Sunlight (cleaning product)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For other meanings see Sunlight (disambiguation)
 |
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (June 2007) |
Sunlight is a brand of household soap originally produced by the British company Lever Brothers in 1884. Designed for washing clothes and general household use, the success of the product led to the name for the company's village for its workers, Port Sunlight. William Lever's initial success came from offering bars of cut, wrapped, and branded soap in his father's grocery shop. Prior to this, commercially-made soap was bought in long bars, an early labour saving device for the housewife.
It was one of the earliest internationally-marketed branded products, and one of the first examples of a cleaning product being produced as a consumer commodity; prior to Sunlight, clothing was generally washed using homemade soap.
Sunlight was eventually supplanted by the more modern products made from sythentically-produced detergents rather than naturally-derived soaps.
In several markets (e.g. Belgium and the Netherlands) Sunlight soap has survived up till today as a personal wash product rather than a laundry detergent. In Canada, it remains a leading brand of dish soap.
[edit] Later brand usage
It appears [1] that Sunlight is still used in some markets as a brand by Unilever (the successor of Lever Brothers); at least in some markets it was taken over by Lilleborg in 1930 [2]; in 2003 exclusive licensing rights to the Sunlight brand of dishwashing detergents in Canada, Puerto Rico and the USA were sold (along with some other Unilever brands) to Lehman Brothers bankers [3], who set up Phoenix Brands for the purpose[4]. The Sunlight brand is used by JohnsonDiversey in Canada and the USA. [5]
