The Man Behind The Brand – In the Tool Shed
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 keepng up the house...
Black and
Decker
Burpee
Coleman
Deere
Glidden
Johnson's
Scott's
Sherwin-Williams
Stanley
Weyerhauser
Yale
And the man behind the brand is...
S. Duncan Black and Alonzo Decker
The names Black and Decker are instantly recognized by any homeowner who ever built his own workshop. But consider the products that S. Duncan Black and Alonzo G. Decker set out to make when they pooled $1200 in 1910: a milk bottle cap machine, a vest-pocket adding machine, machinery for the United States Mint, and a cotton picker.
The two partners opened a small machine shop in Baltimore in 1910 to make these specialty machines. The next year their first ads for the Black & Decker Manufacturing Company began appearing in Manufacturers Record & Horseless Age. But the course of their company was soon to change forever.
After much tinkering Black and Decker patented a pistol-grip drill with a trigger switch and universal motor and in 1916 introduced the first portable 1/2" electric drill. In 1918 the company opened product service centers in Boston and New York and added sales representatives in Russia, Japan, Europe and Australia. Sales passed one million dollars.
Black & Decker expanded their line to add other power tools with the unique pistol grip. An electric screwdriver was introduced in 1922 and an electric hammer in 1936. Black & Decker was an innovator in consumer education to teach the public about their new power tools. They purchased two Pierce Arrow buses to use as classrooms on wheels. In 1929 a specially outfitted 6-passenger Travel Air monoplane was used as a flying showroom. And in 1932 one of the first industrial movies, a 60-minute sound production, was used to sell Black & Decker tools.
Black served as president of the firm until 1951 and Decker succeeded him for the next five years. The two men had taught the world about power tools, selling more portable machine tools than anyone else. But why stop there? In 1971 a Black & Decker Lunar Surface Drill removed core samples from the moon on Apollo 15.
Atlee Burpee
Nowhere is a seller's reputation of more paramount importance than the seed business. To the consumer an ill-bred seed looks exactly the blue-ribbon winner. Not until it actually grows months later will the buyer know if he has made a good bargain.
Washington Atlee Burpee never forgot the need to win his customer's trust. He wrote relentlessly in his catalogs about the need for a seed merchant's honesty. At times he even argued against the selling of his own seeds.
At the turn of the century a craze swept America for growing ginseng root to sell to the Chinese trade. Burpee detested such get-rich-quick plotting and angrily fired off a missive in his 1904 catalog admonishing his readers about ginseng root. The plant was devilishly difficult to grow, he wrote, and if it was that easy to make millions of dollars selling ginseng root he would be doing it. But if his customers still wanted to buy ginseng root seed - now knowing the truth - he could sell it in good conscience.
Burpee came to seeds from his days as a poultryman. He became an avian specialist by the age of 14 and in 1874, when he was ready to begin the study of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania at 17, Burpee was actively selling and exhibiting fancy breeds of chickens, geese, turkeys and pigeons. He had already published the first of many authoritative information bulletins, "The Pigeon Loft, How To Furnish and Manage It."
Burpee withdrew from the University of Pennsylvania medical program after one year because he couldn't stand the suffering of patients. In 1875 he offered a line of fowls and livestock by mail order in the 16-page "W. Atlee Burpee's Catalogue of High Class Land and Water Fowls." Seeds were probably first offered as feed for birds. Almost immediately he issued a separate seed catalog he called "Burpee's Farm Annual."
Burpee offered $1.00 worth of vegetable seeds for 25｢ and pushed his introductory deal by offering a $22 sewing machine to anyone buying 300 25｢-boxes. But for the most part he sold his seeds from his Philadelphia area home at premium prices.