Play-doh, seriously, it was not a toy.  This is serious stuff.  Learn how observing how your customer is using your products can lead to new product ideas and maybe even save your company.  You will also learn the mystery of how they created the name.  The first idea was doozy.

David Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders podcast, teaching business owners, the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Steven Simple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I'm Steven's sidekick and business partner, Dave Young, before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well it's us, but we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients. So here's one of those.

[Peak PTT Ad]

David Young:

Steven, another big old flash from the past right today. You've taken me back to my childhood. Is that what I understand?

Steven Semple:

We're going to play with some Play-Doh.

David Young:

Oh God, I'm hungry anyway.

Steven Semple:

Don't eat the hot dogs that you make, you're not supposed to eat that.

Steven Semple:

Here's the thing, it's amazing, we sometimes forget about things like Play-Doh. So Play-Doh's now owned by Hasbro, has been for a number of years. They still sell 95 million cans of Play-Doh a year.

David Young:

95 million cans of it.

Steven Semple:

95 million cans a year. And when there was a bunch of marketing companies got together a while ago and created this list of the most memorable brands in the world and number 24 was Play-Doh. Mark it in your calendar, September 18th is national Play-Doh Day.

David Young:

Oh, sweet. That's nice. They have their own day.

Steven Semple:

So when you have your own day, you're kind of a bit of a deal.

David Young:

Yeah. I mean, it's a foundational toy for most of us, right? We all remember playing with Play-Doh.

Steven Semple:

And here's the interesting thing, it didn't start as a toy. Didn't start as a toy. So, if we go back to 1920, there's a company called Kutol and it was founded by Cleo McGyver, McGyver, not MacGyver, McGyver, and it was a soap and cleaning product. And basically houses at that time were heated by coal, so there was lots of soot. And what was really popular in that time was wallpaper. Wallpaper was much more popular than painting. So, you basically had a house, it was heated by coal wallpaper on it, lots of soot, and basically, Kutol sold all these products basically to different grocery stores. And what happened is Kroger basically said to them, "Hey, do you have a cleaning product that would clean soot off of wallpaper? Did you have something like that?" And he said, "Sure, I do." And they signed a contract and then he went, "You know, this is really good news because we've been a struggling business about to go bankrupt. We now got this great contract from Kroger."

David Young:

We just got to figure out...

Steven Semple:

We don't have a product. So he went to his younger brother, Noah, and he said, "Can you make a product? I got an order. Can you make a product?" So, they created this putty pliable, like substance that you would basically roll on wallpaper and would collect the soot off the wallpaper and had cleaning product in it and whatnot. And it would clean the wallpaper. And the product did gangbusters in the company made tons of money until suddenly the 1950s come along. And you know what happened in the 1950s? Oil and gas, no longer coal. Way cleaner. Soot went way down, also a trend away from wallpaper to painting. But the big thing is, you didn't need this cleaning product. So demand went, boom, like this. So for the second time in the company's history, first time is struggling and they get those order from Kroger and they make this product. They're now a struggling company again, about to go bankrupt. And so basically they hired their nephew, Joseph to join the business.