Burma-Shave
Burma-Shave
Main page
2240098

Burma-Shave

logo
Community Hub0 subscribers
What are your thoughts?
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Burma-Shave

Burma-Shave was an American brand of brushless shaving cream, famous for its advertising gimmick of posting humorous rhyming poems on small sequential highway roadside signs.

Burma-Shave was introduced in 1925 by the Burma-Vita company in Minneapolis owned by Clinton Odell. Odell hired a chemist named Carl Noren to create a quality shave cream. The company's original product was a liniment made of ingredients described as having come "from the Malay Peninsula and Burma" (hence its name). Sales were sparse, and the company sought to expand sales by introducing a product with wider appeal.

The result was the Burma-Shave brand of brushless shaving cream and its supporting advertising program. Sales increased; at its peak, Burma-Shave was the second-highest-selling brushless shaving cream in the US. Sales declined in the 1950s, and in 1963 the company was sold to Philip Morris. Its well-known advertising signs were removed at that time. The brand decreased in visibility and eventually became the property of the American Safety Razor Company.The company eliminated the roadside billboards with the jingles, dismissing them as a silly idea.

In 1997, the American Safety Razor Company reintroduced the Burma-Shave brand with a nostalgic shaving soap and brush kit, though the original Burma-Shave was a brushless shaving cream, and Burma-Shave's own roadside signs frequently ridiculed "Grandpa's old-fashioned shaving brush."

Burma-Shave sign series first appeared on U.S. Highway 65 near Lakeville, Minnesota, in 1926, and remained a major advertising component until 1963 in most of the contiguous United States. The first series read: Cheer up, face – the war is over! Burma-Shave. The exceptions were Nevada (deemed to have insufficient road traffic), and Massachusetts (eliminated due to that state's high land rentals and roadside foliage).Originally, owners Allan and Clinton Odell wrote most of the jingles. After some time, the owners held contests for consumers to creaet the jingles, offering cash prizes.

Typically, six consecutive small signs would be posted along the edge of highways, spaced for sequential reading by passing motorists. The last sign was almost always the name of the product. The signs were originally produced in two color combinations: red-and-white and orange-and-black, though the latter was eliminated after a few years. A special white-on-blue set of signs was developed for South Dakota, which restricted the color red on roadside signs to official warning notices.

This use of a series of small signs, each of which bore part of a commercial message, was a successful approach to highway advertising during the early years of highway travel, drawing the attention of passing motorists who were curious to learn the punchline. As the Interstate system expanded in the late 1950s and vehicle speeds increased, it became more difficult to attract motorists' attention with small signs. When the company was acquired by Philip Morris, the signs were discontinued on advice of counsel.

Some of the signs featured safety messages about speeding instead of advertisements.

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.