10-Play-Doh

Kutol Products of Cincinnati, founded in 1912, made one thing well: a soft, pliable, putty-like compound that you rolled across wallpaper to lift off soot. This was a real and substantial business. Homes in the first half of the twentieth century were heated by coal, and coal deposits a greasy black film on every interior surface. Wallpaper could not be washed, water destroyed it, so every spring, households rolled Kutol’s dough across their walls, watched it turn grey, and threw it out. Kutol sold it by the truckload and was for a time the largest manufacturer of wallpaper cleaner in the world. Then, after the Second World War, American homes converted to oil, gas, and electric heat. The soot stopped. Vinyl wallpaper arrived and could simply be wiped down. In the space of a few years, the entire reason for Kutol’s product ceased to exist, and the company slid toward collapse. The rescue came from outside the company entirely. Kay Zufall was a nursery school teacher in New Jersey and the sister-in-law of Joseph McVicker, a Kutol principal. She came across an article suggesting wallpaper cleaner could be used for children’s modeling projects, tried it with her class, and watched a room of small children fall completely in love with a doomed industrial product. It was soft, non-toxic, endlessly reusable, and — unlike modeling clay of the era — did not stain, dry out immediately, or smell chemical. Zufall told McVicker to sell it as a toy. She also told him his working name was terrible and suggested Play-Doh. McVicker set up Rainbow Crafts to sell it. The compound was essentially unchanged — flour, water, salt, and a mineral oil — but the color went from institutional off-white to primary colors, the packaging went from a utility can to a toy can, and the customer went from a housewife with sooty walls to a child. The first buyer was Woodward & Lothrop in Washington, D.C., in 1956, followed by Macy’s and Marshall Field’s. The decisive move was television: in 1958 Play-Doh ran on children’s programming including Captain Kangaroo, where Bob Keeshan featured it twice a week in exchange for two percent of sales. McVicker was a millionaire before he turned twenty-seven. General Mills bought Rainbow Crafts in 1965. Hasbro has owned the brand since 1991. Over three billion cans have been sold, more than 700 million pounds of a substance originally formulated to clean coal soot off wallpaper. The structural lesson is sharper here than in any of the software cases, because nothing about the product changed. Kutol did not invent anything. It did not reformulate, re-engineer, or improve. The compound that saved the company was the exact compound that was killing it. What changed was the frame, who it was for and what it was called. Kutol, incidentally, still exists, making commercial soap. It survived the death of its own category twice over. The lesson: sometimes the pivot isn’t a new product. It’s the same product, held up to a different cust