A Danish zipper, a Romanian family and a Japanese bag.

The Ziploc bag rests on a zipper that came first and found its use later. The New York Times Magazine, in a 2014 history by Melanie Rehak, says the story begins with Steven Ausnit, who fled Communist Romania with his family in 1947. In 1951 he, his father Max and his uncle Edgar bought the rights to an original plastic zipper designed by a Danish inventor, Borge Madsen, who had no particular application in mind, and formed a company called Flexigrip to make it.

The Flexigrip zipper used a plastic slider to press two interlocking grooves together. When the slider proved costly to make, the Times says, Ausnit, a mechanical engineer, worked out the press-and-seal type of zipper now familiar from storage bags. English Wikipedia adds that the initial Flexigrip products were loose-leaf binder inserts and flat briefcases before the company’s marketing turned to packaging goods in zipper bags.

The idea was not an easy sell. Ausnit told an audience at Marquette University, the Times reported, that around the early 1960s his company persuaded Columbia Records to try a plastic album sleeve with a zipper on top — until, at the final meeting, an assistant who was handed the sealed sleeve tore the zipper right off. Looking back, he said that “people did not know how to open the bag.”

The turning point came from Japan. In 1962, according to the Times, Ausnit learned of a Japanese company, Seisan Nihon Sha, that had found a way to build the zipper into the bag itself instead of attaching it afterwards with a heat press, as Flexigrip did. The Ausnits licensed the rights and formed a second company, Minigrip. English Wikipedia dates Minigrip’s agreement with Dow Chemical, for exclusive manufacturing and selling rights in the United States grocery trade, to 1964.

Dow Chemical, DowBrands and S. C. Johnson.

Dow, the Times says, asked for an exclusive grocery-store licence and introduced the Ziploc bag to a test market in 1968. English Wikipedia describes the product as developed and test-marketed by the Dow Chemical Company that year. The bag was not an immediate success, according to the Times, but by 1973 it had found its place: that November, Vogue told its readers there was “no end of uses for those great Ziploc bags,” from keeping children’s games together on a long drive to storing cosmetics, first-aid supplies and food — adding that “even your wig will be happier in a Ziploc.”

The zipper business and the consumer brand then went separate ways. English Wikipedia says Minigrip was acquired by Signode in 1978; that Signode and Dow formed a joint company, Zip-Pak, in 1986 to develop zippers for food packaging; that Illinois Tool Works acquired Signode in 1987; and that in 1991 ITW bought out Dow’s interest in Zip-Pak. Ziploc itself stayed with Dow and later formed part of Dow’s DowBrands division.

In the late 1990s Dow left the household-goods business. English Wikipedia says the sale of DowBrands to S. C. Johnson & Son of Racine, Wisconsin, was agreed in 1997, and its article on S. C. Johnson, citing the Milwaukee Business Journal of 23 January 1998, dates the completed purchase to 1998. The division brought Ziploc, Saran wrap, Fantastik and Scrubbing Bubbles to S. C. Johnson. S. C. Johnson has owned Ziploc since then.

Under its new owner the range widened. English Wikipedia lists freezer bags, stand-up bags with expandable bottoms, large bags for non-food storage and plastic containers, and says S. C. Johnson extended the Ziploc name to disposable tableware and storage products in 2002. Adweek reported in April 2015 that the brand had teamed up with Tough Mudder on a “Tough Mother” obstacle course aimed at mothers.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are household paper, food-wrap, bag and dish-care names: the rolls, boxes, cartons and bottles that sit in kitchen drawers, under sinks and beside the bath. Brands like these are bought again and again, often quickly and from a crowded shelf, so their names, colours and pack shapes have to be recognised at a glance from one shopping trip to the next.

Behind that familiarity, the companies have often changed. A name on a roll or a bottle may have started at a small mill or a metals business, passed through several owners, been split off into a new company or been folded into a much larger household-goods group, while the pack in the shopper’s hand still looks much as it did. Advertising, too, has often done as much as the pack to fix a name in memory.

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

A name that describes the action.

The Ziploc name joins two everyday words, zip and lock, into one. In the Times’ history, Ausnit recalls that the early difficulty with the zipper bag lay in showing people how to open it, and the name spells out the action in a single compound word.

The mechanism behind the name is the press-and-seal zipper the Ausnit family developed in the 1950s, built into the bag in the way Seisan Nihon Sha showed them in the early 1960s. Dow took it to the grocery trade, under an exclusive licence and with a test market in 1968. Behind the brand, English Wikipedia notes, Flexigrip, Minigrip, Zip-Pak, Dow and DowBrands together obtained hundreds of patents for plastic zippers, zipper bags and the machinery to make them.

English Wikipedia says the bags compete with Glad and Hefty, whose OneZip slider bag was developed at Mobil in the early 1990s, as well as with store brands.

For a design guide, Ziploc shows how a descriptive coined name can turn an unfamiliar mechanism into an everyday habit, and how a brand can move from the chemical company that launched it to a household-goods owner. Compare it with Stasher, the silicone storage bag, and Scrubbing Bubbles, which also came to S. C. Johnson with DowBrands. For this guide we use seal blue, zipper red and clear white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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