Ivory (soap)
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| Product type | Soap |
|---|---|
| Owner | Procter & Gamble |
| Country | United States |
| Introduced | 1879 |
| Markets | Worldwide |
"Ivory" is a personal care brand created by the Procter & Gamble Company (P&G), including varieties of a white and mildly scented bar soap, that became famous for its claim of purity and for floating in water. Over the years, the brand has been extended to other varieties and products.
In 1840 the J.B. Williams Company in Glastonbury, Connecticut, manufactured soap under the name Ivorine. Williams decided to focus on its shaving soap and sold Ivorine to Procter & Gamble, who later renamed it Ivory.
As Ivory is one of P&G's older products (first sold in 1879), P&G is sometimes called "Ivory Towers" and its factory and research center in St. Bernard, Ohio, is named "Ivorydale".
Ivory's first slogan, "It Floats!", was introduced in 1891. The product's other well-known slogan, " 99 44⁄100% Pure" (in use by 1895), was based on the results of an analysis by an independent laboratory the other founder's son, Harley Procter, hired to demonstrate that Ivory was purer than the castile soap then available.
Ivory bar soap is whipped with air in its production and floats in water. According to an apocryphal story, later discounted by the company, a worker accidentally left the mixing machine on too long and the company chose to sell the "ruined" batch, because the added air did not change the basic ingredients of the soap. When appreciative letters about the new, floating soap inundated the company, P&G ordered the extended mix time as a standard procedure. However, company records indicate that the design of Ivory did not come about by accident. In 2004, over 100 years later, the P&G company archivist Ed Rider found documentation that revealed that chemist James N. Gamble, son of the founder, had discovered how to make the soap float and noted the result in his writings.
In October 1992, Procter & Gamble market-tested a new Ivory formula, a "skin care bar" that would address customer complaints about dryness but would not float like the original. In October 2001, P&G tested the sinking bar soap as part of an advertising campaign in the United States, in a six-month plan to release 1,051 soap bars that sink, among other bars that float, to see if people would notice the sinking bars, even if given a cash reward of up to $250,000. The D. L. Blair company, part of Draft Worldwide, a unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies, was assigned to administer the contest.
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