Kilmer House

Organizations today are constantly searching for new and creative ways to help people to get to know them better. In 1949, General Robert Wood Johnson wrote that “business is people,” and he felt that the best way to get to know Johnson & Johnson was through its values and its people. In 1945, a remarkable employee exemplifying that philosophy joined Johnson & Johnson.  Irrepressible, creative and full of personality, he was hired to supervise employee activities. He managed a variety of initiatives to raise enthusiasm and foster team spirit during his career, and he launched two wild

Readers who appreciate the long history of Johnson & Johnson might be tempted to wish they could go back in time to hear stories from our earliest employees. Although it seems like an impossible task, there actually is a way to do that: through a series of articles in the Johnson & Johnson Bulletin, an employee newsmagazine that captured the recollections of men and women who joined Johnson & Johnson more than a century ago. The Bulletin began publishing in 1941, part of General Robert Wood Johnson’s efforts to maintain the family feeling of the company as Johnson & Johnson g

Meeting the President of the United States is a rare honor. In 2014, a Johnson & Johnson employee had lunch with President Barack Obama as part of the company’s participation in the White House Summit on Working Families. More than a century before that meeting, five working women at Johnson & Johnson met another president, Theodore Roosevelt, as delegates for a Washington, D.C. meeting of employee women’s clubs in 1908. In 1908, The Laurel Club was just a year old. Chartered in 1907, it had been organized by women employees at Johnson & Johnson with the help of Jean H----, the ge

September 12 marks the birthday of one of the most remarkable people in Johnson & Johnson history, and one of the giants in the history of pharmaceutical medicines: . During his lifetime, he was the world’s most prolific discoverer of new medicines, and he helped change the course of drug development in the 20th century. Dr. Paul, as he was known, was born on September 12, 1926 in Turnhout, in northern Belgium. His father, Dr. Constant Janssen, was a physician and family doctor who began to import and distribute products from Gedeon Richter, a Hungarian pharmaceutical company named after

August brings heat and humidity to just about everyone, and it’s a time when many people head to the beach, or to air conditioning, or on vacation -- or all three combined! So to help everyone stay cool in the late summer heat, here are five cool facts from Johnson & Johnson history: 1.  One of our original 1886 employees sent a fossil to the Smithsonian! In 1904, M.S. Denman sent a fossil of a prehistoric fish to the Smithsonian. Ms. Denman was one of our original fourteen employees in 1886, and one of our original eight women employees. She and her colleagues were chosen by founder Jam

Once considered one of the premiere contemporary fine artists in America, she is largely unknown today, although her works remain in the collections of museums that include New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art. She was a career woman and a pioneering working mother during the 1940s. But she’s perhaps best remembered today for her series of paintings that appeared in Johnson & Johnson ads during the 1940s and 1950s. Here’s a look at Gladys Rockmore Davis, the artist behind the classic Johnson & Johnson ads, and the development of that iconic campaign.

We think of multi-language advertising as a modern phenomenon, but in fact at some companies it goes back decades – sometimes more than a century.   More than 100 years ago, Johnson & Johnson had an in-house Spanish-language advertising department that produced ads, correspondence and other materials for Latin America, the Spanish-speaking retail pharmacists who sold our products in the United States, and for Spanish speaking physicians. The earliest of these items date back to the late 1800s, shortly after we were founded. This very early undated ad for sterile surgical dressings and ab

BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandages were featured on the CBS Sunday Morning annual design show, Sunday Morning by Design, on May 31st. An iconic consumer product and a design classic, BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandages are instantly recognizable as a symbol of caring for 94 years. You can watch the show on the CBS website at this link. The show focused on design and the role it plays in so many aspects of our lives – from places, to comedy, to everyday items, to health care. One of the themes of the show was how design can change the world. In the BAND-AID® Brand segment, Sarita T. Finnie, Seni

Support for nursing is a fundamental part of the history of Johnson & Johnson.  Its roots go back to the founding of the company, and to the beginnings of modern nursing itself. Nurses are featured in the first paragraph of Our Credo, second only to doctors: “We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers…” Employees at Johnson & Johnson have understood nurses' vital importance to patients, to health care, and to our company for more than a century.     Both Johnson & Johnson and the modern profession of nursing were founded in

Since 1970, April 22 has marked Earth Day. The first Earth Day is widely considered to have inaugurated the modern environmental movement and, since then, the day is celebrated annually around the world. The theme of this year’s Earth Day is “It’s Our Turn to Lead.” Johnson & Johnson and its operating companies have long taken leadership roles in sustainability, and this legacy has some surprising early roots. Here’s a look at five of those stories in Johnson & Johnson history. 1.  General Robert Wood Johnson wrote about the need to use renewable natural resources to protect the envir