Fuller Brush
| Privately held subsidiary (since 2007) | |
| Founded | 1906 |
| Founder | Alfred Fuller |
| Products | Branded and private label products for personal care as well as commercial and household cleaning |
| Parent | Sara Lee (1968–1989); Privately held (1989–1994); CPAC Inc. (1994–2012); Victory Park Capital and David Sabin (2012–) |
| Website | www |
The Fuller Brush Company sells branded and private label products for personal care as well as commercial and household cleaning. It was founded in 1906 by Alfred Fuller. Consolidated Foods, now Sara Lee Corporation, acquired Fuller Brush in 1968. In 1991 the company was placed in private ownership but, in 1994, it became a subsidiary of CPAC Inc., which from 2007 – 2012 was owned by the private equity group Buckingham Capital Partners. Since December 2012, the Fuller Brush Company has been owned and operated by David Sabin and Victory Park Capital.
Alfred C. Fuller began what was to become Fuller Brush Company in a basement shop in Somerville, Massachusetts. In 1906 he moved to Hartford, Connecticut and founded the company.
The company began with door-to-door sales of brushes of various sorts, including hairbrushes with a lifetime guarantee for which they are famous.
In 1931, the establishment of the first of what became known as the Green River Ordinance led Fuller Brush to challenge the ordinance's limits on door-to-door sales; the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where on March 1, 1937 it dismissed the appeal "for want of a substantial federal question."
In the mid 1930s, Fuller relocated from rented space on Union Place opposite Hartford's railroad station, to a purpose-built sprawling factory and office complex on North Main St at the Windsor town line.
World War II saw the company "cut its normal civilian output drastically to make brushes for the cleaning of guns"; Fuller's son Howard became president in 1943. After the war, Fuller added Daggett & Ramsdell, Inc.'s Débutante Cosmetics to its line of products it sold house-to-house, sold by a sales force of women, a strategy resurrected after a wartime attempt to have "Fullerettes" sell their core products. Fuller had evidence that women could succeed at sales since Stanley Beveridge, who had left his position as Fuller's sales vice president in 1929, had by 1949 employed women as "dealers" to grow sales at his own company, Stanley Home Products, to $35 million, exceeding Fuller's sales for the first time.
Fuller's oldest son Howard succeeded his father as president, serving until he and his wife Dora died in the high-speed crash of his Mercedes 300SL gullwing sports car in New Mexico in May 1959.
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Wikipedia