Bissell
American business
Bissell Inc., also known as Bissell Homecare, is an American privately owned vacuum cleaner and floor care product manufacturing corporation headquartered in Walker, Michigan. The company is the number one manufacturer of floor care products in North America in terms of sales, with 20% marketshare.
History
Melville Bissell developed an early carpet sweeping machine to aid in cleaning the crockery shop he and his wife Anna Sutherland Bissell owned and operated. The device was patented as the Bissell Carpet Sweeper in 1876. In 1883, Bissell built the company's first manufacturing plant in Grand Rapids, Michigan. By the 1890s the company had an international presence and was producing 1000 sweepers per day.
Melville Bissell died in 1889 and his wife Anna took over as leader of the company. She served as the company president from 1889 to 1919 and chair of the board from 1919 to 1934.
Over the years the company expanded from manufacturing only mechanical sweepers to producing vacuum cleaners and carpet shampooers.
Today
In 2004, the company acquired a license for $62 million for the Woolite trademark for all carpet and upholstery cleaning formulas.
The public source identifies “Bissell” as american business. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bissell, American and business.
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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 Q4918436. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1876, 1883, 1000 and 1889.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bissell” 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.