Odds are there’s at least one Colgate-Palmolive product sitting in your bathroom right now.
Today, Colgate-Palmolive is a consumer-goods heavyweight, ranking 228th on the 2024 Fortune 500 and worth roughly $63 billion in market cap as of late 2025.
Behind that scale is a story that starts with a broke immigrant, a boiling vat of soap, and a string of very deliberate decisions about people, products, and markets.
An immigrant soap boiler with a chip on his shoulder
William Colgate arrived in the United States from England in 1804, at 21, with little money and no real plan beyond “find work.” New York City was already crowded with other immigrants chasing the same thing. When steady work proved hard to come by, he did something practical: he learned a trade, signing on as an apprentice soap boiler.
The job gave him a front-row seat to how a manufacturing business actually ran—and, more importantly, how it shouldn’t run. Colgate grew frustrated with what he saw as sloppy management and wasted opportunity. A friend reportedly told him, “Someone will soon be the leading soap maker in New York. You can be that person.”
In 1806, barely two years after arriving, he did exactly that, founding William Colgate & Company on Dutch Street in Manhattan to sell starch, soaps, and candles.
Business was rough at first, but the company found its footing in the 1820s, helped by popular products like Windsor toilet soaps and Pearl starch. To shore up supply and scale up production, Colgate expanded across the Hudson River, opening a starch factory in Jersey City in 1820—an early bet on vertical integration and better access to other manufacturers.
William struggled with heart problems for much of his life and died in 1857. The company was reorganized as Colgate & Company under his son Samuel, who reluctantly took over the business but saw it as a duty to both family and faith.
Samuel Colgate and the age of perfumed soap and toothpaste
Samuel needed a few years to truly get comfortable running the enterprise. Once he did, he looked outward again. Consumer habits were changing fast as industrialization created a new middle class with more disposable income—and higher expectations for hygiene.
Under Samuel’s leadership, Colgate expanded beyond basic soaps and starch into higher-end products. The firm began producing perfumes and perfumed soaps during the 1860s and introduced Cashmere Bouquet, a landmark perfumed toilet soap, in 1872.
Then came the product that would define the brand: toothpaste. In 1873, Colgate started selling aromatic toothpaste in glass jars—its first major move into oral care.
A couple of decades later, the company tackled usability. In 1896, it launched Colgate Ribbon Dental Cream, one of the first toothpastes sold in a collapsible tube, a format that quickly became the global standard.
By its centennial in 1906, Colgate was already producing hundreds of soaps, personal-care items, and fragrances and claimed more than 800 brands and varieties, a sign of just how aggressively it had embraced product diversification.
Enter Palmolive—and a merger ahead of its time
While the Colgate family was building its soap and toiletries empire on the East Coast, another soap story was unfolding in the Midwest. In Milwaukee, B.J. Johnson’s company developed a soap using palm oil and olive oil. That Palmolive bar became such a hit that the firm eventually renamed itself the Palmolive Company in 1916.
Palmolive later merged with Peet Brothers, and by the late 1920s the combined Palmolive-Peet company was one of the biggest soap makers in the U.S. In 1928, Palmolive-Peet and Colgate agreed to merge, creating Colgate-Palmolive-Peet—one of the earliest large-scale consumer-goods mergers in U.S. history.
Initially, the Palmolive side held more sway in the combined firm, especially in laundry and bath soap. But after the 1929 stock-market crash, demand shifted, margins on laundry soap tightened, and Colgate’s strengths in oral care and toiletries pulled the newly merged company in a different direction. Over time, the Colgate name and businesses reasserted themselves.
By 1953, the company had simplified its name to Colgate-Palmolive.
Lifelong rivalry with Procter & Gamble
There was, however, a giant lurking in the background: Procter & Gamble. P&G, which also began in the 19th century as a soap and candle maker, used Tide to dominate the post-war detergent market and later used Crest (and fluoride) to seize the top spot in toothpaste.
Colgate-Palmolive spent much of the 20th century trying to counter P&G’s muscle. Leadership regularly went back to the drawing board. In 1960, the company hired George Lesch as president, hoping his international experience would help reignite domestic growth and sharpen its competitive edge at home.
That set the stage for one of Colgate’s most aggressive leaders: David Foster. A management trainee who joined Colgate in 1946, he moved through sales and marketing roles for decades before becoming president in 1970 and CEO in 1971.
Foster leaned into a war-like offense against P&G—acquiring companies, launching new product lines, and making big bets on brand-building, including heavy investment in TV and sports sponsorships. During his tenure, sales surged from around $1.2 billion to roughly $4.5 billion by the end of the 1970s, even if some diversification plays ultimately proved too ambitious.
From TV golf tournaments to global brand machine
The Foster era also crystallized Colgate’s belief in brand image as a competitive weapon. One of the more culturally visible moves was the Colgate-Dinah Shore Winner’s Circle, a women’s professional golf tournament launched in the early 1970s that became a staple on U.S. television and elevated both the LPGA and Colgate’s own brand.
Around the same time, Colgate rolled out programs like box-top contests that funneled money to schools whose students collected the most product seals—an early forerunner of modern cause marketing and loyalty programs. It also poured money into prime-time TV sponsorships and national campaigns to keep up with P&G’s advertising firepower.
Fast-forward to today, and Colgate-Palmolive sells products in more than 200 countries and territories across oral care, home care, personal care, and pet nutrition. It owns dozens of major brands—ranging from Colgate, Palmolive, and Fabuloso to Softsoap, Irish Spring, Tom’s of Maine, Sanex, Suavitel, and Hill’s pet food—plus many more regional names.
In 2023, the company generated about $19.5 billion in net sales and crossed $20.1 billion in 2024, with organic sales growth typically targeted in the low-to-mid single digits.
In oral care specifically, Colgate remains a dominant force, with studies over the past decade putting its global toothpaste market share in the 40–45% range and penetration in more than half of households worldwide, while its U.S. toothpaste share sits at roughly one-third.
Still chasing P&G, playing to different strengths
Colgate-Palmolive is still locked in competition with P&G, especially in categories like oral care and home cleaning. But the battleground looks very different today: sustainability messaging, recyclable packaging, digital commerce, and performance-marketing efficiency matter as much as shelf space.
Despite macro headwinds, Colgate continues to grow modestly and lean into emerging markets where its brands skew premium but accessible to the middle class. Recent analyst coverage has framed Colgate as a steady, defensive “dividend king,” with a strong presence in developing markets and a long runway in pet nutrition and skincare.
The through-line from Colgate’s earliest days to now is a willingness to adapt—on people strategy, product strategy, and data strategy—without giving up on the basics: loyalty, local knowledge, and long-term talent bets.
What Other Companies Can Learn from Colgate-Palmolive
1. Hire from within to build loyalty and better decisions
Colgate has a long habit of promoting leaders from inside the business rather than parachuting in outsiders for every new challenge. David Foster is the classic example: he joined as a management trainee in 1946, worked his way through sales and marketing, and eventually became president and then CEO in the early 1970s.
That pattern continues. Current CEO Noel Wallace joined Colgate in 1987, working across global toothbrushes, North America, and Latin America before being appointed CEO in 2019 and later chairman.
Promoting from within does a few things at once:
- Incentivizes loyalty. Employees can see a real path from junior roles to the C-suite.
- Improves context at the top. Leaders understand the quirks of the business because they’ve lived them—across factories, markets, and functions.
- Builds trust downward. Frontline teams are more likely to trust decisions when they know executives have actually done the work or run similar regions.
For other companies, the takeaway isn’t “never hire from outside,” but that internal pipelines should be treated as a strategic asset, not an afterthought.
2. Localize products and distribution to win emerging markets
Colgate was relatively early to think beyond the U.S. market and systematically build a global footprint. By the mid-20th century, it had operations on six continents, with local factories and brand portfolios tailored to regional tastes.
China is one of its more interesting expansion stories. Rather than simply shipping U.S. toothpaste into a complex, preference-heavy market, Colgate partnered with and invested in local manufacturers and joint ventures, including a major stake in Hong Kong-based Hawley & Hazel in the 1980s. That gave it an instant foothold through brands consumers already knew, while also localizing production for mainland China and broader Asia.
The lesson for other firms eyeing emerging markets:
- Trust is local. Piggybacking on existing local brands, distributors, or factories can be more effective than launching cold with a foreign name and generic marketing.
- Do the homework. Markets like China or India punish companies that underestimate regional preferences or over-standardize products.
- Design for regional autonomy. Local teams need enough freedom on pricing, assortment, and messaging to respond to real consumer behavior.
Starbucks’ missteps in Australia are a counterexample often cited in strategy circles—expansion without deep local insight, followed by painful retrenchment. Colgate, by contrast, has generally treated localization as a core capability rather than a box to check.
3. Stay relentlessly open to new strategies and channels
Colgate and Rolex both operate century-old brands, but they play very different games. Rolex survives on scarcity, continuity, and resisting change. Colgate sells mass-market products to a constantly shifting middle class, where habits and channels can flip in a few years.
That reality has forced Colgate to repeatedly “go back to the drawing board.” Historically, that meant investing in R&D to launch products that tracked new hygiene norms—think the move from basic soaps to perfumed soaps, from soap bars to liquid hand soap, or from jars of toothpaste to more sophisticated formulas and formats.
More recently, the company has had to rethink what “marketing” even means. As TV’s dominance faded and digital platforms took over, Colgate overhauled its KPIs, pouring resources into digital channels, partnerships, and data-driven campaigns instead of just buying more 30-second spots.
For any long-lived firm, the key takeaway is that staying relevant isn’t just about making “new stuff.” It’s about periodically questioning the entire go-to-market model:
- Are we using the same channels our customers actually use?
- Are we tracking metrics that matter now, not 10 years ago?
- Do we have mechanisms to regularly challenge our own assumptions?
Colgate’s willingness to reinvent its growth playbook is one reason it’s still in the game against larger peers.
4. Give everyone context—not just executives
Colgate talks a lot about “shared language” and context inside the organization. Senior talent leaders like Wendy Boise, EVP of Global Talent, Learning and Organization Development, emphasize that change starts with leaders clearly articulating priorities and making sure the entire workforce can speak to them.
In practice, that means:
- Investing in leadership communication so strategy isn’t a buzzword salad.
- Training employees at all levels on the company’s goals, trade-offs, and metrics.
- Using consistent frameworks and terminology across regions and functions.
When frontline teams understand why a strategy exists—and how their work connects to it—they’re more likely to trust leadership, surface useful feedback, and spot opportunities. It also makes performance reviews and upskilling less abstract: people know what “good” looks like in the context of the company’s real objectives.
5. Build a measurement ecosystem that chases ROI, not just dashboards
Like most large enterprises, Colgate is sitting on more data than it can reasonably use. The difference is that it’s increasingly explicit about using data to generate “measurable business value,” not just prettier reports.
Colgate leans on a use-case-driven approach:
- Start from business goals. For example, grow share in a specific market or protect margins in oral care.
- Pull the right datasets. Revenue Growth Management (RGM) inputs like pricing, promotion elasticity, and assortment; plus marketing-mix data and digital commerce performance.
- Layer on consumer insight. The company uses search and social data—across platforms like Google and Reddit—to map emerging needs and sentiment, feeding those patterns into proprietary models and graph-based tools.
The result is a measurement ecosystem aimed at answering, “What actually drives profitable growth with real consumers?” rather than just “How are we doing versus last quarter?”
For other firms, the lesson is to treat measurement as a product, not a reporting chore: something designed, iterated, and evaluated based on its ability to guide decisions that raise ROI.
6. Treat employee growth as an operating system, not a perk
Colgate frames digital training and upskilling as a way to “break down barriers and create equity of opportunity” across its global workforce. In practical terms, that translates into:
- Massive digital L&D programs. Multi-phase bootcamps and online courses for thousands of employees in marketing, customer development, and beyond.
- Continuous assessments. Employees are encouraged to identify their own gaps, pain points, and ambitions, which also gives leadership better visibility into where talent is under-utilized.
- Data-informed talent decisions. Findings from training and assessments feed back into succession planning and leadership structures, helping Colgate spot high-potential people earlier.
On the company side, this builds a deeper internal talent bench and makes it easier to set meaningful KPIs around performance and capability growth. On the employee side, it turns training from an occasional obligation into an ongoing part of the job—and leaves people with skills that remain valuable even if they eventually move on.
For large organizations, the core insight is that employee development isn’t just about morale; it’s an information system. Done well, it surfaces who can do what, where the bottlenecks are, and how to adjust strategy to match real human capabilities.