A Wealth of Ideas : Anaheim Inventor of Jet-X, Slush Mug, Turbo-Wash Keeps On Creating
In 1966, Rudy Proctor and his younger brother, Denver, were workaday salesmen when they had an idea for a household device that would mix soap and water together to spray cars clean.
The brothers scraped together what seemed to them a huge sum of $2,000 to hire experts to design a plastic garden-hose attachment durable enough to withstand strong water pressure.
The experts said it couldn’t be done. But Rudy Proctor persisted.
He found a factory that made plastic molds and asked if he could use the machinery after hours to work on designs for the device. Eight months later, the brothers had their attachment and, within five years, Proctor says, the Jet-X car washer had made them millionaires.
Proctor, an Anaheim inventor who dropped out of the eighth grade to help support his family, has made $10 million with gadgets such as Jet-X, the Slush Mug and his best-known product, Turbo-Wash, another car-cleaning product.
Now he’s at it again. His latest invention is an all-in-one household cleaner called Take 5, which Proctor claims can clean windows without streaking, erase bathtub rings and remove nail polish from carpets.
His company, Rollout L.P., has succeeded in persuading the Lucky supermarket chain to begin selling the product at its stores next week.
Proctor, 58, has spent two years and $1 million to develop Take 5. The company is planning to spend another $1 million for an eight-week radio, television and newspaper advertising campaign that begins April 1.
Admarketing, a Century City advertising agency, has created a marketing campaign that will attempt to overcome any consumer qualms about the product’s price: $7.99 for the first bottle and $2.99 for refills. Proctor believes that consumers will see the value in spending more for a concentrated cleaner.
Proctor’s dream scenario is to capture at least a third of the $900-million annual market for all-purpose cleaners in the United States. But while Proctor’s other ventures have had few competitors, the cleaner market is flooded with well-established, big-name products such as Fantastic, Formula 409 and Simple Green.
But Proctor is counting on his product’s unique design and easy use. The Take 5 spray bottle has twin tubes that lead to separate containers of water and cleaning fluid. It has a dial with five settings that allows the consumer to adjust the concentration of the cleaner. Other concentrates require buckets and mixing.
Devising the perfect product is a Proctor obsession. “Everything I see, I’ve got to change it, fix it,” he said.
Proctor shares a makeshift office with the eldest of his nine children, Rudy Jr., in the Tri-Star Plastics building in
Anaheim, which manufactures parts for Turbo-Wash and Take 5. The fluorescent lights in the office flicker, and the only clues to Proctor’s wealth are a chunky gold ring and a pair of blue snakeskin shoes.
Proctor was the second of 11 children raised in a small town outside of Denver. His father died when he was 14, and, to help out his family, Proctor would go to the local market every morning and cart home day-old vegetables discarded by merchants. His early problems, he says, helped teach him self-reliance.
Proctor’s first invention was an oil-pan plug for a car that could be opened and closed from under the hood. He never made the plug because someone else thought of a similar idea first and patented it. Proctor’s second idea was a garden-hose attachment to wash cars.
The 25-cent carwash was just coming on the market, and Proctor decided it was the chemicals, not the water pressure, that was doing most of the cleaning. “I found out what chemicals they were using and ordered some,” Proctor recalled. “I mixed them in a cup, threw them on the fender of the car and used a hose to rinse it to see if it would come clean.”
In 1972, the Proctor brothers sold the company that made Jet-X and bought a dude ranch in Wyoming. They spent 10 years “having fun and making very little money,” Proctor said. The year after they sold the farm in 1983, a sales representative for Jet-X called Proctor and asked if he had any more ideas to sell.
Proctor eventually went into business with the former Jet-X representative, Fred Reinstein, selling Slush Mugs, which are soft-drink containers that turn soda into icy slush, and Turbo-Wash, which improved on the Jet-X by using a collapsible wand to mix the soap and water. The Slush Mugs grossed $11 million and Turbo-Wash, with 30% of its sales overseas, has grossed $100 million in three years, Proctor said.
The Anaheim inventor says he learned a valuable lesson with the Slush Mug. Two months after introducing the product in 1983, at least seven copycat products hit the market at a lower price. Fighting the copycats in court is expensive, Proctor said, and often it’s difficult to find them after they’ve made a quick profit and closed up shop. He decided not to sue the Slush Mug rivals because he figured that the product was a fad item and not worth a long court battle. But he’s gone to court 12 times to protect patents on Turbo-Wash, and he plans to do the same with Take 5.
Proctor took out 45 patents on Take 5 before he showed it to the public. Some of them are for ideas that could be derived from Take 5; for example, a spray top that can draw from three bottles instead of two.
“I’m not going to let someone come in and take over my efforts,” Proctor said.
