Viatris Brand Guidelines: Mylan 1961, Upjohn & a 2020 Latin Name for Three Goals

A distributor in a West Virginia skating rink.

Viatris is a new name built on two older companies. Its larger American root is Mylan, which English Wikipedia says was founded in 1961 as a drug distributor by Milan Puskar and Don Panoz, in a disused skating rink in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The business moved to Pennsauken, New Jersey, in 1962, to Princeton, West Virginia, in 1963 and to Morgantown in 1965, and in 1966 it began making penicillin G tablets as well as vitamins. It went public on the over-the-counter market on 23 February 1973, moved its head office to Canonsburg, outside Pittsburgh, in 1976, and in 1980 stopped working as a contract manufacturer to sell medicines under its own “Mylan-labeled” brand.

Mylan grew with the American generics market after the Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984. It bought Bertek, a maker of transdermal patches, in 1993, renaming it Mylan Technologies in 1999, and UDL Laboratories, a supplier of unit-dose generics to hospitals and care homes, in 1996. In 2007 it took a controlling interest in Matrix Laboratories of India, a producer of active pharmaceutical ingredients, and bought the generics business of Germany’s Merck KGaA, which brought the rights to market the EpiPen. In 2015 it bought Abbott’s generics business in developed markets, after which it was domiciled in the Netherlands, and in 2016 it agreed to buy Meda of Sweden. In January 2019, English Wikipedia says, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Mylan’s Wixela Inhub as the first generic version of Advair Diskus.

The record includes disputes. In 2000 Mylan settled a Federal Trade Commission case, filed at the end of 1998, over exclusive supply agreements for drug ingredients. In 2016 the rising list price of EpiPen drew wide criticism and congressional inquiries, and in October 2016 Mylan announced a settlement with the US Department of Justice over the classification of EpiPen under the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program, together with a corporate integrity agreement. In 2018 valsartan made by the company was voluntarily recalled after trace amounts of an impurity were detected.

Upjohn, Pfizer and a Latin name.

The other root is Upjohn. English Wikipedia says William E. Upjohn, a physician, founded the company in Hastings, Michigan, in 1886 to make “friable” pills designed to crush easily. Its medicines came to include Xanax, Halcion, Motrin and Rogaine; it merged with Pharmacia AB in 1995 to form Pharmacia & Upjohn, came under Pfizer in the early 2000s, and in 2015 Pfizer revived the Upjohn name for its division handling medicines whose patents had expired.

In July 2019 Pfizer and Mylan announced a plan to combine Upjohn with Mylan in an all-stock Reverse Morris Trust transaction, with Pfizer’s shareholders to own 57% of the new company and Mylan’s 43%, English Wikipedia says. The name followed in November 2019. WV MetroNews reported that it was drawn from Latin and stood for a path to the new company’s core goals: expanding access to medicines, leading by innovating to meet patient needs and being a trusted partner for the healthcare community; the logo, stock symbol and board were to be announced later. The company’s website still explains the name the same way, as a path (“via”) to three (“tris”) goals.

The visual identity came in July 2020. Goodwin’s Big Molecule Watch reported that month that Mylan and Upjohn had unveiled the branding and that, according to Mylan’s press release, its three colours, blue, yellow and purple, were chosen to signify three commitments: access, leadership and partnership. Dexigner reported in February 2021 that the London consultancy Conran Design Group, working alongside Havas Life Metro, advised on the brand strategy and logo and led the colour palettes, typeface, iconography, photography and graphic design. It described an identity grounded in warm, shifting gradients of purple, photographs of groups of people, and a logo in which a globe is accompanied by three differently coloured swirls standing for the three tenets.

The combination was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and closed on 16 November 2020. Viatris, headquartered in Canonsburg, began trading on the Nasdaq under the symbol VTRS, with Michael Goettler as chief executive and Robert J. Coury as executive chairman.

Generic medicine.

Generic-medicine makers sell products that are, by design, meant to match medicines already on the market. That leaves their visual identity with an unusual job: it has to signal reliability and scale rather than novelty, and it often has to work on thousands of packs at once.

The pictures these companies publish tend to repeat a small set of scenes. There are close-ups of blister packs and plain white tablets, shot clean and bright against pale backgrounds. There are pharmacists at a counter handing a box across to a customer, a moment that puts a person between the product and the patient. And there are wide views of large production sites, with long corridors, stainless steel and staff in white coats and hairnets, used to suggest capacity and control.

Packaging is where the system shows most clearly. Because one company may carry a very large range of molecules and strengths, its packs usually rely on a fixed layout with colour bands, stripes or blocks that separate one product or dose from another, while the company name stays in the same place on every box. Corporate material then widens the frame: maps, globes and lines linking continents, meant to picture supply reaching many countries.

The same language appears on the trade-show floor. At industry fairs such as CPHI, where ingredient suppliers, contract manufacturers and generics companies meet, stands lean on large logos, simple colour fields and photographs of laboratories and plants. For a designer, the category is a study in restraint: a clear name, a disciplined colour system and imagery that keeps attention on trust and access.

Reshaping since 2020.

The new company reshaped itself quickly. In December 2020 it announced a restructuring affecting up to a fifth of its global workforce, English Wikipedia says. In 2021 Fortune placed it fifth on its “Change the World” list for its work on low-cost antiretroviral medicines for HIV, including a children’s version in fruit-flavoured tablets. It agreed in February 2022 to contribute its biosimilars business to Biocon Biologics in exchange for payments and a stake, a deal completed in November 2022, and in January 2023 it closed the purchases of Oyster Point Pharma and Famy Life Sciences to form an eye-care division. Scott A. Smith succeeded Michael Goettler as chief executive on 1 April 2023. In October 2023 Viatris reached agreements to sell almost all of its over-the-counter business, its women’s healthcare business and its India-based active-ingredients business.

Regulators have also left marks on the record. In December 2024 Viatris disclosed that the FDA had issued a warning letter and an import alert covering its plant in Indore, India; the company said it had taken corrective and preventive actions. Its portfolio, as English Wikipedia describes it, spans about 1,400 approved molecules, from generics and complex generics to brands including Viagra, Xanax and Lipitor. The company gives its mission as “to empower people worldwide to live healthier at every stage of life.”

For a design guide, Viatris shows how a merged company can build its whole identity on the meaning of a coined name: three goals, three colours and three swirls around a globe. Compare Pfizer, which supplied the Upjohn half, and Sandoz, another generics maker shaped by a merger. For this guide we use a deep purple, ink, a soft lavender and a gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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