Colgate Facts You Probably Didn’t Know

Colgate is a well-known brand, yet it’s not a corporation you hear much about. It was a part of New York before Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, and Times Square, having been founded almost two centuries ago in Manhattan. Amid the Great Depression, the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1930. That’s not all; here are a few more interesting facts about Colgate that you probably didn’t know.

1. Before producing toothpaste, Colgate sold perfumes for almost a decade.

2. They first introduced a toothpaste in jars in 1873; the tube was released twenty-three years later in 1908, with the slogan “We couldn’t improve the product, so we improved the tube.”

3. Though the company was renamed Colgate-Palmolive in 1953, it was originally renamed Colgate-Palmolive-Peet in 1928. (soap manufacturers Palmolive and Peet had merged just two years before).

4. Nirvana’s grunge anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was inspired in part by Mennen’s Teen Spirit deodorant stick from the early 1990s (another brand subsequently acquired by Colgate-Palmolive).

5. Another of its subsidiaries, Kolynos, was mentioned in two well-known works: J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Kolynos is a toothpaste brand that was popular in the 1930s and is still manufactured in Latin America and a few other countries.

6. In 2011, PETA gave Colgate the go-ahead to stop using animals in their research.

7. Colgate had a difficult time marketing its brand in Spanish-speaking nations because “Colgate” literally means “go hang yourself” in Spanish. Despite the morbid moniker, the “Colgate” brand continues to be extremely successful in Spain and South America. The unintentional double meaning may have aided its success.

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