programmes that pick out a colour for the year. Because the company behind a name may have been sold, merged or closed, and because paint can be made far from where it is marketed, the plain questions are worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where the paint is actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A retail paint brand that sorts its colours by where you buy them.

Today the Valspar name is mostly met on a paint can and a colour chip. The brand’s US website opens by asking visitors to choose a preferred retailer, offering Lowe’s or an independent retailer, and it notes that Valspar products and colours vary by retailer. Its menus are built around colour first: browse colours, a colour visualiser, popular colours and a Color of the Year, followed by interior and exterior paints and primers, exterior wood stains, concrete floor coatings and tools. A separate section, Valspar Pro, is aimed at professional painters, and the site runs in English and Spanish for the United States and in English and French for Canada.

The annual colour pick is the brand’s most visible design moment. Valspar’s website presents Cottage Door, colour number 8004-38E, as its 2027 Color of the Year, describing it as a grayed-out blue with warm undertones, and it pairs the announcement with ideas for using the shade inside and out.

The older story still gives the brand its name. Valspar began as a varnish, and the company itself took that product’s name in 1932. The Boston dealership, the Valentine family and the move to Minneapolis are the background; the colour card is the foreground.

For a design guide, Valspar shows how a product name can outgrow the product and become a retail paint brand built around colour chips and an annual hue. Compare Sherwin-Williams, its owner since 2017, and Dunn-Edwards, the California paint maker. For this guide we use harbour blue, varnish amber, door grey-blue and ink slate with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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