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Throughout the 1880s, New Yorker Nathaniel Kellogg Fairbank worked to develop an inexpensive multi-purpose washing powder. The result was Fairbank’s Gold Dust Washing Powder which launched in 1890. By 1892, the company had devised a rather clever marketing scheme which introduced two of the first brand “mascots” in U.S. advertising—the Gold Dust Twins.
The twins—a pair of African American boys—became the company’s logo. They were depicted on packaging, seated amongst a mass of gold coins—sitting side-by-side with their arms around one another, they quickly became a hit with buyers. By 1900, the twins, however, had developed visually into a rather bizarre duo of asexual boys wearing tutus—which, oddly enough, sounds like something Liza Minnelli would say. Still, they were very popular and remain in our collective memory as one of the earliest forms of cross-promotional marketing. They did, after all, have their own radio show which was, essentially, a way of hawking soap.
Now, obviously, this depiction wasn’t the most racially sensitive. So, by the mid-Twentieth Century, the company tried to distance themselves from their longtime mascots.
Here, I have a very, very rare die-cut trade card dating to the earliest incarnation of the Gold Dust Twins. I found this card tucked in with a lot of trade cards which I recently bought.
The twins are sitting in a tub of what I can only assume in Gold Dust soap—which, we should remember was not meant for bathing.
The reverse says:
Best Purest
CLEANS
EVERYTHING
Gold Dust Washing Powder cleans
everything about the house in half the
time, with half the labor and at half the
cost of soap or any other cleanser.
GOLD
DUST
Washing Powder
Saves a woman many an hour of worry and makes
her housework easy. Largest package is great-
est economy.
SOLD EVERYWHERE. MADE ONLY BY
THE N.K. FAIRBANK COMPANY
CHICAGO, ST. LOUIS, NEW YORK, MONTREAL
BOSTON, PHILADELPHIA, PITTSBURGH, BALTIMORE
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