From medicine to steam engines.

Valvoline dates its story to 1866. On its history page, Valvoline Global Operations says that Dr John Ellis discovered the lubricating benefits of crude oil in that year and founded the company that became Valvoline. The brand line on the same site calls Valvoline “The Original Motor Oil”, and the founding year is the centre of the way the company presents itself.

English Wikipedia fills in the background. It describes Ellis as a Massachusetts-born physician who travelled in the early 1860s to Titusville, Pennsylvania, then the centre of America’s young petroleum industry, to research crude oil as a possible medical compound. Instead, Wikipedia says, he found it useful as a lubricant for machinery, and he built his own equipment to improve the crude’s lubricating qualities.

The business came next. According to Wikipedia, in 1866 Ellis partnered with a relative of his wife who had an oil refinery in Binghamton, New York, to found the Continuous Oil Refining Company, which made petroleum lubricant for steam engines. Ellis first called his product Binghamton Cylinder Oil. Two years later, Wikipedia says, he renamed it with the simpler and more memorable Valvoline.

The company moved more than once. Wikipedia says the Continuous Oil Refining Company moved to Brooklyn in 1869, and that Ellis, with his son and son-in-law, later renamed the business Ellis & Leonard and relocated to Shadyside, New Jersey. Through those changes the product name stayed put.

The name was protected early. Valvoline’s timeline says the brand was trademarked in 1873, and the company treats that date as a cornerstone of its heritage. In 1920, the timeline continues, when the Ford Model T was in mass production, Valvoline was the motor oil that Ford recommended. English Wikipedia also says Valvoline was recommended for the Model T in the early twentieth century.

Ashland, a stock listing and a split.

The modern corporate story begins in 1949. English Wikipedia says that in that year Ashland purchased the Freedom-Valvoline Company, and Valvoline spent the following decades as part of the Kentucky-based group. Its timeline from those years is a list of products: a single-grade oil called X-18 in 1939, an all-climate motor oil in 1954, and in 1965, as muscle cars grew popular, an oil designed for racing that the company now calls VR1 racing oil.

Later decades brought the names on today’s shelves. The company says it introduced DuraBlend, a synthetic-blend motor oil, in 1996, and MaxLife high-mileage motor oil in 2000. In 2015 it launched the Pro-V Racing line, which it says draws on the technology and expertise behind its professional race teams.

Independence came in two steps. According to English Wikipedia, Valvoline completed an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange on 22 September 2016, and Ashland spun Valvoline off as an independent company on 5 May 2017. The company’s own timeline notes the 2016 listing under the ticker VVV. In 2021, the timeline says, Valvoline realigned its operating businesses into two segments, Retail Services and Global Products.

Those two segments then went separate ways. On 1 August 2022, according to Aramco, the two companies announced an equity purchase agreement. On 1 March 2023, in a release filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Valvoline Inc. said it had completed the sale of its Global Products business to Aramco. Aramco announced the completion on 2 March 2023, saying it had acquired the business through a wholly owned subsidiary, that the business was named Valvoline Global Operations, and that it would remain headquartered in Lexington, Kentucky.

The result is a shared name. Aramco said it now owned the Valvoline brand for the products business, while Valvoline Inc. kept the brand for its retail services, and the two companies planned to work together to grow it. Valvoline Inc. described itself after the sale as a pure-play automotive services company, operating the Valvoline Instant Oil Change and Great Canadian Oil Change networks.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make motor oils, lubricants and performance parts: the fluids that go into an engine and the components that enthusiasts and workshops fit to cars, from ignition and fuel parts to brakes and suspension. Brands in this trade sit at many different points, from founding families whose surname is still on the product to names that now belong to oil majors, industrial groups or listed holding companies, and a single name can be sold on a supermarket shelf, in a parts store and on a race car.

A motor-oil or parts brand’s identity is usually carried by a can, a box, a colour and a sticker on a racing livery, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factories or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are 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.

The bottle, the label and the car.

Packaging has been part of recent brand work. Valvoline’s timeline says the company introduced the five-quart Easy Pour Bottle in 2017, aimed at people who change their own oil. In 2022, it says, Valvoline reimagined that bottle and completed a label redesign effort that became the global package standard. For a lubricant brand, the bottle on the shelf is the main surface the identity lives on, and the company describes that 2022 redesign as the global package standard.

Motorsport is the other surface. English Wikipedia says Valvoline has sponsored in NASCAR since 1981, starting with Cale Yarborough, and that from 1992 it began a long relationship with Roush Racing and driver Mark Martin. It reunited with Hendrick Motorsports in 2014. Wikipedia also says Valvoline sponsored IndyCar driver Al Unser Jr. from 1988 to 1993, and that since June 2020 its logo has appeared on the sleeves of the La Liga club Sevilla FC.

The Aramco era has added Formula One. Valvoline’s timeline lists a 2023 strategic partnership between Valvoline Global Operations and the Aston Martin Formula One team, which already carried Aramco’s name. Wikipedia says the partnership began in July 2023 as an extension of that existing arrangement. In 2024, according to the company, Valvoline launched Restore & Protect motor oil globally.

The story also has a split ending. One name now sits on two businesses with two owners: oil and lubricants under Aramco’s Valvoline Global Operations, and service bays under Valvoline Inc., both based in Lexington, Kentucky. Each uses the same word and its founding year.

For a design guide, Valvoline shows how a product name chosen in the 1860s can survive a doctor’s experiment, several company names, a stock listing and a split between two owners. Compare Pennzoil, another American motor-oil name, and Castrol, a British lubricant brand that also grew from a single product name. For this guide we use a deep blue, a racing red and a navy with a condensed sans-serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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