Pears
Established 1807Launched in 1807 by Andrew Pears, Pears transparent soap is the world’s first mass-market transparent soap. In fact, Pears is also considered the world’s first registered brand – and therefore the world’s oldest continuously existing brand. In the days, many of soaps and other beauty products contained arsenic or lead. Pears began to experiment and managed to create a gentle soap based on glycerine and other natural products. The novel transparent appearance of the soap was an instant success. To add to the appeal, Pears soap scents like an English garden. In spring.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Pears presented their product as a sign of cultivation, in which the soap stands for progress, and started using artwork in their advertising. The first famous marketing campaign used Ruggero Focardi’s statue ‘you dirty boy’, which was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle de Paris in 1878. The statues had so much success that Pear’s purchased the copyright and turned the statue into shop counter displays. Another campaign in which they used Millais’s painting ‘Bubbles’ continued over many decades.
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