The GOJO Purpose of Saving Lives and Making Life Better Through Well-being Solutions drives every decision our Family Enterprise makes, from the products we create, to the ways we work. As the inventors of PURELL® Hand Sanitizer, GOJO is a privately-held company headquartered in Akron, Ohio, with facilities in North America, South America, Europe and Asia and has changed how the world stays well for more than 70 years. We use the best science available to develop well-being solutions for skin and the surfaces people touch – solutions that result in healthier people and a healthy environment at home and away-from-home.

As relentless innovators, driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, we’ve harnessed the power of the PURELL® brand to create new products that deliver the ideal combination of effective protection from germs and safety for people and the environment. Our latest innovation, the PURELL SOLUTION™ includes PURELL® Hand Sanitizers, PURELL® Surface Disinfectant, PURELL® Brand HEALTHY SOAP™ products with CLEAN RELEASE™ Technology and PURELL® ES8 Dispensing Systems with energy-on-the-refill.

Our complete product portfolio includes heavy-duty hand cleaners, soaps and wipes, in addition to breakthrough dispensing and electronic hand hygiene compliance monitoring systems.

Founding of GOJO and History of Our Products and Well-Being Solutions

Our story begins in Akron, Ohio, during World War II. Goldie Lippman was a supervisor in one of Akron's many rubber factories, manufacturing life rafts and rubber products for the war effort, where she and her co-workers discovered how difficult it was to clean their hands after a day’s work. The men who had worked in the rubber factories before the war had dipped their hands in chemicals like kerosene and benzene at the end of a shift in order to remove the graphite and carbon black. These harsh chemicals took a toll on workers’ hands, and Goldie and her husband Jerry set out to find a better solution. This kindled the spirit of innovation that led to the founding of GOJO in 1946.

Jerry knew he needed help solving this important human problem. So he visited the chemistry department at Kent State University in search of a chemist to help him develop a hand cleaner that would be effective against difficult soils and safe for skin. He found Professor Clarence Cook, and the two worked together to invent what became the first-ever one-step, rinse-off GOJO® Hand Cleaner.

Over the following decades, we expanded into broader skincare solutions for virtually every away-from-home market, from foodservice establishments to healthcare facilities, from cruise ships to schools. In 1988, we invented PURELL® Hand Sanitizer, creating a new way for employees, patrons, students, teachers, and everyone else to clean their hands away from the sink, reducing the spread of disease-causing germs.

The development of PURELL® Hand Sanitizer was a turning point, and, in 1997, we launched this breakthrough innovation into the consumer market, allowing people everywhere to have convenient access to hand hygiene. Today, PURELL® remains America’s #1 Hand Sanitizer1 and can be found all over the world, anywhere that people care about keeping people healthy and well.

Powered by this spirit of innovation, in the years after PURELL® Hand Sanitizer was created we have continued to develop ever-better solutions in hand hygiene. In 2006, we introduced a revolutionary line of touch-free wall- and counter-mount dispensing systems that made washing and sanitizing hands the most convenient yet.

Our commitment to sustainability leadership, which has its roots in Goldie and Jerry’s resourcefulness and sense of stewardship, has been a major influence in everything we do — from how we work to what we make. In 2010, we released PURELL® Green Certified Hand Sanitizer, the world’s first EcoLogo certified hand sanitizer. But it’s not just about sustainable products. We constantly evaluate our manufacturing processes, business partnerships, and community relationships to make sure we’re doing everything we can to make the world a better, healthier, safer place.

When we developed PURELL® Advanced Hand Sanitizer in 2011, we were able to create a step-change in formulation efficacy and reinforced our position as the most trusted and used brand in hospitals. This new formula kills more than 99.99% of most common germs that cause illness and was the first to meet FDA hand hygiene requirements with a single pump (vs. two of other national brands*), and allowed us to continue to push the hand hygiene envelope.

Over the past 30 years, the PURELL® brand has become very meaningful to people as safe, effective, and good for you and the environment. Inspired by this “gold standard,” we went to work again in our labs in order to formulate, engineer, and design new solutions that would live up to the high expectations everyone has for the PURELL® brand. The launch of PURELL® Surface Spray in 2019 and the launch of the multi-category PURELL SOLUTION™ in 2018, with breakthrough soap formulations, like PURELL® brand HEALTHY SOAP® products with CLEAN RELEASE™ Technology and the game-changing PURELL® ES8 Dispensing System with energy-on-the-refill, are the culmination of our years of passionate commitment, hard work, and inventiveness to drive toward our BHAG (“big hairy audacious goal”) to bring well-being to one billion people every day.

Leadership at GOJO has always been team-based. From our earliest days, our leaders have always come from inside the founding family and beyond, combining complementary strengths and a shared passion for the GOJO Purpose that have helped propel GOJO to success.

Jerry Lippman once said, “Everything I know, I learned from someone else.” This wise and humble attitude manifested in how Jerry and Goldie built the GOJO leadership team from the beginning. As a husband and wife whose strengths balanced one another’s, they started a promising business. As GOJO grew, Jerry and Goldie (until her untimely death in 1972) brought in other leaders with diverse skills and expertise: Eleanor Morris, who mixed soap; Al Hendershot and Bob Walker, the first two salespeople to join Jerry in the field; and Ted Marks, who managed the company’s legal and business operations, becoming President to Jerry’s CEO.

Joe Kanfer, Goldie and Jerry’s nephew, grew up and into leadership of the Family Enterprise. Joe’s first job as a young child was sealing the boxes of GOJO heavy-duty hand cleaner, sitting on them as the glue dried. In his teenage years, Joe mixed product and built dispensers. He also traveled with Goldie and Jerry on sales trips across the U.S. Throughout his law school years, he spent half of every week on campus out-of-state and commuted to Ohio the other half.

In the mid-1970s, Joe became President. Joe and Jerry continued their close family partnership as confidants for decades until Jerry passed away at age 92 in 2005. In his role as Chairman and CEO, Joe carried on the family value of collaboration, building the next leadership team in the mid-1980s with Mark Lerner as CFO and then President, and with key advisors with physical and social sciences expertise.