The GOJO Well-Being Story

In a classic American entrepreneurial story, Goldie and Jerry Lippman built a thriving business that started with an idea to solve a single problem and grew to hundreds of products and programs for improving well-being through hygiene and healthy skin.

How It All Started
Like many women of her day who worked in factories, Goldie worked in a rubber factory during World War II.  For Goldie and her co-workers, it was extremely difficult to remove the graphite, tar and carbon black that got on their hands.  They used chemicals, like benzene, to remove soils, even though they caused irritation and damaged the skin.

Jerry learned about a heavy-duty hand cleaner that gently and effectively cleaned dirty hands and started selling it to Goldie’s co-workers in 1946.  Goldie and Jerry quickly heard from their first customers that the product did not rinse off easily, resulting in a second step of washing with soap and water.  In search of a simpler solution, Jerry approached Professor Clarence Cook from Kent State University’s chemistry department.  Together, they invented a heavy-duty hand cleaner that was effective against grease, grime and other tough soils and rinsed off easily.  Goldie and Jerry named their original formulation GOJO® Hand Cleaner and continued to sell it to rubber workers.

After the war, Goldie and Jerry turned their full attention to finding more people that needed this heavy-duty hand cleaner.  Jerry made the product at night and sold it from the back of his car to automotive service facilities during the day, while Goldie handled purchasing and accounting for their growing business.

Jerry had a natural instinct to listen to his customers and soon learned that automotive garage owners thought that GOJO Hand Cleaner was too expensive to supply to workers.  By spending time with his customers, observing how the product was being used, he discovered that workers were using much more hand cleaner than they needed.

This insight led Jerry to develop the first portion-control hand cleaner dispenser, which solved the cost problem.  GOJO was granted a patent for the dispenser in 1952.  With this innovation, the GOJO brand soon came to dominate the heavy-duty hand cleaner market.

Decades of Innovation
Through the years, GOJO expertise has grown from getting dirty hands clean in heavy-duty environments to well-being through hygiene and healthy skin in a wide variety of away-from-home markets.  Along the way, GOJO has continued to identify and innovate to solve important problems for workers and patrons in hospitals, nursing homes, schools, restaurants, washrooms, and other workplaces and public spaces, in addition to manufacturing plants and automotive service stations.  This includes the development of PURELL® Instant Hand Sanitizer – one of the most important inventions in infection control in the 21st century – preventing the spread of dangerous diseases throughout the world.

The current GOJO product line includes a full range of hygiene and skin care products for away-from-home applications, including:

• PURELL, the #1 instant hand sanitizer in America
• PROVON®, a comprehensive line of healthcare products
• GOJO, a complete line of soaps and hand cleaners for washrooms, showers and heavier duty applications.

Dispensing innovations include:

• FMX™ Foam Soap System
• TFX™ Touch Free Dispensing System
• CX™ and CXi™ Counter Mount Systems

In each market, the approach is the same today as when Goldie and Jerry First solved problems for the rubber workers:

• Listen to people.
• Understand their needs.
• Formulate products and delivery systems to meet those needs.
• Complement the products and dispensing systems with programs that encourage good hygiene.