From a home laboratory in Manhattan to a family firm of four generations.

Zinsser began with shellac. According to the International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 2004), William Zinsser had been a foreman in a shellac factory in Mainz, Germany, before he emigrated to the United States in 1848. Working from a home laboratory, he developed a shellac product and in 1849 established William Zinsser & Company in what the Directory calls “far uptown rural Manhattan”. The business stayed at its address on West 59th Street for 115 years. The company itself gives 1849 as its founding year, and its British arm still headlines its history “Excellence Since 1849”.

Shellac is a resin secreted by the lac insect, gathered from trees in India and Thailand and refined into flakes, and for decades it was the firm’s main product. The Directory says Zinsser’s first customers were other German-speaking immigrants. By 1860 the business had outgrown the home laboratory; a full production facility opened next door, run by Zinsser’s brother August, who arrived that year, and a Manhattan shop sold a range of coatings. A second storey was added to the plant in 1895, along with a neighbouring building for offices and retail.

The early twentieth century was harder. The Directory says the business struggled under William Zinsser II, and that in 1910 the founder’s grandsons, William Zinsser III and Rudolph Zinsser, took over. Rudolph brought a master’s degree in chemistry from Princeton. The brothers stopped supplying wholesalers and turned instead to the retail market, selling the company’s Bulls Eye shellac through direct mail and advertising. In 1921 they opened a bleaching plant in Chicago, close to the furniture makers of Michigan, and in 1932 set up an import department for shellac resins used in everything from floor wax to phonograph records.

The Second World War cut off supplies. The Directory says the company had to sell its resin stock to the government and, in 1942, developed Zinlac, a synthetic shellac made from a corn by-product, which it dropped in 1944 once natural shellac was available again.

B-I-N, a move to New Jersey and a place inside RPM.

The product that turned Zinsser from a shellac house into a primer brand arrived in 1946. The Directory records it as 3-Purpose Bulls-I-Namel, a white-pigmented shellac primer meant to prime, seal and cover stains in one coat, later shortened to B-I-N. A ready-to-use Bulls Eye Shellac, no longer needing to be thinned with alcohol, followed in 1955, and an aerosol version in 1958. In 1947 Edward H. Walworth Jr., son-in-law of William Zinsser III, and Gardner R. Cunningham joined the company; William III handed them day-to-day running in the late 1950s and stayed on as chairman until 1979.

The Manhattan works eventually ran out of room. The Directory says Roosevelt Hospital wanted the site, and in 1974 Zinsser moved its headquarters, laboratory, warehouse and distribution to a new building in Somerset, New Jersey. New categories followed: DIF wallpaper stripper in 1975, Bulls Eye 1-2-3, a water-based primer-sealer, in 1982, the Shieldz wallcovering primer in 1984 and the spiked PaperTiger scoring tool in 1985. In 1982 Zinsser also bought Bradshaw-Praeger, a Chicago shellac maker.

Family ownership ended with a sale to RPM, Inc. of Medina, Ohio. The Directory gives the year as 1987 in its narrative and as 1986 in its list of key dates; its separate history of RPM dates the purchase to 1987. Under RPM, Zinsser bought the Mantrose-Haeuser company of Westport, Connecticut, in 1993, opened a London office in 1999, the year of its 150th anniversary, and added Zehrung in 1999, Modern Masters in 2001 and Parks Corporation in 2002; by 2002 RPM had also merged Wolman Wood Care into the Zinsser business.

Today Zinsser sits within Rust-Oleum, itself an RPM company. The zinsser.com address redirects to Rust-Oleum’s website, which lists Zinsser among its consumer brands with ranges of primers, paint, wallpaper adhesives and removers, waterproofing paint and interior wood finishes. In Britain, Zinsser UK says its range is manufactured and marketed by Tor Coatings from a facility in County Durham, England.

Design and documentation.

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 family name, a bull’s-eye and three letters with hyphens.

Zinsser’s identity rests on a surname and a handful of product names that have outlived several owners. The founder’s family name has stayed on the cans for more than a century and a half, through several generations of Zinssers, a move from Manhattan to New Jersey and a sale to RPM, and it now sits beside the Rust-Oleum name on the parent company’s website. Beneath it, the product names do much of the recognisable work. Bulls Eye, the name the founder’s grandsons pushed through direct mail and advertising after 1910, survives on both the shellac and the Bulls Eye 1-2-3 primer. B-I-N is a contraction of the 1946 trade name 3-Purpose Bulls-I-Namel, which explains its unusual hyphenated capitals. Cover Stain completes the trio of primer names; Rust-Oleum’s Zinsser page today carries videos for B-I-N, Bulls Eye 1-2-3 and Cover Stain alike.

The brand has also carried its message on broadcast media. The Directory records that in 1999, the anniversary year, Zinsser began a television campaign under the line “Zinsser First”, aimed at homeowners planning improvement projects. In Britain, the Zinsser UK website illustrates its company history with a photograph it captions as the Zinsser depot in 1897, and repeats the date 1849 in its headline.

The family connection has outlasted the business. In February 1991, the Directory notes, William Zinsser IV, who had not joined the business, wrote in The New York Times about his father, William Zinsser III, and the shellac works, recalling that “quality was my father’s passion”.

For a design guide, Zinsser shows how a founder’s surname and a few durable product names can carry a brand through generations of family ownership and decades inside a larger group. Compare it with Rust-Oleum, the RPM company that now sells it, and Varathane, another Rust-Oleum wood-finish brand. For this guide we use lacquer red, shellac amber and primer white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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