A chemical brokerage, a drain cleaner and then a blue liquid for glass.

Windex came out of Cincinnati, from a family chemical business that began as a brokerage rather than a brand owner. The company history of Drackett in the International Directory of Company Histories says that Philip W. Drackett, who had trained and worked as a pharmacist in Cleveland, left the drug trade and set up a bulk chemical brokerage in Cincinnati with his wife, Sallie Drackett, in 1910. When their sons Philip Jr. and Harry joined in 1915, the business was incorporated as P. W. Drackett & Sons Co. It sold lye, ammonia and Epsom salt under a “diamond D” trademark, and the same history notes that Procter & Gamble was a Cincinnati neighbour and sometime competitor.

The family’s move into branded household goods began with Drano, introduced in 1923. The company history credits Sallie Drackett with the Drano name and with the drawing of a gooseneck pipe that became the drain cleaner’s symbol. The firm took the name Drackett Chemical Co. in 1922, and in 1933, when it went public, it shortened that to The Drackett Company, a change the history reads as an acknowledgement of its turn from industrial chemicals to consumer goods.

Windex followed. The International Directory of Company Histories dates its introduction to 1935 and describes it as a blue, pre-mixed formulation of water, a trademarked ingredient the company called “ammonia-D”, and other chemicals added to hasten evaporation. English Wikipedia explains the name as a blend of “window” and the suffix “-ex”. In the late 1930s and 1940s Drackett also built a soybean-processing business in Cincinnati, but it was Windex and Drano that carried the family name into American kitchens and bathrooms.

A sprayer bottle, a pharmaceutical parent and a move to Wisconsin.

The bottle changed in the 1950s. According to the company history, Drackett introduced a plastic sprayer bottle for Windex during that decade, and in 1954 it bought two bottle and plastics makers, Calmar Co. and Maclin Co., bringing packaging in-house. Roger Drackett, the third generation of the family to lead the company, set up Drackett Co. of Canada in 1958, and by 1964 the history records distribution outlets for Drano and Windex in Germany, Australia and England. Through the 1960s the company advertised the two brands in newspapers, magazines and on television, and it tried an “all-purpose” Windex that was later dropped.

In 1965 the Drackett family sold the business to Bristol-Myers, a dating that both the company history and English Wikipedia give. Under its new parent Drackett added brands such as the Endust dusting aid and Renuzit air freshener, while Windex faced new glass and multi-surface cleaners in the 1970s, including Texize’s Glass Plus and Procter & Gamble’s Cinch. After Bristol-Myers merged with Squibb in 1989, the combined drug company put Drackett up for sale in 1992.

S. C. Johnson of Racine, Wisconsin, already the owner of Pledge, Glade and Raid, bought the business. S. C. Johnson’s own fact sheet on its acquisitions lists 1992: “The Drackett Company, which brought SC Johnson the Windex and Drano brands”; English Wikipedia gives 1993. The company history says that within six months most production had moved to S. C. Johnson’s Waxdale plant near Racine, and that the Federal Trade Commission required the sale of the Behold and Endust furniture-care brands, while O-Cedar was sold in 1993 and Renuzit was also sold. Windex stayed, and it has sat in the S. C. Johnson portfolio since, alongside later arrivals such as Scrubbing Bubbles from DowBrands and the Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day brand from the Caldrea Company in 2008.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make products for cleaning the home: sprays, powders, liquids, wipes and the tools that carry them. Household-cleaning brands sit in a crowded aisle, and a single name can cover dozens of formats, from a trigger bottle by the sink to a refill pack bought in bulk, so the identity has to hold together across very different objects.

On the shelf, much of that identity is carried by shape and colour before any word is read: the profile of a bottle or tub, the colour of the liquid seen through it, a cap or trigger in a set hue, and a logo placed in the same spot on every pack. Some brands lean on a character or mascot in their advertising; others rely on a coined name or a single strong colour.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, and how its packs, logos and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One word, one colour and a sprayer.

The Windex identity rests on very few elements, and the most recognisable of them is the liquid itself. The company history describes the original formulation as blue, and English Wikipedia notes that Windex is commonly blue even though the range has since been sold in other colours and scents, including lemon and orange varieties.

The second element is the name. “Windex” compresses the job — window — into a short trademark with a hard ending, and it has been carried on the bottle from the Drackett era through the Bristol-Myers years to S. C. Johnson. The third is the sprayer. The plastic trigger bottle that Drackett introduced in the 1950s replaced the bucket, and the company history ties the product’s appeal to that convenience.

The logo has been adjusted to carry company messages. English Wikipedia cites an S. C. Johnson press release from Racine dated 17 January 2008 announcing a new logo on the Windex bottle to highlight the company’s Greenlist process. The same article notes that in 2009 S. C. Johnson began publishing ingredient lists for its products, Windex among them, and that the product was reformulated in 2006. Glass Plus, the Dow-owned rival, passed to Reckitt & Colman in 1998 under the terms on which S. C. Johnson was allowed to buy DowBrands.

For a design guide, Windex shows how a cleaning brand can be carried by the colour of the product, a coined word and the shape of a sprayer, through three successive owners. Compare it with Scrubbing Bubbles, the bathroom cleaner that joined the same S. C. Johnson portfolio from Dow, and Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day, another S. C. Johnson cleaning brand. For this guide we use glass-cleaner blue, window sky and clear pane with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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