Nessler and Nestle

The name he sold under, and the story that is wrong about it

He was born Karl Ludwig Nessler in Todtnau in the Black Forest on 2 May 1872, to a cobbler named Bartholomaus Nessler and his wife Rosina. He apprenticed as a barber and then worked his way across Europe — Basel, Milan, Geneva, Paris — before arriving in London in 1901. Four countries by the age of thirty, which is the relevant fact. He understood before he had anything to sell that a hairdressing name sells differently in different markets.

So he sold as Charles Nessler, or Charles Nestle, and the trade knew the firm simply as Nestle. The version told in most popular retellings is that he changed the name defensively, because of anti-German feeling during the First World War. It is a good story, it is repeated everywhere, and the patent record contradicts it.

Both British patents of 6 February 1909 name the applicant as Charles Nessler, trading as Nestle and Co — five years before the war began.

The trading name was already in commercial use, on a legal document, while Europe was still at peace. The reference sources that address the motive give the ordinary one: he took the French form Charles while working in a French-speaking market, and Nestle followed as a softer and more saleable version of Nessler. The war certainly made the name useful to him later. It did not create it. He adopted it long before, for money.

I keep coming back to that correction because of the shape of the mistake rather than the fact itself. A dramatic explanation displaced a commercial one, and it displaced it so completely that the commercial one now reads as a revelation. That happens constantly in the history of this trade, and it happens for the same reason each time: nobody checks a good story against a boring document.

Nestle and Co: what the London business actually was

It was never a one-product company, and the perm was not the first thing in it. In 1902 he patented in Britain a method for manufacturing artificial eyebrows, eyelashes and the like, and by about 1903 he was selling boxed strip lashes of human hair. Salon and manufacturing ran together from the beginning.

That is the structure to notice, because he rebuilt it twice and every salon group that works still uses it. A chair business generates the reputation. A product business monetises the reputation at a margin the chair cannot reach. Neither half is viable alone at that scale, and the founder’s name binds them. He had that worked out in a London shop before he had a permanent wave to sell in it.

The permanent wave arrived in that context: demonstrated to London hairdressers on 8 October 1906, patented on 6 February 1909, with improvements filed in 1912 and 1914. By the outbreak of war Nestle and Co was a going concern in the West End with a patented process, a patented apparatus, a sideline in lashes, and a founder holding the intellectual property personally.

I have deliberately not given you a street. Different sources place the early London salon on different roads, and a street name that gets copied out of a history page acquires a permanence the evidence does not have. What can be said is the district and the shape: a West End address, a small wealthy clientele, and a service that took most of a day.

1914: everything taken

In August 1914 he was a German national running a London business, and the whole of it became worthless to him at once. He was interned as an enemy alien and his assets confiscated as alien property — the machines, the premises, the stock and, on most accounts, the British patents.

He got out in 1915 and reached New York. Accounts of how differ — passage bought under an assumed name, an escape on a false identity — and none of them is well sourced, so I report the emigration as fact and the manner of it as an unsettled story. What he found on arrival was worse than starting from zero. Copies of his machine were already selling in America, built by people who had never paid him, in a market where his British patents bought him precisely nothing.

The second business, 1915 to 1928

He went back to first principles, in the right order: file, then sell. An improved hair curler was filed in the United States in April 1919 and held through a vehicle called Nestle Patent Holding Co., Inc. Later filings covered artificial eyelashes and a home waving device. Only once the paperwork existed did he open the shop.

What he built between 1915 and 1928 is recognisable to anyone who has worked in a salon group. A Manhattan flagship on the best address he could carry. Branches in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Palm Beach. Around 500 employees by 1927. A manufacturing arm selling lotions, tonics, shampoos and colour rinses under the same name, so that chair revenue and product revenue fed each other. An advertising budget reported at 300,000 dollars a year in 1927, which was extraordinary for a hairdressing company then and would be respectable now. And two books, The Story of Hair in 1928 and Our Vanishing Hair in 1934, positioning him as an authority on hair rather than a man who sold machines.

The two prices, and what they tell you

His obituary in The New York Times in 1951 gives the one business figure I can cite directly. He charged 120 dollars for a wave in his own New York shop, while a machine for home use sold at fifteen. Treat both as American and as the 1920s market rather than Edwardian London.

That pair of numbers is far more interesting than either alone. It is an eightfold gap between the salon service and the machine that did the same job, in the same city, sold by the same man, with no attempt to hide either price from the buyer of the other. He was selling the appointment, not the apparatus, and he understood the difference decades before the boxed home perm made the same argument to a much larger market on the home perm boom.

The tool has never been the expensive part. The judgement is the expensive part, and Nessler priced it that way in 1927.

1928, the crash, and twenty-two quiet years

In 1928 the business changed hands. Sources describe the transaction two ways — as a sale by Nessler of his chain, factories and distribution to the Nestle-LeMur Company, or as a merger of C. Nestle and Co with a cosmetics manufacturer called Le Mur. The outcome is not disputed. From 1928 the Nestle name in hair belonged to a corporation rather than to him. Terms have been quoted; none of them is properly sourced and none of them appears here.

The timing looks like genius and was mostly luck. He sold a year before the market broke, and roughly a decade before the cold wave destroyed the machine business his fortune rested on. Then he lost most of the proceeds in the crash of 1929 anyway. He settled at Harrington Park, New Jersey, wrote his second book in 1934, and lost his wife Katharina — whose hair he had burned off twice in his first experiments — in 1935. He died of a heart attack at home on 22 January 1951, aged 78, twenty-three years after his name had stopped meaning him.

The corporation outlived him by decades, and it survived by doing the only thing a machine business could do. It stopped selling hardware and started selling bottles. Its United States trademark record runs from the 1920s into the 1980s and is almost entirely chemistry — tints, rinses, bleaches, sprays and setting lotions, alongside perfumes and men’s toiletries. Colortint was filed in 1949, Nestle ColoRinse in 1953, Nescurl in 1954, Streaks ’n Tips in 1955; the Seaforth range was acquired in 1964.

The machines went to museums. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History holds a Nestle-LeMur Multi-Triumph Duo Control waving machine of 1927 to 1928. What became of the corporation itself, and who owns those trademarks today, I have not been able to establish, and I would rather say so than fill the gap.

That pivot from hardware to chemistry is not a footnote about one company. Every serious maker of waving machines faced the same choice within about fifteen years, and the ones that are still trading are the ones that made it. Zotos is the clearest surviving example on the American side, and the European houses that did the same thing are on the European perm houses.

Three things this company still teaches

Nothing you can book descends from these businesses. What survives is the word — he sold permanent waving as a category and the trade never gave it back — the business model, a handful of objects in museum cases, and the habit of asking who owns a brand now rather than assuming. That last one is the most useful thing on this page, and it applies to every bottle on my trolley.

It is not the Swiss food company

Say it plainly, because everybody asks and most people half-believe it. The hair-care Nestle has no connection whatever to the Swiss food company. They are two separate businesses that happen to share a name.

The Swiss company was founded in September 1866 at Vevey, on Lake Geneva, by Henri Nestle — born Heinrich Nestle in Frankfurt am Main in 1814 — who made a milk-based infant food, and it is still headquartered there. The hair company was a trading name adopted by Karl Ludwig Nessler, born in Todtnau in 1872, and in use in London by 1909 at the latest.

It is a small thing to get right and I take a certain pleasure in it, because it is the cleanest example in this library of a fact everybody has and nobody has checked. If you want to see how much of the rest of the received history is like that, the cold wave is where it gets seriously bad.

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