This Company Is No Squeaky Wheel When It Comes to Self-Promotion
Apparently somebody forget to tell the folks at WD-40 Co. that San Diego is not “business friendly.”
All they did is develop a nifty product, market the blazes out of it, withstand a battalion of imitators and climb to $100 million a year in worldwide sales.
Howdidtheydoit?
“It was just done with American enterprise, what can I say?” says marketing services manager Louis E. Repaci.
If you’ve been living in a cave somewhere, let me explain: WD-40 stops squeaks, protects metal from rusting, loosens frozen parts and is applied to everything from screen door hinges to aircraft carriers.
There are competing products, but WD-40 has 70% of the market: “We’re in more homes than Coca-Cola.”
And WD-40 is as San Diego as the zoo or sunburns.
Next year will be the 40th anniversary of the discovery of the formula. Lab guys were trying to find a product for Convair to use on the Atlas rocket.
It was the 40th experiment at water displacement. Hence, the name WD-40.
“A lot of people don’t know that,” Repaci says.
Fact is that a lot of people don’t even know WD-40 is in San Diego at all. The company is not big on trumpets.
That may change when the company holds an anniversary bash. It’s mild by business standards--no fireworks or monuments to the founders--but absolutely radical by WD-40 standards.
The company is looking for San Diegans who were involved when WD-40 was developed. There will also be a new aerosol can; it will look just like the regular yellow-blue-red can but with “40th Anniversary.”
“It’s a commemorative can,” Repaci explains. “It will be a collectors’ item.”
It will never be on the Gray Line Tour, but the company headquarters is in a nondescript business park off West Morena Boulevard where enough of the “secret sauce” is brewed each week for 1 million cans.
The president, Gerald C. Schleif, has an office about the size of a third-string bureaucrat’s at City Hall. Executive aggrandizement is not the WD-40 style.
The art on Schleif’s wall--a crashing wave with light filtering--is vintage dime store.
“Nobody comes to visit us here,” Schleif says, “so it’s irrelevant.”
Sheltered Away From Home
People and what they’re doing.
* After one week on the job, Mayor Susan Golding has left for a three-week vacation in the Far East (Thailand, Bali and other stops) with her children.
That means she’ll miss helping out in the city’s annual Christmas shelter program for the homeless.
Explanation: The travel plans were made before the election, non-refundable tickets, etc.
(Before she left, Golding announced that, in response to her plea, the Boy Scouts and Marine reservists have donated 800 cots for the shelter, averting a shortage.)
* Dr. Anthony Cuomo, a San Diego pulmonary specialist, was not invited to Bill Clinton’s policy powwow this week.
But that didn’t stop Cuomo from sending an urgent letter Monday to Clinton asking him to reconsider his support for the “managed care” plan, which means fewer tests and fewer second opinions to cut costs.
Cuomo includes information about a San Diegan who died after her doctor misdiagnosed her cancer and declined to do additional tests.
Managed care, Cuomo fumes, is equal to “making ‘fiscal euthanasia’ our national health care policy.”
The letter is signed by 28 other doctors.
* A smooth talker is making phone calls in San Diego seeking donations to the “California Reserve (Police) Officers Assn.”
Be skeptical. The smooth talker isn’t connected to any reserve officer association known locally.
* San Diegans Sally Buckalew and Paul Davis are writing a possible script for TV’s “Columbo” involving the Hotel del Coronado and the mysterious death of Kate Morgan in 1892. Peter Falk likes the outline.
* San Diego vice cops require topless dancers to wear opaque pantyhose. How opaque?
Cops have been known to ask a dancer to run a credit card underneath her hose.
If the card can be read, the dancer can be busted.
Legal Niceties
Lawyer: What is your current employment?
Witness: I’m self-employed.
Lawyer: By whom?
