UPDATE III: Maury spotted the a “J” dealership sign example on this Miller Tools brochure:
UPDATE II: I’ve added two examples of‘dark’ “J”s, dark (blue or black) background with white letters. Now that I think about it, I guess this is similar to the black and white newspaper versions.
CREDIT: Douglass, Neal. Harry Payne Motors, photograph, June 3, 1942; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth34338/m1/1/: accessed April 7, 2019), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library. … MY NOTES: The photo year is more likely late 1947 or 1948.
From Willys World March-April 1991 issue.
UPDATE: This is best described as a working draft thatMaury Hurt and I have constructed in the hopes of understanding Willys-Overland’s “J” logo better …. If you have input, please email me or add it in a comment at the bottom of the post.
In January of this year, Maury emailed me about a Willys/Cars•Trucks/Jeep logo that he was hoping to reproduce, wondering if I had any better examples of it. That simple email turned into a mission: Find out the history behind the logo.
I have one of these patches. Not sure who created them or when.
It turned out that we could find no articles or discussion about the evolution of the logo. So, we spent a month looking through old brochures and advertisem*nts to develop a theory of what it should look like, when it was used, and why.
What’s the logo supposed to look like?
Our first challenge was to determine what the logo was supposed to look like. As these examples show, different fonts and slightly different looks were used in the printing of the logo.
Another patch example.
This was from a January 1946 magazine ad.
or even this one …
Our suspicion is that this is from overseas, possibly Australia? We don’t have a time frame on this one.
And, the list would not be complete without some matchbook covers:
How should the “J” look?
Otherquestions we had included how wide and tall should the long part of the “J” be; how should the interior font look; and how tall and large should the curly portion of the “J” be? Again, revisiting the examples above, the fonts, sizes and shapes differ.
Our Best Example choice:
Eventually, we decided that ads produced specifically by Willys-Overland with dates we could document should be given the most weight. Because of that, we settled on this ad being the foremost example of the logo.
And here is the reproduced version made by Maury:
Logo Details:
On closer inspection of the best quality versions of the logo, we learned the “J” logo had a variety of nuances. First, the top blue portion has a right side that scallops like a bird wing. This design may have been influenced by the Willys logo shown below, but we have not date on that graphic.
The “J” logo’sblue section drops down farther on the red “J” on the left hand side vs. the right hand side.
The “J” reflects the cj2a-launch-time font not seen prior to the launch of the CJ-2A in July. The font down the center of the “J” is equally new.
The closest example we found to the font designs found on the “J” logo came not from Willys-Overland, but from this WWII Jeep-Soap product that wasn’t made byWillys-Overland.
Coincidence that this design preceded the “J” designs by Willys-Overland? Probably.
When was the “J” logo first used?
As a part of the search for the ‘best-case’ logo, we discovered that Willys only used the logo a short time. The “when” turned out to be pretty easy to figure out. A search of our joint documents concluded that the earliest use we could date was October 03, 1945, but that was in black and white:
Evening Star, October 03, 1945, Washington, D.C.
On November 10, 1945, the “J” logo appeared in color for the first known time whenWillys published a two-page ad in the Saturday Evening Post: “Willys … Presents to the World” “The Universal ‘Jeep’ …”.
Saturday Evening Post November 10th Ad (one of two pages).
Willys did not publish an ad with the “J” logo in Collier’s Magazine until December 1945. Then, following that issue, none of the other ads in Colliers ever included the “J” logo again.
Collier’s December 1945 ad.
Though the earliest documented date for the logo is October 03, 1945, we believethe earliest undated example of the logo’suse was in an 8-page newspaper mailer with the title “Willys Presents the Jeep” that was likely published prior to the other ads in this post.
The circles in the images above and below this text highlight the implementationof the curly “J” along with the use of the new “Jeep” font AND the use of the “J” logo. Also highlighted is the “Willys Jeep” logo, a leftover from WWII magazine ads that uses the older “Jeep” font”.
The reason we believe this newspaper was published earlier than the other adsis because the newspaper is a marketing mess of varying fonts for ‘Jeep’; the newspaper also included pre-war phases such as “Willys Builds the Mighty Jeep”; in addition, itshows varying jeep types (some experimental agri-jeeps, some CJ-2s, and some CJ-2As). As part of the effort to brand the logo, the “J” logo appears seven times in the magazine.
So, we feel that the “J” logowas first used around July or August of 1945. Then, after the Saturday Evening Post November issue, the “J” logo appeared in magazine ads, newspaper ads, and business cards.
A similar (in intent), but not an exact “J” logo version also appeared on at least one dealer sign for Sunshine Motors in Florida.Below are night and day photos fo the logo. The “J” on the sign to the right has a curly portion that isn’t as tall as the one on the building to the left. Perhaps the one one the left was outsourced to a painter, while the one on the right under the sign was purchased from Willys for the purpose of hanging it under the sign? Those are answers we don’t know.
This photo was purportedly taken in 1948. It’s unclear when the bottom photo was taken. Given the same Jeepster appears to be in the window, it likely was taken around the same time.
Here’s another example. Here’s Willys Car and Trucks sign without the “J”.
Now, this postcard shows the same sign design with the “J” added below it.
The “J” even ended up on envelopes (at least one of them):
We also found a red version of the logo on a September 1946 invoice:
When did Willys stop using the logo?
The latest example we could find of its use was on a January 19, 1946 magazine ad in the Saturday Evening post. After that, the logo met a quick end.
January 19, 1946 issue of the Saturday Evening Post.
What was behind the logo’s creation?
Once we had a time frame for the logo, we began wondering why it was developed in the first place and why it died such a quick death. We discovered that tellingthis part of the story required looking back at how Willys transformed during WWII from a car and truck company into a jeep company.
Near the end of the war, the jeep became not just a third category of vehicles, an important transformation in W-O’s business model, but also the flagship brand of the company. Yet, tthe company still had a traditional network of truck and car dealers,So,Willys had to respect those dealers and develop some type of advertising schemethat both introduced the jeep and embraced all three lines.
Thus, ourtheory is that the “J” logo was the result of that tension between the pre-war company and the post-war company.
In Part II of this topic (at least a week away) we’ll jump backwards to pre-war Willys-Overland, then see how the company shifted it’s marketing messages during the war years, both in terms of content and style, by following the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s Magazine WWII and post-war ads.
