Wisconsin Hometown Stories

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.