Burma Shave Pillows

By the 1920s, commercial signs and billboards turned the roadside into an advertising medium. The sales manager of the family-owned Burma-Vita Company, created serial roadside rhymes in 1926 to advertise the company’s brushless shaving cream. The classic design shown here is from 1959.

Old red and white Burma Shave sign along in plains Route 66

No brush, no lather

Very sophomoric!

Burma-Shave was introduced in 1925 by the Burma-Vita Co. of Minneapolis. The company's original product was a liniment with ingredients described as being "from the Malay Peninsula and Burma" (hence its name). Sales were sparse, and the company sought to expand sales by introducing a product with wider appeal. The result was the Burma-Shave brand of brushless shaving cream and its supporting advertising program using humorous rhyming poems on small sequential signs along highways. Sales increased and at its peak, Burma-Shave was the second-highest-selling brushless shaving cream in the US. Sales began declining in the '50s and in 1963 the company was sold and by the end of the decade, Burma-Shave would be no more.