The Man Behind The Brand – Around The House
by Doug Gelbert
published by Cruden Bay Books at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 by Cruden Bay Books
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Open a copy of the Information Please Almanac and turn to the chapter on famous people. 4000 names and you won't know hardly any. But what about names everyone knows? Pillsbury, Kraft, Maytag, Hertz, Kellogg, Gerber. Nowhere to be found. How many names are more famous than Howard Johnson? Milton Bradley? Oscar Mayer? But who were these folks? Let’s take a look at the men behind the names we see when we look around our house...
Andersen
Armstrong
Bissell
Carrier
Culligan
Fuller
Brush
Hoover
Jacuzzi
Johns
Manville
Maytag
Oster
Simmons
Singer
Steinway
Tappan
Tupperware
And the man behind the brand is...
Hans
Andersen
In
1870, 16-year old Hans Andersen arrived in Portland, Maine to start a
new life. Bringing with him his only possessions - a set of drafting
tools and a diploma from night school in Copenhagen - his goal was to
get to the Midwest. Heading west, he purposely sought work from
employers who did not speak his native language so he would have to
learn English. Andersen learned his first three English words while
helping a team of field hands clear tree stumps: “All together
boys.”
He ended up in Spring Valley, Minnesota, and by his
early twenties, he began operating a lumber yard. Shortly thereafter
he was hired by the largest saw mill in LaCrosse, Wisconsin to
dispose of a huge surplus of lumber that was the result of low demand
during the Depression of the 1880s. Hans harbored retail experience
that served him well in this endeavor. He was so successful that when
the project was complete he was able to buy his own sawmill in St.
Cloud, Minnesota.
In 1886 Andersen learned of another major
lumber surplus - about one million board feet - just south of a town
called Hudson, Wisconsin. He began managing the sawmill in town and
brought along some of his best men from St. Cloud. But when fall
came, the mill’s owner insisted these laborers be laid off during
the slow winter months. Andersen refused and resigned on the spot. He
started his own retail lumber yard and hired the men to work for
him.
At the time there existed no accurate window frame on the
market. So, the Andersen Lumber Company began to manufacture
standardized window frame units made of durable white pine. By
standardizing a few basic dimensions the company gained the advantage
of mass production. These window frame units were made with such
precision they surpassed the quality of any frame available to home
builders at the time of their introduction.
The actual
manufacture of window and door frames began in earnest in 1904. By
1912, production reached 132,455 frames. Andersen developed the
“two-bundle” method of packaging knocked down window frame units.
Eleven sets of both horizontal and vertical members, packaged
separately, cold be assembled in a variety of combinations that fit
together perfectly without cutting or trimming.
In 1913 the
Andersen Lumber Company moved into a new 66,362 square-foot facility
in what would become Bayport, Minnesota. The next year Andersen died
at the age of 60 with the family business established as the leading
innovator in the window business.
Thomas
Armstrong
By
1860 24-year old Thomas Armstrong had saved up $300 from his job as a
clerk in a Pittsburgh glass factory. He was due to be wed that year
and it seemed a fine stake upon which to start a married life. But
instead Armstrong took the money and invested in a one-room shop run
by John D. Glass who cut out cork bottle stoppers. He did, however,
hold on to his day job, stopping by the cork shop in the evenings to
cut cork by hand.
Each piece of cork sold by John D. Glass &
Co. had to be cut and shaped by hand. It was tedious and slow and
impossible to deliver cork of uniform quality to customers. In 1862,
again with the support of his wife, Armstrong invested $1000 in an
unproven machine that cut cork. He quit his clerk’s job and jumped
into the cork business full-time.
Armstrong now needed to
expand his market greatly to recoup such a large investment. Cork was
the only way to plug the bottle of the day, more and more of which
were containing the new pharmaceuticals and alcoholic beverages that
were appearing everywhere on the market. But at the time cork was
sold locally so buyers were able to inspect and choose the cork they
wanted. It was a policy of “buyer beware.”
Armstrong knew
that to ship his cork to distant markets he needed a way to insure
its quality. In 1864 John Glass died and Armstrong brought his
brother into the firm as partner. He pioneered brand-name recognition
in the cork industry by stamping “Armstrong” on all his bags of
cork. The name carried with it a money-back guarantee.
During
the Civil War Armstrong made bottle stoppers for the Union Army. He
was singled out for praise for fulfilling contracts at the agreed
price with top-grade corks. The favorable publicity and Armstrong’s
groundwork for national distribution led to a large drug contract
after which the company leapt forward.
In 1878 Armstrong
stopped buying cork from importers and set up direct purchasing lines
with cork suppliers in Spain and around the Mediterranean. By 1890
Armstrong was the world’s largest cork manufacturer with 750
employees, all of whom Thomas Armstrong could address by name.
Into
the 20th Century Armstrong’s only raw material was cork. But cork
harvesting was a seasonal activity and the fluctuations in supply led
to fluctuations in price and profit for Armstrong. More ominously
there was a growing fervor in America to ban the sale of all alcohol
- and the elimination of one of Armstrong’s biggest markets.
The
product line in the early 1900s included insulation, cork board,
gaskets and flexible coverings. But the year 1908 simultaneously saw
a death and birth for the company. Thomas Armstrong died in
Pittsburgh, ending the founder’s reign and the company’s ties to
the city.
Meanwhile in Lancaster, Pennsylvania the Armstrong
Cork Company produced its first linoleum flooring. Linoleum, made
from cork flour, mineral fillers and linseed oil pressed onto a
burlap backing at high temperatures, was not a new product. But
Armstrong was the first to look past its utilitarian uses and add
colors suitable for every room in a house. Future generations of
Americans would never see an Armstrong cork.
Melville
Bissell
Is
it more improbable that the Bissell name is known at all or that it
is still known today? There were carpet sweepers patented 200 years
before Melville Bissell brought his first mechanical sweeper on the
market in 1876 and his sweeper itself should have been swept away
with the popularization of the vacuum cleaner fifty years later. But
people are still “Bisselling,” just as they did a century
ago.
Melville and Anna Bissell sold crockery in Grand Rapids,
Michigan. The fragile glass and china arrived in their shop packed
tightly in sawdust stuffed in crates. Invariably the dust would spill
on the floors and rugs, irritating the Bissells’ allergies. Among
the many carpet sweepers available at the time Melville Bissell
selected the “Welcome” to pull the allergy-inflaming dust from
his rugs.
A lifelong tinkerer, Bissell found his new carpet
sweeper lacking and set out to make a few improvements on his own.
His model used floor wheels and angled bristles to fling debris up
into a removable compartment. He was quite satisfied with his new
invention and when several patrons inquired about the device, the now
clear-eyed Bissell converted the second floor of the crockery store
into a carpet sweeper assembly area.
The timing was right in
America. New scientific research into the dangers of germs and filth
spurred a new devotion to housecleaning. Still, the spread of the
Bissell name from a small crockery store in Grand Rapids to every
household in America was not achieved without dedicated missionary
work, mostly performed by Anna Bissell. While her husband supervised
the shop as its capacity grew to 30 machines a day Anna Bissell
visited shopkeepers, many over and over, until she was able to win
in-store demonstrations and displays for the Bissell sweeper across
Michigan.
Early product information stressed the mechanical
marvels of the Bissell sweeper, touting product innovations to
homemakers who just wanted clean rugs. When a young company
bookkeeper persuaded the Bissells to emphasize the cases constructed
of “golden maple, opulent walnut and rich mahogany” sales soared.
When Bissell introduced a limited edition sweeper crafted from rare
vermilion wood from the jungles of India the advertising emphasized
how the wood was dragged by elephants to the banks of the Ganges
River. Bissell sold more sweepers in six weeks than it had the
previous year.
In 1883 the Bissells moved into a new
five-story brick factory which was gutted by fire almost immediately.
Melville Bissell mortgaged his entire personal fortune, including a
team of prized harness horses, to rebuild and meet orders. The rushed
production resulted in defective sweepers which Bissell recalled at
an astronomical loss of $35,000. But the revolution in American
housecleaning was in full force, women were happily “Bisselling,”
as carpet sweeping came to be known, and the firm withstood these
reversals.
In 1889 Melville Bissell contracted pneumonia and
died at the age of 45. Anna Bissell assumed the presidency, becoming
one of America’s first female corporate executives. She had been
deeply involved with the company from the start and now she
aggressively set out to make Bissell an international phenomenon, not
just an American institution. As the Bissell carpet sweeper colonized
the world it even received a product endorsement from Queen Victoria
and the Bissell rolled across the rugs in Buckingham Palace.
Anna
Bissell guided the company into the 1920s, leading the fight against
the insurgency of the new electric vacuum cleaners. No longer was the
mechanical sweeper the only convenience in the closet. But the
Bissell has survived, dodging obsolescence as a quick-cleaning
adjunct to its more powerful neighbor for use on small messes.