The P&G story

“It Floats”.

Adversity is our best friend. It gives us the opportunity to innovate and break away from the pack.

William Procter was a candle maker. When a soap maker named John Gamble joined him, both of them set up a soap factory in Cincinnati by the river Ohio.

It was the right move. Thomas Edison had just invented the light bulb and candle sale was going down drastically. The company was heading towards bankruptcy.

…

Naturally James Gamble was a worried man. In his distress, one day he failed to shut off the soap-making machine when he went to lunch. As he returned, he found the soap mixture was all puffed-up and frothy. It had trapped far more air than the usual sample because of the extra time. The extra air made the lather lighter than water.

IT FLOATED.

James, instead of throwing away the mixture made it into new soap and sent it to market. Within a month they received orders for more of “this floating soap.” The people in the Order Department were perplexed.

In Cincinnati, in those days, more people bathed in the Ohio River. This new floating soap wouldn’t sink in the muddy water and became a run away sensation in Ohio.

So James found a new name for the soap from the Bible, ‘the Ivory’.

“Today, Ivory floats because we intentionally whip a small amount of air into Ivory.”

In October 1879, the first bar of Ivory soap was produced with 80 employees on roll. Today, Ivory Soap is in its 140th year and still remains in production.

Today Proctor & Gamble is a 100 billion dollar company and employs 90,000 employee.

Ivory soap is still the company’s most well-known product.

Moral of the story:

Adversity is our best friend. It gives us the opportunity to innovate and break away from the pack.