BY Armin

This Logo comes with a Two-Year Warranty

CREDIT UPDATE: The new Seal was designed by Louise Fili.

I must be making all the wrong consumer choices because I had never seen or heard about the Good Housekeeping Seal that adorns the packaging (and in some cases the advertising) of everything from washers and dryers, to cell phones, and even to movers. The Seal, issued by the Good Housekeeping Research Institute — a 17,000-square-foot (since 2006 when it moved to the Hearst building) lab and kitchen testing facility with scientists and engineers as its staff — is given to products that pass their rigorous tests, granting them not just use of the seal, but entry into the its namesake magazine, Good Housekeeping, which only takes advertisers whose claims and promises can be corroborated by the Institute. The seal gives consumers a two-year warranty on any approved product and will happily issue refunds if necessary. The Seal was introduced in 1909 and, to celebrate its 100th anniversary, a new version has been released.

Screen capture from the November 25th Today show by Chino.

“If you’re not a Baby Boomer or older, you don’t really know what the seal is because they haven’t done anything to re-energize its importance,” said Marshal Cohen, chief analyst of the NPD Group, which specializes in consumer behavior.
— Polishing the Good Housekeeping Seal, from a November 20, 2006 article in The New York Times

So at least this confirms I’m not crazy or that I am completely oblivious to the things I buy. For clarification: I’m neither a baby boomer nor older. Also, my purchasing decisions rarely come from Good Housekeeping, rather from Wired, MacWorld, and the Amazon.com and epinion.com customer reviews, so not only am I not a baby boomer or older, but a young geek. I digress. The new Seal is far, far better than the old one which was very Swooshy American and had more of a coupon-ish aesthetic that didn’t flatter it. The new Seal is very nicely executed, and in its use of House Industries’ Neutraface, it gently pushes the nostalgia buttons of the Good Old American Days when apple pies were put in windowsills to cool. With the wider character shapes and generous letterspacing I do wonder if the legibility of the text is compromised, although the Good Housekeeping name, for those that do know about it, is more than enough. But no doubt, this is a great upgrade and it’s nice to see some properly executed typography go out to the mass market.

If you are interested in learning more about the Seal, this is a good article and here is a quick video overview. And here is the official promise of the Seal.

Thanks to Chino and Dennis Derammelaere.

UPDATE: It seems there is confusion about this. And now even I am confused. So, as far as I can tell, the swooshy thing is the old logo: if you look at the screen grabs below, the swooshy thing appears in products and ads and there is no way a new logo can get on those so fast; the other telling part is that the swooshy logo is the only one that appears on Google Image Search which, again, if this were the brand new logo it wouldn’t yet appear in Google; and, finally, the last screen grab shows the new logo with a “100 years” text below it. So, yeah, I think we got it right. Happy to correct this if I’m wrong.

\n\nCREDIT UPDATE: The new Seal was designed by Louise Fili.\n\nI must be making all the wrong consumer choices because I had never seen or heard about the Good Housekeeping Seal that adorns the packaging (and in some cases the advertising) of everything from washers and dryers, to cell phones, and even to movers. The Seal, issued by the Good Housekeeping Research Institute — a 17,000-square-foot (since 2006 when it moved to the Hearst building) lab and kitchen testing facility with scientists and engineers as its staff — is given to products that pass their rigorous tests, granting them not just use of the seal, but entry into the its namesake magazine, Good Housekeeping, which only takes advertisers whose claims and promises can be corroborated by the Institute. The seal gives consumers a two-year warranty on any approved product and will happily issue refunds if necessary. The Seal was introduced in 1909 and, to celebrate its 100th anniversary, a new version has been released.

Many thanks to our ADV @ UnderConsideration Partners