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- By 1905,
three of the four founders of Kimberly-Clark had passed away,
and John Alfred Kimberly had retired from active management.
- And so, the constant for Kimberly-Clark
was a man named Frank J. Sensenbrenner.
Frank J. Sensenbrenner is born in Menasha
and Sensenbrenner was kind of a classic American success story--
dropped out of school in 8th grade,
kind of kicked around for a little bit.
He found his way into papermaking
doing bookkeeping for Kimberly-Clark
in several of their mills.
Sensenbrenner calls himself the general manager,
but he's really the chief executive.
He's calling the shots.
One of his most important accomplishments
is that he realized
that chemistry was going to be the basis of success
for Kimberly-Clark.
- In 1914, the company hired
an Austrian-born chemist named Ernst Mahler.
Mahler had studied at
the top paper-making university in the world in Germany
and had many contacts at the school.
- And so, Mahler was able
to bring this back to tiny Neenah, Wisconsin
and create a staff
that was solely focused on innovation in paper-making.
This is a manufacturing company,
and the paper-making process is heavily manufacturing-based.
When you think of taking giant trees,
and stripping them down to nothing,
turning them into a pulp soup with chemicals,
and then that eventually becoming paper--
this is a heavy manufacturing process.
And under Mahler's leadership,
they're able to really turn this heavy manufacturing company
into a first rate R&D company.
And that's fueling everything.
- A new opportunity for the company
emerged with the rising price of cotton,
as an insect
called the boll weevil spread throughout the south.
- So Kimberly-Clark scientists want to find a way
to turn logs into cotton,
and the opportunities for this kind of product
seemed unlimited.
So James C. Kimberly and Mahler
head back to Europe on a fact-finding mission,
right before World War I breaks out.
But while they were there, they used Mahler's connections,
they talked to a lot of scientists,
learned some things about the chemistry of paper-making,
and they think, "Wow!"
They have kind of the key now.
And company lore has it
that Kimberly and Mahler are high-tailing it across Europe
and back to the United States,
just as World War I is breaking out.
They come back to Neenah, and they were able to adapt
the German process to the American trees
and that led to the ability
to make this kind of fluffy cotton wadding,
and they call it "Cellucotton."
And they realize this could be used in hospitals right away.
So Sensenbrenner sends out a team of sales people
to talk to Midwestern hospitals,
asking them to test out this new product.
And almost instantly,
they realized, "This is better than cotton."
It's more absorbent, it's cheaper to make,
and the Red Cross needs absorbent wadding
for bandages and in surgery,
and the Army War Department needs the same materials.
- Kimberly-Clark won a contract to sell cotton wadding,
at cost, for the war effort,
and huge orders came in.
- The Armistice ends the war in 1918,
and the Army and the Red Cross immediately stop the contracts.
And so Kimberly-Clark
has tons and tons of excess Cellucotton
and they don't know what to do with it.
- Kimberly and Mahler traveled
to Sears and Roebuck in Chicago,
where they hired a salesman named Walter Luecke
to figure out a new use for the product.
Luecke found a letter in the company files
from a group of French nurses, who gave him a suggestion.
- This wadding you've been sending over--
we've noticed that women are using this
for sanitary napkins,
so you've got a real opportunity
to create a product that's necessary.
- Despite the need for the product,
marketing it
meant breaking through strong cultural taboos,
in businesses run mostly by men.
- When consumers wanted to buy products,
there was usually a table or a glass barrier
between the clerk and the consumer.
So the consumer had to ask the clerk for all their products.
This was such a cultural taboo,
men weren't willing to even stock the product,
let alone talk about it.
So they had to overcome this barrier.
Kimberly-Clark tried direct sales--
they tried to sell it directly to women,
they tried to get women to sign up.
It's such a taboo topic
that women won't even take free samples.
- The company gave the unmentionable product
a new name-- Kotex--
and overcame the reluctance of national magazines
to run their ads.
Sales were slow.
But a decisive breakthrough came,
after creating a new way to buy it--
with the product placed on top of a counter,
next to a coin box.
- Customer puts the coin into the box,
takes the box away.
No conversation.
And this was revolutionary,
not only for Kimberly-Clark and this product
but for the buying process in America.
Self-service was not a thing
that people understood or ever did,
and so this was one of the first self-service opportunities
that people had,
and it kind of changed the way people thought about shopping.
- Kimberly-Clark soon developed another consumer product
based on its wartime research.
Using the filter material developed for gas masks,
researchers developed an absorbent tissue
called Kleenex.
- At the time, the cosmetic industry is exploding.
Women are starting to wear makeup.
They need a way to remove the makeup,
a way to remove cold cream,
They create Kleenex as a cold cream remover,
put it out into the marketplace,
and what they find is that sales are flat.
When they went in to focus groups and talked to consumers,
they found that two-thirds
of the people who were using Kleenex
weren't using it as a cold cream remover,
they were using it as a disposable hankie.
So, immediately they launch a new advertising campaign
and totally rebrand Kleenex
as a disposable handkerchief.
And this allows Kimberly-Clark to create a market,
and then dominate that market right away.
- Kleenex would go on to become
one of the best-known products in American history.
And its pop-up box,
first made by the Menasha Printing and Carton Company,
became a design classic.
- It's not necessarily that
that box was some innovation that transformed the world,
but for this particular product,
in this particular time,
there was just some kind of magic to that thought:
that when you pull one up,
another one's waiting for you.
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