Train cars, overpasses and abandoned buildings often end up on the wrong end of a can of spray paint. But what happens when taggers target ecologically sensitive areas like Petroglyph National Monument or Joshua Tree National Park?
Based in North St. Paul, Graffiti Solutions is removing tags from the Twin Cities and across the country with its biodegradable and environmentally safe graffiti removal product, Elephant Snot.
Named for its striking appearance, Elephant Snot can remove paint from porous surfaces like brick, concrete and sandstone without damaging them.
Owners Gil and Carol Shipshock first launched their graffiti removal service, Sani-Masters, in North St. Paul in 1969. The second half of Shipshocks’ operations, graffiti solutionswhich sells chemicals and graffiti removal products, was launched in the early 1990s.
When Graffiti Solutions was created, the husband and wife team made a living selling graffiti removal products and getting local jobs through Sani-Masters to remove graffiti around St. Paul and Minneapolis. Gil Shipshock spent so much time removing graffiti that he said he could identify “repeat offenders” by their tags.
“We hadn’t seen this guy in a long time and all of a sudden his tag shows up at a Lunds and Byerly’s in Minneapolis,” he said.
Passionate about his craft, Shipshock occasionally wrote for trade publications such as Cleaner Times Magazine. One such article about graffiti removal piqued the interest of a Circle Pines chemist, he said.
Elephant Snot began to take shape.
Secret formula
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Graffiti Solutions, based in North St. Paul, sells a product called Elephant Snot that can remove graffiti from difficult surfaces like this brick building along Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis. The brick was restored in April 2024. (Courtesy of Tom Shipshock)
Chemist Walter Gorbunow reached out to Shipshock in the late 1990s after reading one of his articles and told him about a formula he was trying to perfect: an environmentally safe graffiti removal product.
Asked if he wanted to join forces, Shipshock took the plunge and the two began experimenting with viscosity, odor and efficiency.
Although he was not a chemist himself, Shipshock was eager to help where he could. “I know you don’t mix ammonia and bleach,” he said with a laugh.
After about a year of experimentation and field testing, they knew they had a winner on their hands, Shipshock said.
Coined by Shipshock, one look at Elephant Snot and the product name becomes quite clear.
The Minnesota State Capitol, Ramsey County Courthouse and Mill City Museum are just a few of the local establishments that have been coated in Elephant Snot over the years.
Mill City in downtown Minneapolis is “a real mecca for taggers because of the height,” Shipshock said, adding that it once took an entire summer to remove all the tags.
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Elephant Snot also touched on most of the locations you’d find on a traveler’s bucket list: Red Rock Canyon, the Great Smoky Mountains, Joshua Tree, Lake Tahoe, Grand Teton, Zion and the Petroglyph National Monumentto name a few.
“From what we hear, Elephant Snot is the only product in the world that can safely remove graffiti from a petroglyph,” said Shipshock.
But it’s not just organizations like the National Park and Forest Service that commission Elephant Snot.
Shipshock remembers individuals on their personal quests who pursued their best-selling product.
“A girl was cleaning up Confederate monuments that were scarred,” he said. Another person would use the product to clean cemetery headstones that had been painted.
“We never know what’s going to happen when we show up every day, but we leave satisfied because we helped someone solve a problem,” Shipshock said.
The city of St. Paul, which is a client of Graffiti Solutions, expects about 500 work orders a year to remove graffiti as buildings are tagged weekly and even daily, Clare Cloyd, the city’s public services manager, said via e-mail.
The city’s Parks and Recreation department employs two full-time painters to handle graffiti removal, Cloyd said, and the cost of materials, including Elephant Snot, can total between $89,000 and $185,000 per year. depending on the volume.
Doing business
Now run by Tom Shipshock, Gil and Carol’s son, Graffiti Solutions is less reliant on local work through Sani-Masters due to national sales of its products.
In fact, the company chose not to renew its contract with the city of Minneapolis following the George Floyd protests.
The Shipshocks chose not to renew the contract, which they had had for 15 years, because “it has become more dangerous to remove graffiti,” Gil Shipshock said, and the city had some unrealistic expectations regarding the time it takes to remove graffiti.
But the city still recommends Shipshocks to anyone looking for graffiti removal services, Gil Shipshock said, adding that there is no bad blood between them.
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Since his mother’s passing in 2021, Tom Shipshock has been adapting to the property with his father’s help and has plans to update the website and online store.
Gil and Carol Shipshock have been married for 56 years and although she has passed away, her presence is still felt in the store. “Carol’s fingerprints are all over it,” Gil Shipshock said.
As for the coveted Elephant Snot recipe that put them on the map, Gil Shipshock has the trademark. When asked if he would ever patent the product, he quickly declined. Why?
“Because then we would have to release the formula,” he said.
