Train cars, overpasses and abandoned buildings often find themselves on the wrong end of a spray paint canister. But what happens when taggers target ecologically-sensitive areas like the Petroglyph National Monument or Joshua Tree National Park?

Based in North St. Paul, Graffiti Solutions is removing marks from the Twin Cities and across the country with its biodegradable, 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 the Shipshocks’ operations, Graffiti Solutions, which sells graffiti-removal chemicals and products, followed in the early 1990s.

When Graffiti Solutions was first established, 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 spot “repeat offenders” by their tags.

“We hadn’t seen this one 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 like Cleaner Times Magazine. One such op-ed on graffiti removal piqued the interest of a chemist from Circle Pines, he said.

Elephant Snot began to take form.

Secret formula

Chemist Walter Gorbunow reached out to Shipshock in the late 1990s after reading one of his articles and told him about a formula he’d been trying to perfect: an environmentally safe graffiti-removal product.

Asked if he wanted to join forces, Shipshock was all in and the two began experimenting with viscosity, odor and efficiency.

Although 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 chuckle.

After about a year of experiments and field tests, they knew they had a winner on their hands, Shipshock said.

Coined by Shipshock, one look at Elephant Snot and the product name becomes abundantly clear.

The Minnesota State Capitol, Ramsey County Courthouse and the 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 a whole summer to remove all of the tags.

Elephant Snot also has touched most 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 Monument, to name a few.

“From what we’ve heard, Elephant Snot is the only product in the world that can safely remove graffiti from a petroglyph,” Shipshock said.

But it’s not just organizations like the National Park and Forest Services that order Elephant Snot.

Shipshock remembers individuals on their own personal missions who sought out their best-selling product.

“One gal was going around and cleaning Confederate monuments that kept getting tagged,” he said. Another person would use the product to clean up headstones in cemeteries that had been painted over.

“We never know what’s going to happen when we come in each day, but we leave satisfied because we helped someone solve a problem,” Shipshock said.

The city of St. Paul, which is a customer of Graffiti Solutions, expects some 500 work orders a year to remove graffiti as buildings get tagged weekly and even daily, said Clare Cloyd, public service manager for the city, in an email.

The city’s Parks and Recreation department employs two full-time painters to handle graffiti removal, Cloyd said, and the cost for materials, including Elephant Snot, can total $89,000 to $185,000 a year depending on the volume.

Doing business

Now run by Tom Shipshock, the son of Gil and Carol, Graffiti Solutions is less reliant on local work through Sani-Masters due to the nationwide sales of their products.

In fact, the business chose not to renew a contract with the city of Minneapolis in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests.

The Shipshocks chose not to renew the contract, which they’d had for 15 years, because “it became more dangerous to do graffiti removal,” Gil Shipshock said, and the city held some unrealistic expectations in regards to the time it takes to remove graffiti.

But the city still recommends the Shipshocks to anyone looking for graffiti-removal services, Gil Shipshock said, adding that there is no bad blood between them.

Since the passing of his mother in 2021, Tom Shipshock has been adjusting to ownership with the help of his father and has plans to update the website and the online store.

Gil and Carol Shipshock were married for 56 years and although she has passed, her presence is still felt at the store. “Carol’s fingerprints are all over this place,” Gil Shipshock said.

As for the coveted Elephant Snot recipe that put them on the map, Gil Shipshock has the trademark. Asked if he’ll ever patent the product, he quickly declined. Why?

“Because then we’d have to release the formula,” he said.