‘Post-Its’ Beat the Odds : Glue’s Failure Backs 3M’s Biggest Success
This is the story of how a big corporation produced its biggest hit ever from out of a failure.
It is the story of how a company with unwieldy numbers--$7.7 billion in sales and 86,700 employees last year--and an active policy of encouraging individual entrepreneurship and innovation watched that policy bear fruit.
The company is Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing, usually known simply as 3M. The product is Post-It, those ubiquitous little yellow note pads with the sticky backing, one of the top five sellers in the office supply industry.
Knock on the Door
The tale begins in 1973. Geoffrey C. Nicholson had just been named new-product manager for 3M’s big commercial tape division. He hadn’t been on the job 48 hours when two researchers from 3M central research, Spence Silver and Bob Olivera, knocked on his door.
They had stumbled upon an adhesive that flunked all of the conventional 3M tests. 3M’s business is making adhesives that stick better. This one hardly stuck at all.
Around 3M they were calling it “the adhesive that fails.”
Still, Silver and Olivera were convinced they were onto something. They even had a patent for it. They just couldn’t find an application. Could Nicholson help?
Meantime, one of the researchers that Nicholson had inherited, 18-year 3M veteran Arthur Fry, was hard at work on a tape to keep books in place on a shelf. The idea came to him while he was at work on a similar tape for the bottom of skis.
While watching the Winter Olympics, Fry noticed that changing weather conditions gave skiers fits because they had to change the wax on their skis accordingly.
3M is famous for its “bootleg slack” policy. Its employees are allowed to use up to 15% of their work time on the projects dearest to them. Fry figured he could design a removable tape to replace the wax. He would make it at work, using his 15% pet project time.
While working on that one day, he reached under his desk to pull out a phone book. Everything else tumbled to the floor. “Why is it,” he asked himself, “that whenever I wriggle a book a quarter of an inch, everything else seems to move an inch and a half?”
Scrawling out some mathematical calculations, Fry realized that he had just come face to face with a scientific fact of life. “Hmmm,” he remembers muttering to himself, “there are a hell of a lot more bookshelves than ski bindings out there.”
Singing in Church Choir
Fry began calling on librarians, who assured him that falling books were indeed a problem. Patrons move a book and others fall to the floor. Their bindings crack. The patrons are embarrassed. They return the books to the wrong place.
Fry convinced 3M that a stabilizing tape for bookshelves could be a big seller. And that’s what he was doing for a living when the challenge of his life came along.
It was a Sunday in June, 1974. Fry was singing in the church choir. But he was distracted because the slips of paper that he was using to mark his place in the hymnal kept falling to the floor. If he bent back the page, he would permanently mar the book. What he needed was a marker that would stick to the page as long as he wanted it to and then lift off without tearing the hymnal. Something permanently temporary.
As he daydreamed, it occurred to him that an adhesive matching that description already existed at 3M: “The adhesive that fails.”
Early the next day, Fry cranked out a crude example of such a marker and presented it and his idea to his supervisor, Bob Melenda. Proceed with the library tape, he was told, but work on this, too.
Fry had his dream project. Silver and Olivera had their application. What could possibly go wrong? Just about everything.
Getting the adhesive just right proved to be a months-long nightmare. Too sticky and the marker tore the paper. Not sticky enough and the marker fell off.
Nor did 3M have the right equipment to make the notes, which came to be called “Press and Peel.” Machines had to be designed and built. Would there be enough demand to justify the huge expense? “Some people thought it was like taking the Queen Mary out to do crappie fishing,” Fry says.
Doubts, in fact, were the biggest hurdle of all. “The whole project was very tenuous,” Fry recalls. “There were a lot of people around here saying instinctively that you can’t sell a piece of paper like that for a penny when you can get scratch paper for almost nothing.”
Another strike against Fry’s pet project was the realization by some that the product, formally dubbed Post-It, would be competing with that other 3M success, Scotch tape.
When 3M began distributing the notes in 1976, the naysayers appeared to be right. Going through its usual marketing channels, 3M offered the notes to distributors and office suppliers. Sales barely crept along. 3M was ready to kill the project. But customer demand saved the day. When the Post-It team asked users of the notes whether they would buy them again, a resounding 80% said yes. 3M figures a 50% repeat customer rate predicts a big hit.
Meantime, Nicholson had decided to find out for himself what was wrong. He walked the streets, visiting one office after another, demonstrating the product. Crowds would gather and people would regale him with ideas for how these notes could be used.
Nicholson’s secretary, meanwhile, was getting so many requests for the notes from 3Mers that she wasn’t getting her work done. Fry couldn’t produce enough to meet the demand. When Nicholson heard this, he instructed her to redirect the calls to the marketing department. 3M Chairman Lewis Lehr’s secretary was directing calls there, too. Lehr had sent some notes to chief executives of major Fortune 500 companies and their executive secretaries and was inundated with questions about “these little yellow pads.”
Marketing got the message. 3M’s normal marketing channels weren’t right for this product. Once sales shifted directly to the consumer, the little pads sold like gangbusters. Public demand forced 3M to speed up its national distribution date.
Nicholson says he “knew we had a winner. Bigger than Magic Tape.”
He was right. Six years after the notes became widely available in stores nationwide, sales exceed $100 million a year, making Post-It the most successful new product in 3M history.
