Sherwin-Williams grew from a bookkeeper’s $2,000 and a paint can that closed again
Before the ‘Cover the Earth’ logo, Henry Sherwin and Edward Williams set out to sell painters what most still mixed by hand each day: paint ready to use.
Cleveland, OH
In 1866 Henry Sherwin was a young bookkeeper in Cleveland with $2,000 saved and three offers for it. A bank wanted to hire him. A wholesale drug company offered a partnership. So did a paint business, Truman Dunham & Co., which imported and sold paints, varnishes, oils, pigments, brushes and window glass from 118 Superior St.
He chose the paint dealer. Years later he said its offer had been the least of the three, and he admitted he had not seen where it would lead.
It led to the Sherwin-Williams Company, a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 1964, whose own paint stores numbered in the thousands by the 1990s. The early part of its story is smaller than that. It is about two young men in Cleveland after the Civil War, and about a chore house painters of the time faced every working day before they picked up a brush.
In the 1870s, painters had to buy the ingredients and mix their own paint each day. Oil and pigment were ground together into a paste, then thinned with more oil, thinners and dryers. Customers brought their own containers to the store. The mix had to be stirred constantly so the pigment would not sink, and it had to be used quickly before it dried out. A few dealers sold premixed paint in popular colors, but paint seldom traveled far from where it was made.
Sherwin came to the trade from the back office. Born in Baltimore, Vermont, in 1842, he stayed in school until he was 15 and took his first job in a general store. In 1860 an uncle invited him to Cleveland, where he started as a clerk at the dry goods store Freeman & Kellogg and was promoted to bookkeeper two years later. He moved on to a wholesale grocer before buying into Truman Dunham.
As a partner there he learned all he could about paint. But in 1869 the firm opened a factory to make linseed oil, the base of most paints, and Sherwin found his partners more interested in the oil than in the paint. The partnership dissolved in February 1870.
He started over with two men. Alanson T. Osborn had been the Dunham firm’s bookkeeper. Edward Porter Williams, born in Cleveland in 1843, had graduated from Western Reserve College, enlisted in the 85th Ohio Volunteers, and then started a glass firm in Kent, Ohio, with his brother Charles and Edward L. Day. Williams left that business to join Sherwin. Each of the three put in $15,000 for an equal share of Sherwin, Williams & Co., which took over Dunham’s old retail operation at 118 Superior St. Its first-year sales came to $422,390.97, a figure histories of the company still give to the penny.
The two namesakes divided the work. The Bratenahl Historical Society, which counts Williams among the village’s past residents, describes him as well educated and congenial, a good mixer and a skilled whist player. Williams was responsible for building the sales staff. Sherwin, by the society’s account, already knew nearly everything there was to know about the paint business itself.
He also ran a tight shop. Citing company records, Gary Hoover wrote for the American Business History Center that Sherwin was obsessed with neatness and organization. He checked for dust behind machinery and under desks, and clutter could get a worker fired.
In 1873 the partners bought a Standard Oil cooperage on the Cuyahoga River and turned the old barrel works into their first factory, making paste paints, oil colors and putty. The first product off the line that year was a paint called Guaranteed Strictly Pure Raw Umber in Oil. In 1875, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, the firm brought out a reliable ready-mixed paint, which soon became the industry standard. In 1877 it patented a resealable paint can. A painter could now buy paint already mixed, use part of it, close the lid and come back to it later. Before long the company was making its own tin cans.
Osborn sold his interest in 1882 but kept the retail operations. Sherwin and Williams incorporated The Sherwin-Williams Company in Ohio on July 16, 1884. That year they introduced an Inside Floor Paint, which pushed the idea that particular paints belonged on particular surfaces, and hired Percy Neyman, whom the company describes as the first chemist employed by an American paint manufacturer.
Williams engineered the 1888 purchase of the Calumet Paint Co. of Chicago, the company’s first plant outside Cleveland. The Chicago operation served the Pullman Co. and makers of carriages and farm implements. Pullman required as many as 20 coats of finish on the elaborate interiors of its cars. Sherwin hired an ambitious young man named George A. Martin to run the new plant, and Martin later became the company’s third chief executive.
By 1898 the business had grown more than its founders could handle alone, and Walter H. Cottingham, whose Canadian paint company had merged with Sherwin-Williams in 1892, became general manager. Hoover wrote that Cottingham was a master salesman who built incentive systems, slogans, company songs and handbooks covering every part of selling. The “Cover the Earth” logo replaced the company’s chameleon emblem in 1905. Williams died in 1903. Sherwin handed the presidency to Cottingham in 1909 and remained chairman until his death in 1916.
The idea of the company store had taken root years earlier. A sales agency opened in Worcester, Mass., in 1891 became its model, and in the first two decades of the 20th century Sherwin-Williams began opening its own retail shops. By the early 1920s it was the largest coatings maker in the United States.
Much of what followed was about making paint easier for people who were not professionals. In 1923 the company published a Household Painting Guide, which promised to help readers “stop making mistakes in painting.” In 1941 its chemists created Kem-Tone, a fast-drying, washable, water-based paint for the home. Hoover wrote that it needed only one coat, dried within an hour and quickly outsold everything else the company made. The same year, the company introduced the Roller-Koater, one of the first paint rollers.
During World War II the company hired its first women, as fillers and cappers, to keep the production line running, and 2,700 of its employees served in the armed forces. In 1959 it introduced the Kem Colormeter mixing machine so customers could have colors made to order. In 1961 it developed a paint can shaker for five-gallon containers, which let customers buy paint in larger quantities.
The hard turn came in the 1960s and 1970s. Discount stores sometimes sold the company’s paint at half price to draw traffic, raw material costs climbed, and profit per gallon fell to the lowest in the firm’s history. After a loss in 1977, the company closed 100 company-operated stores in 1978. It also fended off a takeover bid from Gulf and Western. In 1979 John G. Breen took over a company the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History describes as nearing bankruptcy. Under his management team, Sherwin-Williams shed businesses outside of coatings, bought paint brands including Dutch Boy and Krylon, and put together 16 consecutive years of earnings improvement.
The stores kept multiplying. The 2,000th opened in 1992, the 3,000th in 2006 and the 4,000th in 2014. In 2009 the company produced its billionth gallon of architectural paint, in Garland, Texas. In 2017 it acquired Valspar, the largest purchase in its history. When Heidi G. Petz became chief executive in 2024, she was the 10th person to hold the job since Sherwin took it in 1870.
Joel Baxter, then president and general manager of the company’s global supply chain, traced the habits of the place back to the founder. “Give Mr. Sherwin the credit,” he told IndustryWeek in 2018. “He really instilled this ‘never rest’ mentality.”
Sherwin, checking for dust under the desks, might have recognized what Baxter said next. “Improvement doesn’t really have a finish line,” he told the magazine. “It can always be made better.”