A paint, wood-finish and flooring business on Oakland’s waterfront.

Varathane comes from the Flecto Company of Oakland, California. The Oakland LocalWiki, a community history site that cites a PR Newswire release and the Oakland Tribune, describes Flecto as a paint, wood-finish and flooring company noted for creating Varathane, and says the business was started in 1934. The same page notes that the Vetterli family ran the company, naming John Vetterli as chief executive.

The company’s Oakland addresses are part of the record. By 1967, according to the LocalWiki, Flecto had a manufacturing plant on Brush Street; that property was bought by the Port of Oakland in 1971, and Flecto moved to 45th Street, on the border between Oakland and Emeryville. The page also names Richard Swanson as president of manufacturing until his retirement in 1999, and a chemical engineer, Alfredo Guevarra, who retired in 1994.

Varathane was the name under which Flecto sold its wood finish, described by the LocalWiki as a polyurethane alternative to varnish. The Flecto name has since gone from the shelf, while Varathane remains in use under its later owners.

A merry-go-round, a fairground and a new owner.

Flecto found an unusual way to show off its finish. In 1974, the Oakland LocalWiki says, Ken Vetterli bought an old merry-go-round, built in 1950, to display Varathane at trade shows. The carousel stayed with the company until 2002.

In 2002, according to the same source, Flecto donated the carousel to Children’s Fairyland, the children’s park in Oakland, where members of the Lake Merritt Breakfast Club worked out how to reassemble it. By 2015 it was showing wear. By then Flecto had been bought by Rust-Oleum, and the LocalWiki says Fairyland approached the new owner, which advised on the restoration and paid for it; the Oakland Tribune reported the restored carousel’s reopening to the public on 30 March 2016.

The change of owner had come in 1998, when Flecto was purchased by Rust-Oleum, part of RPM, Inc., the LocalWiki says, citing RPM’s announcement of the acquisition. RPM International has owned Varathane since 1998. English Wikipedia lists Varathane among Rust-Oleum’s key brands, with Zinsser and Watco, and among RPM International’s consumer brands, with Rust-Oleum, DAP and Zinsser.

Rust-Oleum has its own history. English Wikipedia says it was founded in 1921 by Robert Fergusson, a sea captain who noticed that fish oil spilled on rusty metal decks stopped the rust spreading, and that it stayed in family hands until 1994, when RPM International bought it. Rust-Oleum tells the same story on its own website. Its headquarters are in Vernon Hills, Illinois, north of Chicago, in a building designed by the architect Helmut Jahn, English Wikipedia says. RPM itself, according to English Wikipedia, was founded in May 1947 by Frank C. Sullivan as Republic Powdered Metals, which made an aluminium roof coating called Alumanation, and is based in Medina, Ohio.

RPM is organised in groups. From 1 June 2025, English Wikipedia says, it reorganised into three: the Construction Products Group, the Performance Coatings Group and the Consumer Group, which makes and markets products for home improvement and hobbies and sells them to mass merchandisers, home improvement centres, hardware and paint stores and craft shops. English Wikipedia says the Consumer Group’s main manufacturing and distribution operations are primarily in North America, with a few locations in Europe, Australia, South Africa and South America, and lists Rust-Oleum plants in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin; Hagerstown, Maryland; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Lesage, West Virginia.

Paint sundries and wood finishes.

The brands in this group sell the things that sit around a tin of paint rather than the paint itself: masking tape, brushes, primers, wood stains, clear finishes and spray paint. In a hardware aisle they compete for attention on crowded shelves, so their identities are carried by a few repeated signals — the colour of a roll of tape, the band of colour on a can, a label that customers can find again on the next visit.

Wood-finish brands also have to show colour that is not their own. A stain only makes sense once it is on wood, so swatch cards, sample boards and finished projects often do as much of the visual work as the logo. Tape brands, by contrast, can make the product itself the signature, with one colour of roll standing for the whole name.

Many of these names have changed hands over the years, and the business behind a familiar label may now be part of a much larger coatings group. Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how it presents itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A finish shown on a carousel.

Varathane now sits inside Rust-Oleum’s range of wood-care products. Rust-Oleum’s website announces new Varathane lines under its own name, such as the Varathane Total Control Gel Stain, which the company describes as combining “oil-based performance with water-based convenience”; we give that as the company’s description. The brand is presented as Rust-Oleum’s wood-finish name, next to Zinsser for primers and the Rust-Oleum name itself for paints.

The group around it has kept growing. English Wikipedia says Rust-Oleum bought Synta Inc. in 2012, Krud Kutter and Citadel Restoration and Repair in 2014, and Seal Krete in 2016, and Rust-Oleum’s website reports that RPM completed its purchase of The Pink Stuff, which became part of the Consumer Group’s Rust-Oleum cleaners business. Varathane shares that parent with cleaners, sealers and spray paints as well as other wood-care names such as Watco.

The brand’s most memorable piece of promotion was physical rather than printed. A carousel bought to show a varnish at trade shows, and later handed to a children’s park, is an unusual piece of marketing. The story is still told in Oakland’s community history, and the restoration paid for by Rust-Oleum kept the connection alive after the Flecto name had gone.

Flecto was an Oakland firm with addresses on Brush Street and 45th Street; Varathane is now a name in a catalogue run from Illinois, owned by a group based in Ohio.

For a design guide, Varathane shows how a product name can outlive the company that created it and carry the memory of a place. Compare Rust-Oleum, its parent brand, and Zinsser, another RPM name. For this guide we use forest green, amber and cherry with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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