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Crisis? What Crisis?
The Armor All story all started in a Southern California laboratory in 1962 when, putting aside the worry of the world ending due to the Cuban missile crisis, and Brazil winning the World Cup, a 21-year-old polymer chemist, Joe Palcher, set about inventing a "miracle" formula. His idea was to develop something to protect the rubber, plastic and vinyl surfaces on his pride and joy car from the powerful and harmful effects of nature's elements, namely UV radiation and ozone….after all, there was a lot of it about in California.
Well, Joe did it.
Four years later (when, hurrah, England won the World Cup) a local accessory shop owner convinced him to bottle and sell the formula and allow others to benefit.
Named Tridon (get it…."no dirt" spelled backwards), the product quickly blazed like a bush fire across the USA as folk clocked how easy it was to keep a vehicle looking like new.
By 1972, the rush to buy the product also attracted corporate eyes, and a new company called Armor All was formed, and Joe's elixir of life for car interiors became known as Armor All Protectant.
Back in the laboratory, Armor All's boffins used Protectant as the springboard to a whole range of new car appearance products, continuing Joe's leadership in car care innovation, to help maintain the condition and appearance of cars for those who cared about them.
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