Box Vox

packaging as content

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June 17, 2011

Uncapped Landfill Bottle #4

FitchDandruffRemover

TinyFitch This bottle turns out to have contained either Fitch Dandruff Remover Shampoo or Fitch Ideal Hair Tonic. (The same bottles appear to have been used for both products.)

I like the way these men’s hair care bottles originally had matching embossed skirts & caps. The company’s founder, Fred W. Fitch, started out as a barber, so the slanting, slightly helical pattern is probably meant to evoke: barber pole.

And, as was so often the custom in those days, these bottles were, themselves, packaged in a carton. I like the concentric exclamatory graphics on the box.

DandruffRemoverAd

VipsHairTypes

In 1946 Fitch’s advertising ran afoul of FTC.

In 1892, Frederick W. Fitch was a barber in Madrid, Iowa (pop. 565). His shampoo became so popular that he quit barbering to make “Fitch’s Dandruff Remover Shampoo.” By last year, his company had annual sales of $11,000,000. The advertising that did the trick: “Fitch Shampoo removes every trace of dandruff on first application.”

Last week, after 54 years of such advertising, the Federal Trade Commission decided that it was “false and misleading.” Reason: it made the public believe that “dandruff is an abnormal condition.” The truth, according to FTC: “Dandruff is a physiologically normal condition . . . and cannot be removed permanently through the use of any cleansing agent.”

Fitch Won’t Save It
Time Magazine
Monday, June 10, 1946

(“Fitch Shampoo Airport” after the fold…)

001_big
002_big“Fitch Shampoo Airport” punch-out premium (via: Hakes)

I thought this piece of late 1940s Fitch ephemera was pertinent, since the whole purpose of the landfill project was to create the “Floyd Bennett Field” municipal airport.

ShorelineChanges ©2007 Columbia University

And it was at the edge of this landfill, walking distance from the airport’s old hanger buildings, that our uncapped Fitch’s bottle was found. (Conceivably, some “Fitch Shampoo Airports” might have also have wound up in the landill, although they’d be unlikely to survive immersion in Dead Horse Bay.)

Map-490

FloydBennet-WedellWilliamsPhoto of Floyd Bennett Field in 1934 from Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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