The pharmacist who devised Nivea, generally credited as the first water-in-oil skin creme, created a brand that has become practically indestructible 100 years later. The recipe has been refined, but the product is still basically the same creme that Oscar Troplowitz devised in 1911 in Hamburg and marketed through his manufacturing company Beiersdorf.
While Troplowitz died in 1918, stockmarket-listed Beiersdorf is still around. This year it has been jettisoning some of its minor products, after deciding they sell too slowly in the stores, and putting the emphasis back on Nivea, its mega-brand.
Nivea is still sold in many markets in traditional metal tins: 123 million of them per year. That adds up to 12,500 tons of the creme, which has a fragrance mixed from bergamot orange, regular orange, lavender, rose, lilac and lily of the valley.
The creme is available in 200 nations, according to Beiersdorf data.
Over the years, soaps and lotions have joined the range, which now comprises 500 varied Nivea products with sales in 2010 totalling 3.5 billion euros (5.1 billion dollars). That was lion's share of Beiersdorf's 5.6 billion euros of 2010 revenues.
The company will be celebrating the Nivea centenary in Hamburg this week.
In the product shakeout, Beiersdorf announced in January the sale of a premium skin-care brand, Juvena, to an Austrian company. It is also dropping slow-selling products to concentrate on big sellers.
The back-to-the-roots strategy means Beiersdorf's turnover is likely to stagnate this year. Nivea's key ingredient, a lanolin alcohol that the company calls Eucerit, had been devised by a chemist, Isaac Lifschuetz.
It is made from wax found in sheep's wool and it keeps the creme stable so that it does not separate into oil and water.
Troplowitz, whose Jewish upbringing and life achievements were explored last year in an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Rendsburg, northern Germany, bought the patent and used the know-how to devise Nivea creme and manufacture it on an industrial scale.
His company, Beiersdorf, simply invented the name Nivea.It was inspired by the Latin word "niveus" for white or snowy.
By 1914, Nivea was on sale in 35 nations. In many nations of the world today, people have the vague feeling that it is a local brand because their parents and grandparents used it and the name does not sound German, marketeers say.
The timeless blue-and-white colours of the brand date back to 1925. Before that it had been sold in yellow-and-green tins.
The company still keeps the exact colour mix for Nivea blue almost as secret as the precise recipe for Nivea creme itself.
The bulk of the old-style tins are still made in a metal-printing factory on the company's central Hamburg manufacturing site, with factories in Thailand and Mexico stamping out the rest of the tins and lids.
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