A janitorial supplier, a family and a linen company.

Zep began in Atlanta in 1937. The company’s own history names three founders — Mandle Zaban, William Eplan and Saul Powell — and English Wikipedia gives the same three names, citing an Arcadia Publishing history of Atlanta’s Jewish community published in 2021. The International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 2003), in its entry on National Service Industries, dates the formation of Zep Manufacturing Company to 1937 and describes it as a janitorial supplies business started in Atlanta by Mandle Zaban.

The company says it set out to offer a broad selection of industrial and janitorial cleaning products with formulations of its own, backed by service and technical support. Wikipedia, citing the company’s archived history page, says Zep marketed its formulations as distinctive and promoted hands-on customer service. The Directory adds that Mandle Zaban’s son, Erwin Zaban, went to work in the business full-time in 1937, and that by the early 1960s, with Erwin Zaban as president, the company had expanded into selling cleaning and sanitation products.

In 1962 Zep Manufacturing was bought by National Linen Service, a linen-supply company, a purchase recorded by the Directory, by Wikipedia and by Zep itself. The Directory says the deal was paid for in National Linen stock, that Erwin Zaban kept control of the business his father had started, and that two years later, in 1964, National Linen changed its name to National Service Industries, or NSI, as it moved into envelopes and other lines. In 1966 Erwin Zaban became president of NSI.

Zep became the core of NSI’s chemical division. In 1968 it acquired Selig Chemical Industries; the company says Selig had been known as the “Solutions People” for the cleaning products and programmes it supplied to industrial and institutional customers. Wikipedia, citing Zep’s UK history page and a 2018 interview in the Atlanta Business Chronicle, says Harry Maziar, whom Erwin Zaban had hired as a sales agent, succeeded him as Zep’s chief executive in 1971. The company describes the years from 1969 to 1996 as a period of domestic and international expansion, through its own growth and through acquisitions.

NSI, Acuity Brands, a listing and two private-equity owners.

The chemical division grew abroad and into retail in the 1990s. Wikipedia records that in 1992 NSI added the European specialty-chemicals company Graham Group and Kleen Canada to the division. In 1997 it bought Enforcer Products, a maker of home and garden products, and Pure Corporation; the company says the Enforcer purchase widened its presence in retail and led to the Zep Commercial product line. The Directory says that in July 2000 NSI formed the NSI Chemicals Group from three companies: Zep Manufacturing, Selig Chemical Industries and Enforcer Products.

Then came two spin-offs. In 2001 NSI separated its lighting and chemical businesses into a new public company; Wikipedia says it was incorporated as L&C Spinco in June 2001 and renamed Acuity Brands that November. Zep says it emerged from Acuity Brands in 2007 as an independent, publicly traded company under the name Zep Inc., and Wikipedia’s article on Acuity Brands, citing a Reuters report of 1 November 2007, records the completed spin-off of Zep Inc., including the Zep, Enforcer and Selig brands.

As a listed company Zep kept buying. It names Amrep, a janitorial and sanitation supplier, and Waterbury Companies, a supplier to the food-service trade, as its two acquisitions of 2010, and Wikipedia, citing Auto Laundry News of 7 December 2012, records the purchase of the vehicle-care division of Ecolab in 2012.

In 2015 Zep went private. A press release from New Mountain Capital, the New York private-equity firm, dated 26 June 2015, says the merger agreement had been announced on 8 April 2015, that Zep’s stockholders approved it on 25 June 2015, and that Zep shares, listed under the ticker ZEP, stopped trading on the New York Stock Exchange the next day. Under New Mountain, the company says, it agreed in 2017 to buy AFCO, a supplier of chemicals to food and beverage processors, a deal Wikipedia dates to July 2017 citing FoodNavigator. Wikipedia, citing the Atlanta Business Chronicle, says Dan Smytka became chief executive in September 2019 and Amy Hahn in 2022.

On 1 July 2025 Truelink Capital, a private-equity firm based in Los Angeles, announced that it had closed its acquisition of Zep Inc. from affiliates of New Mountain Capital, with financial terms undisclosed, according to Truelink’s release on PR Newswire. Truelink Capital has owned Zep since 2025. The company remains headquartered in Atlanta. Wikipedia, citing a 2020 Atlanta Business Chronicle report, lists manufacturing in Georgia, Texas, South Dakota, California, Pennsylvania and Louisiana, along with facilities in Canada and Europe, and selling organisations in the United Kingdom, Italy and the Benelux countries.

Design and documentation.

Household cleaners are usually met on a shelf rather than in an advertisement, so much of their identity is carried by the container itself. A cleaner can arrive as a squeeze bottle, a jug with a handle, a round canister of powder with a perforated or sliding lid, an aerosol can, or a bottle topped with a trigger sprayer, and each of those forms leaves a different amount of room for a name, a mark and a line of instructions.

On a bottle or a jug the label usually wraps the body, with the brand name set large and the product description below it. On a powder canister the name tends to run around a cylinder, so it is read in part as the can turns. A trigger sprayer adds a coloured head and a nozzle above the label, which often becomes part of how a product is recognised from across an aisle.

Each guide in this group looks at where a name began, who has owned it over time and how its labels, canisters and advertising are described in the sources, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One short name across a long list of owners.

The Zep identity is above all a name that stayed put. The business has passed through a linen-supply company, a diversified holding company, a lighting and chemicals group, the stock market and two private-equity owners, and the three letters have carried through each change: from Zep Manufacturing Company in 1937 to Zep Inc. from 2007, and to the ticker ZEP that New Mountain Capital’s 2015 release cites. Inside NSI and Acuity Brands the chemical division was known by other names — the NSI Chemicals Group and, according to Wikipedia, Acuity Specialty Products — but the product name on the label stayed Zep.

The name also stretches across very different customers. Wikipedia describes four product categories — retail, industrial and institutional, vehicle care, and food and beverage — and the company’s online catalogue in 2026 is organised by tasks such as degreasers, carpet care, hard-floor care and vehicle wash. Zep marks its retail lines with extensions of the same word: the company dates Zep Commercial to the years after the 1997 Enforcer purchase, Wikipedia lists Zep Professional among its brands, and in 2022, the company says, it introduced Home Pro, a range of household products for grocery and mass retailers, including dollar and club stores.

Other names in the group keep identities of their own. Wikipedia’s list of Zep brands includes Enforcer, TimeMist, Misty and Country Vet alongside the Zep and Zep Professional lines, and the AFCO name continues for the food and beverage business. The company also operates separate national sites for the United Kingdom, Italy and the Benelux countries under the Zep name, linked from the footer of its American site.

For a design guide, Zep shows how a short, hard-edged name can hold together a portfolio that runs from janitorial drums to supermarket spray bottles while the company behind it changes hands. Compare it with Pine-Sol and Mr. Clean, two household cleaner brands. For this guide we use signal red, steel grey and label white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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