Old Spice Started as a Women's Scent With a Colonial Ship on the Bottle

In 1937 a Manhattan toiletries company called Shulton launched a fragrance line called Early American Old Spice. It was sold to women. The packaging borrowed from American colonial crafts, and the first bottles were white pottery. Wikipedia's infobox gives the introduction date as June 19, 1937.

The men's version followed within months, and by the end of the decade it was outselling everything else the company made. The ship on the bottle became one of the most familiar marks in American grooming. Few of the men who wore it knew the brand had started on the other side of the store.

A soap man in Manhattan

The founder was William Lightfoot Schultz. According to the history at Cosmetics and Skin, he was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1876, moved to New York in 1910 and founded the Lightfoot Schultz Company there to make soap and toiletries. Debt forced him to sell a controlling stake to the American Safety Razor Company in 1930. He left in 1933 and started again under a new name, Shulton, with $10,000 of capital and offices in the Bowery Savings Bank building.

The dates around Shulton's founding do not agree. Cosmetics and Skin gives 1933 in its main text and 1934 in its timeline. Wikipedia says 1937, the year of the first Old Spice. What is clear is that Old Spice was the line that made the company. Cosmetics and Skin says Shulton opened assembly facilities in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1939 and moved its offices to Rockefeller Center the same year. By then Old Spice was carried by more than 4,000 retailers and had become Shulton's largest line.

Why colonial

The idea of a colonial look came from retail. Cosmetics and Skin credits Harry Schwimer, an assistant buyer at the Bullock's department store in Los Angeles. Wikipedia adds that Schultz had noticed a surge of interest in colonial furniture after the opening of Colonial Williamsburg, and that the packaging drew on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's early American collection. The artist Enid Edson based the women's packaging on a hand-embroidered carpet at the Met and the men's on colonial apothecary bottles.

For the scent itself, Wikipedia says Schultz drew on memories of his mother's potpourri and his grandmother's spice jug, which fits the name.

The ships

The men's line arrived either just before Christmas 1937 or in 1938. Wikipedia gives both dates in different sections, and Cosmetics and Skin lists men's toiletries under 1938. Its first shaving mug, made by the Hull Pottery Company, carried a drawing of the Grand Turk.

The Grand Turk was a real ship, a 300-ton privateer commissioned by Elias Hasket Derby of Salem during the American Revolutionary War, according to Wikipedia. Other ships joined it. The Friendship appeared on packaging from 1940. The National Park Service records it as a 342-ton ship built at a Salem yard in 1796 and 1797 and launched in May 1797. The Recovery, the first American vessel to visit Mokha in Yemen and an early part of the American coffee trade, appeared on cologne bottles in the 1940s and on shaving mugs into the early 1990s.

The pottery did not last. Wikipedia says glass, developed by the Wheaton Glass Company, replaced it in the mid-1940s. In 1992 the bottle turned from light gray to white, and in 2008 it became plastic, with a red stopper in place of the gray.

The numbers came fast. Cosmetics and Skin reports that in 1938 Old Spice sold $770,000 of Shulton's $982,000 total, which by our arithmetic was about 78 percent of the company's sales in the first full year of the men's line.

Old Spice, decade by decade

The whistle and the horse

Some version of the whistle has been in Old Spice advertising since 1953, according to Digital Music News, which describes it as a six-note tune. Wikipedia says the melody was inspired by the folk tune Scotland the Brave.

By then the brand belonged to someone else. Cosmetics and Skin says Shulton's board approved a merger with American Cyanamid in December 1970, completed in February 1971. In June 1990 Procter and Gamble bought the Old Spice and Santa Fe lines from American Cyanamid's Shulton group for $300 million, UPI reported at the time. Cosmetics and Skin notes that Shulton's plant in Clifton, New Jersey, built after the war, closed in 1991.

Over the decades Old Spice became a gift-set staple, the bottle many men first met on a father's shelf. In 2010 Wieden and Kennedy changed that with The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, starring the actor Isaiah Mustafa. The ad won the 2010 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Commercial, according to the Television Academy. A follow-up response campaign had Mustafa answer fans in 186 personal videos shot over about two and a half days, according to a D&AD case study. D&AD gave the work a Yellow Pencil for writing. The brand kept the absurd tone. Terry Crews fronted the Muscle Music campaign in 2012, and in 2014 Old Spice moved into men's haircare, according to Wikipedia.

Is the old one still the old one?

Not exactly. Wikipedia reports that in 2016 the original aftershave scent was changed to comply with new regulations, according to a company statement. The ship and the name carried on, but the bottle on the shelf today is not quite the one from your grandfather's bathroom.

If you want to understand where the genre came from, our history of eau de cologne goes back further, and our guide to building a fragrance wardrobe explains where a classic barbershop scent fits next to something more expensive. The safety razor and wet shaving guide covers the routine Old Spice aftershave was made to finish. For more, see fragrance and the Quiet Menace grooming section.

The ship is still on the label. Most men who see it have never heard of Salem privateers, and the brand has never needed them to.