The term "Gaylord box" is so embedded in the packaging vocabulary that most people in the industry do not realize it is a brand name turned generic.
The short version
In 1947 the Gaylord Container Corporation, headquartered in St. Louis, introduced a heavy-duty corrugated bulk container designed to ride on a standard wooden pallet. The container caught on because it solved a specific industrial pain point: how to move a large volume of bulk material — grain, pellets, components — without putting it in a steel drum or a wooden crate.
Within a decade the Gaylord box was the dominant format for industrial bulk corrugated containers in North America. By the 1960s, "Gaylord" was being used generically the way "Kleenex" is now used for tissues or "Xerox" for photocopies.
What happened to Gaylord Container
The company itself went through several mergers. It was acquired by Crown Zellerbach in 1955, then spun out, then acquired again by Mid-America Packaging in the 1990s, and ultimately ended up as part of Temple-Inland and later Weyerhaeuser. The brand-name trademark's practical force eroded as the term went fully generic.
Why we still call them Gaylords
Because the industry does. The technical term is "bulk corrugated intermediate container" or sometimes "corrugated bulk box." Nobody says that out loud. When someone calls our yard and says "I need a Gaylord," we know exactly what they mean — and so does every other yard in the country.
Now you can win a small bar bet with this.