12. September 2023

This 1930s postcard from our collection reminds us of the lost profession of billboard painter, signwriter or “wall dogs” as its practitioners were often colloquially called. Commercial advertising has a long history in China and in the West but as an industry only emerged several centuries after the invention of Woodblock printing in China in the 9th century, and of the printing press by Gutenberg in around 1436. These technologies eventually allowed for the mass production of flyers,...

30. May 2022

The Eagle Brand can be traced to 1856, when Gail Borden introduced condensed milk as the flagship product of his newly formed dairy company. In Asia the brand was licensed by the Nestlé and Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company and, in 1874, became the first registered trademark in the then-British colony of Hong Kong. On the mainland the "Fēiyīng" (飞鹰) brand was protected by a “proclamation issued by the Taotai in the ninth moon of the thirtieths year of Kuang Hsü”, meaning the...

02. May 2022

The American Safety Razor Company was a personal care brand founded in 1906 by a merger of the Gem Cutlery Company & Ever-Ready and was a principal competitor to Gillette for over a century. The Ever-Ready brand had been created in 1905 and razors were continued to be sold under that name until the early 1960s.

04. April 2022

"Sometime ago a foreign company, started a vast million-dollar campaign to boost its brand into the Chinese market. For months there appeared not only in all papers but also in Chinese general storekeepers, restaurants, theatres, and public amusement grounds large advertisements depicting a ponderous Chinese character (烤) with a circle encircling it. There was no effort to explain that lone character (烤), which stood for "toasted", and led one to wonder whether it was meant for toasted pork...

13. September 2021

Sketch of a proposed "ricsha advertising plan for Shanghai", submitted to the Municipal Council by the National Advertising Agency in November 1927. After some back and forth with the Traffic Committee and the Secretary to Commissioner of Police, the Council did in fact grant permission to utilize the public ricsha and its puller for advertising purposes in February 1928! Whether it was ever implemented though we do not know - no photographic record has been found so far. Source: S.M.C....

03. September 2021

15. November 2019

Celebrity endorsements and Key Opinion Leaders are all the rage in China's modern advertising and e-commerce market. Yet few consumers and marketers actually know who almost 100 years ago came up with the idea of using stars to promote a specific brand. LUX soap was founded by the firm Lever Brothers, now known as Unilever, in 1899. Marketed as a laundry product for over 20 years, only in 1924, the company conducted a contest that led them to a very interesting finding: women were using LUX as...