Air Wick
an air freshener produced by Reckitt Benckiser
Air Wick is an American brand of air freshener owned by the British multinational company Reckitt. It was launched by creator Guy Paschal in 1943 in the United States, and is now sold worldwide.
History
Air Wick was introduced in 1943 in the United States. In 1973, it had sales of $33.5 million and earnings of $2.7 million, prompting the Swiss pharmaceutical company Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis) to investigate purchasing them. Ciba-Geigy took brief control of the company in 1974 before selling it to British household products company Reckitt & Colman (now Reckitt Benckiser) in December 1984.
The sale was partly motivated by what Ciba-Geigy's top management saw as a product that was at odds with their corporate culture; their rationale was that as a chemical business, they should not be involved with consumer products. In October 2007, Reckitt Benckiser won a High Court ruling in a lawsuit with Procter & Gamble over claims that the design of Air Wick Odour Stop was an exact copy of P&G's Febreze air spray.
In March 2012, Air Wick announced its partnership with the official charity of the United States' National Park Service, the National Park Foundation. The company launched four new scents inspired by Kaloko-Honokōhau National Historical Park, Virgin Islands National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and Glacier Bay National Park. Portions of the sales went to the National Park Foundation to aid National Parks.
“Air Wick” enters the record as an air freshener produced by Reckitt Benckiser. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wick, freshener and produced can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4698268. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1943, 1973, 1974 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Air Wick” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.