A drugstore on Elm Street, and a salve named after a brother-in-law.

Vicks began behind a drugstore counter in North Carolina. The finding aid for the Richardson-Vicks, Inc., Records at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library says that in 1890 the pharmacist Lunsford Richardson sold his small drugstore in Selma and moved his family to Greensboro, where he and a partner, John Fariss, bought the Porter and Tate Drugstore on Elm Street and renamed it the Richardson and Fariss Drugstore. There he began selling home remedies he had developed. A 2022 Davidson College article by John Syme notes that Richardson was a Davidson graduate of the class of 1875.

The name came from family. According to company lore recorded in the UNC finding aid, Richardson thought his own name too long for a product and chose Vicks in honour of his brother-in-law Joshua Vick, a doctor in Selma. The finding aid says that in 1894 he introduced Vicks Magic Salve, a croup salve; the Davidson article also places the start of VapoRub’s product life in 1894, in the Greensboro drugstore. English Wikipedia’s Vicks article gives 1891 as the year the salve was compounded and 1905 as the year it was introduced under the name Vick’s Magic Croup Salve.

The business went through several shapes in quick succession. The UNC finding aid says that in 1898 Richardson sold his share in the drugstore and founded the Lunsford Richardson Wholesale Drug Company, where the salve was renamed Vicks Croup and Pneumonia Salve; that in 1905 he left that company over a dispute about reinvesting profits in advertising and started Vick Family Remedies Company, which made a list of remedies under the Vicks name; and that by about 1911 the other remedies had been dropped, the firm had become the Vick Chemical Company, and the product had taken the name Vicks VapoRub. Wikipedia dates the VapoRub name to 1912.

The rename is credited to the founder’s eldest son. Both the finding aid and the Davidson article say H. Smith Richardson returned to Greensboro in 1907 to run sales and advertising after working in New York and Massachusetts, and Davidson says it was he who rechristened the salve “VapoRub”. The finding aid says he was made a partner in 1911 and became president of the company in 1919.

From Vick Chemical to Procter & Gamble.

The company grew well beyond Greensboro in the 1920s. The UNC finding aid says a second plant was built in Philadelphia in 1923, that VapoRub was exported to England and Mexico the same year, and that an export department opened in New York in 1924. In 1925 the Richardsons sold a quarter of their stock to the public, and in 1929 Smith Richardson handed the presidency to his brother Lunsford Richardson Jr.

The 1930s brought a short-lived merger. The finding aid says Vick Chemical joined Sterling Products, Bristol-Myers, Life Savers and United Drug in 1930 to form Drug Inc., which “demerged” in 1933, leaving Vick on its own again. It adds that Va-tro-nol Nosedrops and Vicks Cough Drops were introduced in 1931. In 1938, under William Preyer, a Richardson brother-in-law, Vick merged with the William J. Merrell Company, and further acquisitions followed, among them the laboratory chemical firm J.T. Baker and the perfume house Prince Matchabelli in 1941. In 1948, the finding aid says, the presidency passed to Edward Mabry, from outside the family.

The parent name then changed twice. The finding aid says the company became Richardson-Merrell, Inc. in 1960, and that in 1980 it sold Merrell to Dow Chemical and renamed itself Richardson-Vicks, Inc.; English Wikipedia dates that split to 1982. Richardson-Vicks sold VapoRub, cough syrups and cough drops alongside Pantene and Vidal Sassoon hair care and Clearasil and Oil of Olay skin care, the finding aid says. Wikipedia lists NyQuil among the Vicks products, with a 1966 introduction.

The family sale came in 1985. According to the UNC finding aid, Unilever attempted a hostile takeover of Richardson-Vicks in the autumn of 1985, and the Richardson family responded by selling the business to Procter & Gamble. Procter & Gamble has owned Vicks since 1985; Davidson’s article also describes Vicks as a P&G product. The company archive went to UNC: the finding aid says the papers were received from H. Smith Richardson Jr. after the 1985 merger.

Not every Vicks product stayed with P&G. English Wikipedia, citing The Wall Street Journal, says P&G sold the Vicks VapoSteam US liquid-inhalant business to Helen of Troy in March 2015, and it names Kaz, part of Helen of Troy, as owner of VapoSteam and VapoPads. Wikipedia also notes that in German-speaking countries other than Switzerland the brand is sold as Wick, and in Latin America as Vick.

Design and documentation.

The medicine cabinet is a rule-bound place for a packaging designer to work. A pharmacy-aisle carton has to carry a brand name, a product name and a product category on its front face, and it has to do so beside text whose wording, order and minimum type size are set by a regulator rather than by the designer. In the United States that text is the Drug Facts panel, a fixed sequence of headings in a prescribed layout, and every carton, bottle label and blister card in the category has to make room for it.

That leaves the designer a narrower field than in many consumer categories: colour blocking, a wordmark, a band or stripe that signals a line extension, and the shape of the pack itself. Blister packs add a second printed surface, the foil backing. Bottles and caps carry the same system at a smaller scale.

Each guide that follows looks at who started a brand, who has owned it since, and how its cartons, labels and advertising have changed, and it describes products only by name and category as the company lists them.

Road signs, store displays, free samples and a jar people knew by colour.

Vicks was built on salesmanship before it was built on a product range. The UNC finding aid describes Smith Richardson, after 1907, travelling North Carolina and then the Southeast from drugstore to drugstore and country store to country store, by horse and buggy and later by Model T Ford. It says the company used road signs, store displays, street car advertising, “mark out” slogans and free samples, and that as it expanded north and west it sent samples through the mail using Rural Free Delivery. The Davidson article adds that a standard store demonstration was to light a match under a spoonful of VapoRub to release its fumes, and that the company used “Boxholder” direct-mail coupons.

The company’s advertising archive survives in unusual depth. The finding aid says the records at UNC include campaign books from the Advertising and Sales Department, product samples, photographs and audio-visual material, and that the advertising files are nearly complete from 1920 to 1960, while other periods are thinly covered.

The jar became the shorthand. The UNC finding aid, closing its history of the family company, calls VapoRub “the little blue jar”, the phrase it uses for the product on which the Richardsons built their business. Later product names kept the Vicks name in front and used short coined descriptors after it: VapoRub, VapoInhaler (1941, according to Wikipedia, which says it became known as the Vick Stick), Sinex (1959) and NyQuil (1966), with its sister DayQuil and the Formula 44 line also listed by Wikipedia. Wikipedia gives the current tagline as “Breathe Life In”.

The brand name itself has had to travel. Selling as Wick in Germany and Austria and as Vick in Latin America means the same jar carries different spellings in different markets, while the founding story, a Greensboro druggist naming a salve after his brother-in-law, stays the same.

For a design guide, Vicks shows how a druggist’s salve named after a relative became a national name through road signs, store demonstrations and mailed samples, with a blue jar carrying the identity. Compare it with NyQuil, the 1966 Vicks product, and Pepto-Bismol, another over-the-counter brand in the Procter & Gamble portfolio. For this guide we use jar blue and deep cobalt with menthol green on cream and a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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