A Shine on Australia
Arriving from Scotland in 1878, John and Margaret Ramsay settled in Melbourne with their four children. Within 10 years, having amassed a fortune in real estate, they built the glorious mansion in Essendon named Clydebank which now forms part of the Ave Maria college.
One of their sons, William, was very entrepreneurial and along with Hamilton McKellan, during the early 1900s, established a two-roomed factory at Carlton, a inner suburb of Melbourne, where they tried to manufacture various products ranging from disinfectants to eczema ointments.
They struck gold in 1906 when they started to manufacture boot polish. As William’s wife, Annie Elizabeth Meek, was from New Zealand, he decided to name the product “Kiwi Boot Polish”. William Ramsay also aided in spreading knowledge of the product by loading boxes onto his horse-drawn cart and travelled around the country selling directly to farmers, who bought the product to protect their boots.
Kiwi had rivals including, in Sydney, a brand named “Cobra” which ran a series of cartoon advertisements, which, in today’s environment, would be frowned upon, The advertisements featured a character named “Chunder Loo of Akim Foo” . As many would know the word “Chunder” in Australian slang means “to vomit” and so using rhyming slang could conceive “Chunder Loo” as “Chunder Spew”.
Another rival product scored a significant victory when a photo of William Ramsay and Hamilton McKellan, taken in their shop in Elizabeth St, Melbourne in 1909, featured a billboard advertising “Nugget” boot polish in the photo.
Whilst boot polish had been around since at least 1851, there was no local production in Victoria. Kiwi boot polish soon became very popular as it had a superior formula to other brands as it preserved shoe leather, made it shine and restored colour.
Further improvements by 1908 added suppleness and water resistance. The success of Kiwi Boot Polish in Australia came to the notice of the British and US Armies who awarded contracts for the supply of the product to their forces during World War 1.
William died of cancer in 1914 and his father, John, then took charge and headed a large sales team in the UK. A factory was opened at Ealing in England which exported Kiwi product to various countries in Europe and the Middle East. As sales increased, further factories and sales offices were opened, including one at Rouen, France which was bombed in World War II and co-opted by the Nazis for their own boots.
In the middle of the war years of 1914-1918, Kiwi also made a silent film depicting two boys shining a hotel guest’s shoes after the adult staff had enlisted to fight in the war. The film was produced in 1916 and shown in movie houses (cinemas).
After the Second World War, William’s son travelled around the world promoting Kiwi and opened factories from Kenya to Singapore. This soon led to “Kiwi” becoming a generic name similar to the use of “Hoover” which, in the UK, is used to describe a vacuum cleaner. Kiwi became a verb within Malay speakers meaning “to polish shoes”.
The company, through much of its life, has contained the name “Kiwi” within its corporate name. It started in 1906 as McKellan & Ramsay, changing in 1913 – 1916 to Kiwi Boot Polish Co. In 1916, a slight name change to the Kiwi Polish Co, by which it was known until 1971 when a merger took place between Kiwi and Nicholas International Ltd, a Melbourne based pharmaceutical company who were best known as the manufacturers of “Aspro” and “Rennies”.
The company was then renamed Nicholas Kiwi Ltd. In 1984 Nicholas Kiwi was taken over by American based Consolidated Foods Corporation (now known as Sara Lee Corporation). Sara Lee then went on to acquire other companies in the shoe care business, so much so that both the US and UK governments became concerned over what seemed to be, in April 2011, a potential monopoly of the industry and they were ordered to divest part of their operations. The Kiwi business was sold to S.C. Johnson.
