The GOJO Well-Being Story

In a classic American entrepreneurial story, Jerome and Goldie 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.

Like many women of her day, Goldie Lippman 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 they got on their hands while working. This was particularly troublesome for the large number of women in the plant who didn’t want to go home with dirty hands. They used chemicals like benzene to remove the dirt, even though it was dangerous and irritated their skin.

Jerry Lippman learned about the problem and, in search of a solution, 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 encountered by rubber workers. Goldie sold the original GOJO® Hand Cleaner to her co-workers in the rubber factory.

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

Jerry, known for his genuine interest in listening to customers, soon learned that garage owners thought that his GOJO hand cleaner was too expensive to buy for workers. He watched them wash and asked questions to find out why, and soon discovered that workers were using much more product than they needed for effective hand cleaning.

This led Jerry to develop the first portion-control hand cleaner dispenser, which solved the cost problem and significantly expanded the hand cleaner market. GOJO was granted a patent for the dispenser in 1952. The GOJO brand soon came to dominate the heavy duty hand cleaner market and became the company's flagship product.

Today, GOJO solves problems for people in a variety of away-from-home locations, including hospitals, schools, restaurants, nursing homes, public washrooms, and other workplaces, in addition to its original focus on manufacturing plants and automotive service stations. In each market, its approach is the same today as when Jerry and Goldie first solved problems for the rubber workers: listen to people; understand their needs; formulate products and delivery systems to meet those needs; and combine these with programs to deliver a total solution to encourage good hygiene behavior.

GOJO continues its focus on well-being through hygiene and healthy skin, grounded in strong principles of learning, problem solving, and inventiveness. Today, the GOJO product line includes a full range of hygiene and skin care products for commercial applications, including PURELL®, the #1 instant hand sanitizer in America, PROVON®, our comprehensive line of healthcare products, and GOJO, our complete line of soaps and hand cleaners for washrooms, showers, and heavier duty applications.