Word: penned
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When 25-year-old Patrick Joseph Frawley Jr. went into the ball-point-pen business in 1949, he could not have picked a worse time. The market was flooded with pens; bankers warned against writing checks with them (forgers could literally pick up a transfer of a signature); schoolteachers banned them; and retailers were swamped with complaints. But Pat Frawley was full of confidence-and with good reason. At 16 he was a salesman for his father's export-import business in Nicaragua; at 18 he negotiated a $300,000 deal between Panama and U.S. Rubber...
While he ran his San Francisco business with one hand, Frawley began to sell ballpoint pens, made by a Los Angeles aircraft-parts manufacturer, with the other. Before long, the manufacturer could not keep up with sales of the inexpensive (97?) pen, which wrote well and did not leak. Frawley bought him out for $18,000, rented a factory for $450 a month and started manufacturing Paper-Mate pens. To solve the problem of fading and transferable ink, he used a new ink that a Hungarian chemist mixed in a makeshift home lab. Frawley's first selling coup...
...Frawley sold 4,000,000 pens and decided to invade the tough New York market. Twenty-two high-pressure salesmen visited 2,400 stores in six weeks. They wrote on retailers' shirts, promised a new $15 shirt if the ink did not wash out. His salesmen gave pens to school principals, won their approval and then advertised it. In the first year he spent $30,000 for advertising. This year PaperMate is spending $5,000,000. As a result, sales climbed from $360,000 to an estimated $26 million for 1955. In six years Frawley sold 51 million pens...
...pays the capital-gains tax, Pat Frawley will have $11.4 million left for his six years' work. Gillette bought the company in line with its policy of diversifying into home permanent kits, shampoo and lipstick, in addition to blades. Hired to run Gillette's new ball-point-pen division: Pat Frawley...
...Success. While the plan had worked with troubled companies, how would it work in a successful one? The test came at the Parker Pen Co. of Janesville, Wis. A progressive firm, Parker had an intelligent management and union, a standard incentive system, a new retirement plan, a sleekly modern, air-conditioned plant with such production aids as piped-in music for its workers. Nevertheless, the company found that even a good incentive plan made trouble. Some men in low-paying jobs were taking home more pay than the men in highly skilled divisions...