The “Easy boy” logo is to me one of the best company product logos of that particular vintage genre which has now been gone over a few times. It has never been picked up on in any of the books covering the topic of Antipodean brands and trademarks to date. Books such as “Well Made New Zealand: A History of Trademarks ” by Kiwiana popular culture and collectibles guru Richard Wolfe have for some reason omitted it. Well, that’s what I’m all about here, as well as the popular, I love the “passed over” as well as unsung even more!
The perky marching band boy-inspired cartoon bears striking similarities to Frosty Boy (we’ll get to him later in the year); – either perhaps by the same designer , or the later refinements inspired by the soft serve icon (the Frosty Boy logo was designed in 1976; I always assumed Easy boy dated back to the fifties, but the company was actually founded in 1961). It’s not out of the question that they were whipped up by the same person, anyway.
From humble beginnings, Easy Ltd., who manufacture various industrial grade cleaning products, has grown to be one of the biggest family owned businesses in it’s field and is still going strong today; seemingly operating out of the same small New Lynn, Auckland premises where I snapped this photo of the hand-painted “original” on the glass office front door in 1988. Well, I bet that isn’t there any more (and I hate to think what happened to it) , but I was able to lift the marginally altered and polished version of the logo from their website at very low resolution, and recreate it. Good to see some things just don’t go changing…not everything has to.
longwhitekid 
Re your comments on Frosty Boy. Frosty Boy originated from the Taylor Freezer distributor in Michigan, USA and was bought to Australia by Taylor Freezer Australia Pty Ltd being my brother. I then set up Taylor Freezer NZ ltd in 1980 and imported the Frosty Boy logo and advertising material from Australia. Frosty Boy never had any connection with Tip Top although they did object to its use and they lost as previously mentioned it originated in the state of Michigan USA.
Thanks for your interesting information, Neil. According to my research the Frosty Boy brand was trademarked in Aotearoa in 1976. If you go over and look at my post called ‘More Ice Age than Frosty’ you’ll see where I compare the two mascots with visuals. Tip-Top ran their ‘Tip Top Boy’ from at least 1964 to 1974 and he was featured on their vanilla single serve dixies. It may have run a bit later but they probably dropped use after losing the case. Could just be a coincidence but to me the resemblance is pretty striking. Images are unfortunately heavily watermarked now due to consistent theft to reprint as merch by others.