That Time a Guy Cornered the Liquid Soap Market by Sneakily Buying Every Hand Soap Pump in the World

just before we get started with this video do want to say that it's brought to you by well me or rather another channel I do call business blaze it's about business clearly but I try to make it interesting it looks the most epic failures and times things went wrong but also blissful moment successes generally it's just the weirdest stuff that I could find from business history and things like why the 50-pound note in the UK is pretty much just for criminals stuff like that it's more laid-back than this channel throwing a good amount of silliness and fun at you along with some facts check it out through the link below and let's get into the video [Music] Robert our tailor is a name you've probably never heard before but this serial entrepreneur made his mark on the world of business by coming up with several products you're almost certainly very familiar with today we're going to talk about on the surface the most boring of those liquid hand soap something you can thank mr. Taylor and is freshly smelling balls of solid steel for being a thing but first a little background on the man born in 1935 Taylor was destined to one day graced the cover of books with titles like the greatest business decisions of all time consistently proving himself to be not only a shrewd businessman but a natural entrepreneur for example as a young man Taylor is known to have made quite a few dollars by training a homing pigeon to fly to his home and then selling it to pet stores repeatedly education wise Taylor studied at both Miami University in Ohio and then Stanford Graduate School of Business graduating from the latter with an MBA in 1959 following this he briefly worked as a salesman for Johnson & Johnson seemingly every great entrepreneur starts by failing and Taylor was no difference in 1963 he started a marketing company with a friends this endeavor ultimately flopped and Taylor decided to go it alone just a year later in 1964 and so it was that at the age of 28 he started a company initially running it out of his garage called village bath products with a three thousand dollar investment about twenty four thousand dollars today that it scraped together from the Contacts it made during his short tenure working for the man not exactly his successful right off the bat when he first tried to sell his handmade soap to a couple dozen companies he had previous business relation hips width from his days with Johnson and Johnson they all turned him down undeterred he then got the idea to match his hand rolled and cloth wrapped soaked towel sets color scheme and all that got some companies interested and they started selling his product along with their bath towel sets village bath products which was later rebranded as Minnetonka after a town near Taylor's home in Minnesota continued to be extremely innovative in the soap market while products commonly seemed today his various master nations were far more out there in his day which perhaps shouldn't come as a surprise coming from a man who purchased a hot air balloon so he could fly it around on the weekends to advertise the product this was a product that saw the New York Times described his rapidly growing business as an offbeat company geared to hippies and people with the luxury bathrooms so what kind of things did he come up with that would appeal to the otherwise seemingly diametrically opposed groups of hippies and the Daddy Warbucks of the world notable soap products included soap designed to look and smell like candy bars and pieces of fruit soap aims that kids could use to draw on themselves in the bathtub and hand rolled scented upscale soap balls packaged in decorative glass jars think the type of product that lines the shelves of Bath & Body Works before that type of product was common his decision to go with offbeat soap product was primarily based on that Taylor knew his company could never compete selling ordinary bathroom products since established companies like Procter & Gamble American Home Products and even his former employer Johnson & Johnson basically dominated the entire market as a result his best hope for making money would be to sell products they wouldn't dare to risk putting on their shelves capitalizing on a niche demand they weren't satisfying as Taylor himself would later state in an interview the best way for an entrepreneur to compete in today's marketplace is to avoid competition or at least find ways to circumvent it of course if a given product line took off the larger companies would inevitably copy the crap out of it such as what happened in the mid-1980s when he introduced checkup anti plaque toothpaste and later bubble gum to the market seeing them become wildly successful before ultimately the big boys swooped in and dominated with their version of the same basic twist on the product forcing his into obscurity this saw Taylor having to extremely nimble and push for constant and very rapid innovation in keeping with this idea Taylor often enlisted the help of his family as one of his daughters Lori Laurence noted it was normal for us to do brainstorming sessions at the dinner table to come up with product names to give him our evaluation of sense consistencies and colors my dad and I did all different kinds of formulations in the kitchen night after night then test the product during the kids bath time to see how it worked I said Lori over time when they were trying to make puffy soap balls meant to be dropped in a bath some days they'd be too flat or they'd get too big and explode like popovers undeterred when things didn't work out she states it simply say tomorrow's a new day there's always a new formula one idea from his family that Taylor found particularly amusing was calling his company's brand of vintage style soaps profit tailors soap Taylor committed fully to the professor Taylor guys in the early days of the company and delivering these soaps to department stores in a vintage Ford pickup truck to give his product an extra authentic feel while Taylor was essentially a machine of producing muddly amusing business anecdotes from his various exploits his real marketing master stroke was the now ubiquitous soft soap the product was conceived in the late 1970s by Taylor while driving to work and contemplating why anybody would put up with bar soap said Taylor I thought our ugly bar soap is and how it usually messes up the bathroom there had to be a better way to wash your hands while liquid soap products were a thing going all the way back to 1865 first patented by a guy called William Sheppard though in the patent noting his was an improved liquid soap implying a similar product was already a thing this wasn't something you typically find in people's homes for home use people just stuck with classic bar soap for washing their hands why well because despite the fact that forms of liquid soap dispensers had been around since at least 1919 when one gh Hans Bean patented a wall-mounted version no company had thought to put liquid hand soap in a container that would make it convenient for use domestically Enso Taylor and his soft soap which was essentially the first mass-produced liquid hand soap ever to be sold to the public all packaged in a convenient bottle featuring a pump of course a key problem with this idea is that while it was revolutionary in some ways a part of the original was enough to patent from his previous experience having bigger companies coffee his ideas not long after he made them successful and then taking over the market Taylor knew that if this one worked out that once again swooped in and used their economic clout to bully his product off store shelves while all well and good for some products it make a quick buck and then move on to his next idea once he was forced out of the market this one he saw as being something that could take his fledgling company to the next level but how is he going to keep it for himself his one advantage was these lumbering large companies were always a little slow to come out with their own copycat version needing to do all sorts of market testing and run everything through the various chains of command as Taylor would note many large consumer product companies get caught up in structure research and justification they're always trying to do a thorough job of risk analysis when they get all the facts together though they find they can't do away with all risks and they often end up either doing nothing or moving very slowly and so it was that he came up with an ingenious and rather ballsy two-stage plan first launched soft soap and essentially leverage every dime he could come up with to advertise it investing a whopping seven million dollars about twenty-one million dollars today on a countrywide ad campaign for his new product to try and get his brand to be the one that everyone associated with liquid hand soap let's put this in perspective this was almost as much money as the largest soap manufacturer of the day dial spent on advertising all their products combined to further put this in perspective Taylor's entire company at this point had only got a net worth of about eight million dollars now to step two which if it wasn't successful would have just seen him essentially spend every dime he could come up with to establish a new soap market for his competitors before launching soft save Taylor made a crucial observation there were only a few companies in the United States at the time that actually made the kind of pumps needed of these companies only one produced enough pumps suitable for mass production on the scale envisioned here and since there also wasn't much in the way of a suitable international company that would be able to provide what was needed here quickly and at a competitive price in effect this left only a single choice for anyone wanting to sell liquid soap on mass using such a pump system thus Taylor's idea was quite simple by literally every pump the company had available for the foreseeable future and how many would he need to buy it turns out about a hundred million to keep the company Kalmar busy at full capacity for about a year the problem was he didn't have the required 12 million dollars about 37 million dollars today to play such an order so he had to wait until the product was launched and hoped that it was a massive hit to give him the money he needed before his competitors decided to make their own copycat product of course when the time came he also had no way of knowing where the Kalmar would agree to the contract if Cal Mart did it was a very real risk that one of the bigger companies would eventually sign a contract with them that would do to tailor what he was attempting to do to everyone else stopped them from getting the needed pumps for a little while and while you might think that agreeing to a massive contract that would see them working at full capacity for the foreseeable future would be a no-brainer the Kalmar consider that this would force them to get rid of all their other business contacts to service one relatively small company when the time came however Kalmar agreed naturally the sequence of events has gone down in history as one of the most ballsy bet the company moves ever and just as Taylor had plans when the larger companies tried to release their own take on Softsoap they quickly realized they couldn't because I'm mysterious freshly smelling large penis owning individual had called dibs almost every suitable pump in the United States that was going to be produced for the next year with literally no competition to speak of during that period soft soap quickly cornered the market seeing minnetonka bringing in excess of 25 million dollars 77 million dollars today within six months of the product launch about double their former sales total across all their product lines during the previous six months within two years of the launch sales of the company had risen to over 100 million dollars about 270 million dollars today and saw the stock price of the company multiplied an incredible 15 fold minnetonka estimated that when competitors finally caught up that still retain about 50% of the emerging total liquid soap market which they tentatively valued at being worth of 400 million dollars long-term although the liquid soap market did prove to be as profitable as Minnetonka predicted after their monopoly on pumps ended their market share ultimately shrank to less than 30 percent when some 100-plus competing products launched but do you remember this is Robert Taylor we're talking about through a variety of marketing stunts such as putting 1.5 ounces less soap in the bottle to allow him to lower his price compared to those using the then standard nine ounce bottles soft soap slowly managed to claw its way back into the number one spot in the market finally only about 7 years after its launch he sold soft soap to Colgate Palmolive for 61 million dollars which is about 136 million dollars today two years later in 1989 he sold off much of the rest of the company for three hundred and seventy six million dollars about seven hundred and seventy million dollars today to Unilever who really just wanted Taylor's extremely lucrative Calvin Klein fragrance line of products that had managed to buy for just 1 million dollars nine years previously when it was floundering then promptly made it wobbly successful he did this by starting with obsession and once again implementing a bet the farm strategy on that product although in this case Taylor simply humbly noted sometimes it's better to be lucky than smart even a blind squirrel finds him not as for Taylor after selling off the company had started with a mere three thousand dollars for a combined almost billion dollars when adjusted for inflation today he retired for two quote in two minutes starting other extremely successful companies after including a high-end salon products company Graham Webb International and the Monterey Bay clothing Co Father time catches up to all men however and his business adventures finally ended with his death from cancer at the age of 77 on August the 29th 2013 on his climb from nothing to literally a member of the entrepreneurship Hall of Fame Taylor would sum up the adventure that is starting companies as such each one gets easier but it's never easy he also sagely noted ten percents of the success of a new consumer product is the idea 90% is the execution that means positioning the product marketing strategy and creativity and as for making such a plan work he notes success is a matter of attitude so next time you're pumping away at that hand soap by your bathroom sink take a moment to thank Robert R Taylor and his cartoonishly simple pump based ploy for not having to mess with the bar soap so I really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below also don't forget to go over 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Channel: Today I Found Out

Views: 348,113

Rating: 4.9568462 out of 5

Keywords: today i found out, tifovidz12, tifo, awesome, facts, didn't know, The History of Liquid Soap, The History of Soap, Robert R Taylor, Minnetonka Corp, HandSoap in a Bottle

Id: QxhqT1Y1jxk

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2020