How Colgate Achieved Global Popularity and Success

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I’m sure that we are all familiar with Colgate the toothpaste brand, this brand has existed for generations and has become so popular to the extent that the unofficial word for toothpaste in some countries is “Colgate.” The brand has been in existence for about 217 years, so our grandparents and possibly their grandparents knew about Colgate. The company is not just a toothpaste brand, though that is what is mainly known for, they also make consumer products.

The Beginning of Colgate

Colgate was founded by William Colgate, an English immigrant to America and devout Baptist who established a starch, soap, and candle factory on Dutch Street in New York City under the name William Colgate & Company in 1806. Initially, the company was not a toothpaste brand, but it was a starch, soap, and candle business, considering the age of Colgate one would think that they invented toothpaste, but they didn’t.

The desire for a clean mouth dates back at least 5,000 years ago and the use of the modern toothbrush and floss started in the 1950s. In 1824, a dentist named Peabody (first name unknown) was the first person to add soap to dental paste, followed by John Harris in the 1850s, who added chalk as an ingredient. Colgate joined into this about 20 years later, with Colgate being the first mass-produced toothpaste and initially, it was packaged in a jar.

In 1892 Dr. Washington Sheffield, an American dentist, thought it was unsanitary for multiple people to dip their toothbrushes into one jar of toothpaste. So that year, he developed the first toothpaste in a collapsible tube. A big shout-out to him! The Colgate company introduced tubed toothpaste in 1896 four years after Dr. Sheffield’s innovation.

The Present of Colgate

The Colgate company is not just the Colgate company, but it is known today as Colgate-Palmolive an American multinational consumer products company, and it became the Colgate-Palmolive company in 1928. The firm was bought by Palmolive-Peet Company, whose founder, B.J. Johnson, had developed the formula for Palmolive soap in 1898. Two years before the acquisition of Colgate, the Peet Brothers Soap Company of Kansas City merged into Palmolive and then on 1 July 1928 the company became known as the Colgate Palmolive Peet Company.

Obviously out of these three companies, the most well-known is Colgate because of its toothpaste so we will just refer to it as “Colgate” for the rest of the article.

Today, the company sells more than just toothpaste as it is a consumer product and the company specializes in the production, distribution, and provision of household, health care, personal care, and veterinary products. It owns brands that you might be familiar with like Colgate, Protex, Sanex, Ajax, Palmolive, Toms, Fabuloso, Irish Spring, Elemex and many other brands.

The Numbers of Colgate

So, how big is Colgate in terms of numbers? Well, according to Statista in 2022 Samsung Electronics had a total revenue of 302.23 trillion Korean won, which is about 234.08 billion US dollars. That's more than the GDP of some countries, such as New Zealand, Vietnam, or Romania. Samsung also had a total of 270,320 employees worldwide, as of December 2022. Samsung also produced about 1.2 billion smartphones, 41 million TVs, 6.7 million refrigerators, and 4.4 million washing machines in 2022. That's enough to supply every person in the US with a smartphone, every household in China with a TV, every household in India with a refrigerator, and every household in Brazil with a washing machine.

Conclusion

Those three are the main reasons why Colgate is so popular, but they are not the only reasons why, there are many other reasons that I might touch on in future articles. The history of Colgate is quite an interesting one and how they have managed to stay in business for more than 200 years is quite an impressive streak. I hope that this article has been a helpful and educational one, be sure to stick around and check out our other articles and see if you find anything that you like and be on the lookout for future posts. Thanks for reading.