William Hesketh Lever was born at Bolton, Lancashire in 1852 was the son of grocer. In 1867, Lever was recruited into the family grocery business, where one of his chores was to cut the large blocks of soap into slices and wrap them for sale.
Looking at his father’s humble empire, Lever’s gaze fell upon one thing – soap. Together with James Lever, William Lever opened soap factory at Warrington, England, in 1885 and brought soap to the masses. After much market research and international travel, they began to corner the market
Up until 1884 Levers marketed their soaps under the name LEVER'S PURE HONEY. Requirements of the 1875 Trade Marks Act led Leverhulme to search for another trade name as their soap was neither pure nor did it contain honey.
The name was selected from list of words suggested to him by a Liverpool patent agent firm W.P Thompson in 1884.
SUNLIGHT, William Lever felt, was as distinctive a name, as he hoped his soap would be. The idea was to apply the name ‘Sunlight’ to a range of soaps sourced from different manufacturers. The product was to be delivered in manageable sized portions, packed in cartons and launched with the support of a significant advertising budget.
Lever's at this time had several manufacturers supplying their soap requirements for, as they advertised in their house journal The Lancashire Grocer, not all manufacturers could supply all types of soaps at a uniformly high standard.
Lever's boasted that only by selecting the best soaps from each manufacturer could they ensure a range of quality soaps.
The registration o the brand name took place just before the Board of Trade used new instructions on July 1885 “to implement a far stricter interpretation of the term ‘fancy word’.
Their products, Sunlight, the world’s first packaged soap, was very successful. The soup they made in ready molded tablet.
Production facilities were expanded in December 1886 and by the end of 1887 the works was producing four hundred and fifty tons of Sunlight Soap per week, in addition to the valuable by-product glycerine.
History of Sunlight soap
