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Play-doh, seriously, it was not a toy. This is serious stuff. Learn how observing how your customer is using your products can lead to new product ideas and maybe even save your company. You will also learn the mystery of how they created the name. The first idea was a doozy.

David Young:
Stephen, another big old flash from the past today. You’ve taken me back to my childhood. Is that what I understand?

Stephen Semple:
We’re going to play with some Play-Doh.

David Young:
Oh God, I’m hungry anyway.

Stephen Semple:
Don’t eat the hot dogs that you make. You’re not supposed to eat that.

Here’s the thing, it’s amazing, we sometimes forget about things like Play-Doh. So Play-Doh’s now owned by Hasbro and has been for a number of years. They still sell 95 million cans of Play-Doh a year.

David Young:
95 million cans of it.

Stephen Semple:
95 million cans a year. A bunch of marketing companies got together a while ago and created this list of the most memorable brands in the world, and number 24 was Play-Doh. Mark it in your calendar; September 18th is National Play-Doh Day.

David Young:
Oh, sweet. That’s nice. They have their own day.

Stephen Semple:
So when you have your own day, you’re kind of a bit of a deal.

David Young:
Yeah. I mean, it’s a foundational toy for most of us, right? We all remember playing with Play-Doh.

Stephen Semple:
And here’s the interesting thing, it didn’t start as a toy. So, if we go back to 1920, there’s a company called Kutol, and it was founded by Cleo McGyver, McGyver, not MacGyver, McGyver, and it was a soap and cleaning product. And basically, houses at that time were heated by coal, so there was lots of soot. And what was really popular at that time was wallpaper. Wallpaper was much more popular than painting. So, you basically had a house, it was heated by coal with wallpaper in it, lots of soot. And Kutol sold all these products to different grocery stores. And what happened is Kroger said to them, “Hey, do you have a cleaning product that would clean soot off of wallpaper? Did you have something like that?” And he said, “Sure, I do.” And they signed a contract, and then he went, “You know, this is really good news because we’ve been a struggling business about to go bankrupt. We now got this great contract from Kroger.”

David Young:
We just got to figure out…

Stephen Semple:
We don’t have a product. So he went to his younger brother, Noah, and he said, “Can you make a product? I got an order. Can you make a product?” So, they created this putty. A pliable substance that you would roll on wallpaper and it would collect the soot off the wallpaper and it had cleaning product in it and whatnot. And it would clean the wallpaper. And the product did gangbusters and the company made tons of money until suddenly the 1950s come along. And you know what happened in the 1950s? Oil and gas, no longer coal. Way cleaner. Soot went way down and there was also a trend away from wallpaper to painting. But the big thing is, you didn’t need this cleaning product. So demand went bust for the second time in the company’s history. The first time it was struggling and they got those order from Kroger and they make this product. They’re now a struggling company again, about to go bankrupt. And so basically, they hired their nephew, Joseph, to join the business and said, “Hey, come join our business. It’s your job to save it.”

David Young:
I hope Joseph was like an eight-year old…

Stephen Semple:
But no pressure…

David Young:
No pressure, Joseph.

Stephen Semple:
Your job is to save the family business. So, he was thinking about a bunch of different things and his sister-in-law, Kate Zufall, was a school teacher. She had read in a magazine, like a magazine to school teachers, because remember there’s a magazine for every profession. So, she’s reading a magazine to school teachers talking about how there are lots of kids using the Kutol product for arts and crafts.

David Young:
Oh wow. Okay.

Stephen Semple:
So, she mentions this to Joseph, “Hey Joseph, there are lots of people using this for arts and crafts.” And he goes, “Oh, well, that’s really interesting.” So he went and he reformulated the product, took out the cleaning agents and instead of it being… Because it was packaged before in a really big ugly pail because it was more of a commercial product than a consumer product. He put it in a little can.

It’s a little nicer for kids, right. And he came up with an awesome name. It wasn’t originally called Play-Doh, an awesome name. You’re going to love the name: Kutol Rainbow Modeling Compound.

David Young:
Perfect.

Stephen Semple:
Perfect.

David Young:
Rolls off your tongue like…

Stephen Semple:
Rolls right off your tongue. Kate basically looked at Joseph and said, “Are you an idiot? That’s not it. We’re calling it Play-Doh.” So it became Play-Doh. And it started as a single color. So, think about this, they started this like early 1950; by 1958, they were selling $3 million worth of this in 1958 dollars. And in 1964, they started exporting it to Europe, and then they were eventually bought by Hasbro and it made all sorts of money from the Kutol Rainbow Modeling Compound.

David Young:
The international Play-Doh conglomerate was born.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, A.K.A. Known as Play-Doh, September 18th, national Play-Doh Day. So it’s a really interesting story of the first iteration was, we take the order, come up with something, don’t say no to an order, take it. Like if your business is dying and somebody wants to buy something from it, take the order and figure it out.

David Young:
We don’t have a product, but we have an opportunity.

Stephen Semple:
We have an opportunity, so we’re going to seize that opportunity. And then number two was, keeping your eye open to the world. It would be really easy to sit there and go, “Yeah, but it’s not a toy. People are using it as a toy. Man, they’re using it as a toy, and we haven’t even told them it’s a toy, and we haven’t even made it like a toy. But they’re using it as a toy.” Huh, that’s an opportunity, right?

David Young:
Well, yeah, and to think about it, it was in millions of houses.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

David Young:
Of course, somebody figured out it was a toy.

Stephen Semple:
It’s really easy to say, “We don’t do that.” Or it’s really easy to say, “That’s not how our product is used. Our product is a cleaning product. It’s not a toy.”

David Young:
You think about how many moms or families said, “Hey kids, help me get the soot off the wallpaper. You grab some. I’ve got some.” And so now it’s in their hands, they’re playing with it. Of course it ended up as a toy.

Stephen Semple:
You know, it just dawned on me. I wish I could think of the name of the company, but there’s a company out there that creates the sealant. It’s a rubberized sealant, and they’re advertising it a lot right now. And interestingly enough, it just dawned on me. They advertise how you can use it to seal the roof of your RV, they advertise how you can seal your windows in your downtown basement, how you can seal up if there’s a wall that gets busted you can seal up. But they also talk about how you can use it for crafts.

David Young:
Like it’s a modeling or poxy based…

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, you can also use it on modeling crafts. So it’s really interesting they’ve opened up their mind to it, but in the early days of a telephone, there were complaints from the telephone company, because the telephone was originally marketed as an emergency device. This is an emergency device. If something happens in your home, you can call. And what happened is people started phoning each other. And in the early days of the telephone companies, they were running ads saying, “Don’t do that. This is an emergency device.”

No, if your consumer is starting to use it for that, meet them where they’re at. If they’re starting to use your cleaning compound as a toy, maybe it’s a good idea to remove the cleaning agent and make it colorful. Make it a toy, but watch what’s going on and be open to those opportunities. Don’t be narrow-minded. If your customer is sitting there saying, “I don’t want to buy in your store,” and they’re buying stuff online, make it easy to buy online. I know that’s a simple example today, but watch what they’re doing and meet them where they’re at.

David Young:
Absolutely. I think that’s great advice. It just brings to mind loads of other things. I think as a kid, I don’t think I ever glued anything together with rubber cement, but I sure used a lot of it all over my hands. It was fun to play with.

Stephen Semple:
But remember Kutol Rainbow Modeling Compound day September…

David Young:
No, I’ll never remember that. And you won’t either. I just watched you read it, right. You can’t remember that.

Stephen Semple:
I can’t remember it.

David Young:
You can remember Play-Doh, that’s it.

Keep it simple, keep it simple.

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