The ballpoint pen wasn’t really available until after world war 2 in most of the world. Up until then people used mostly pencil or fountain pen and each had their draw backs.
The ballpoint pen had been patented over 60 years before that but was expensive and had flaws. Enter a couple brothers in Budapest on the run from the Nazis who ended up in Argentina and patented the capillary action ballpoint pen. Stateside Milton Reynolds caught on to ballpoint pen fever and figured people would buy in. The pens hadn’t made it into the US market yet but the brothers capillary action pen was under patent so Reynolds used a gravity feed design that had problems but was still novel and had potential. The problem being that in the late 1940’s his pens cost just shy of $200 each (adjusted to todays dollars) and were sold at high end department stores. People did buy them, huge crowds rushed in when they first went on sale.
Now, in the meantime mr. Bich, the guy Bic is named after, is in France making pencil cases and other writing tool related stuff. He’s got this knack for finding trends and producing relatively quality goods on the cheap.
So Bich does alright for himself and catches on to the whole ballpoint pen thing and figures out some ways to improve the pens. He buys up the patterns from our brothers in Argentina for the superior capillarity design pens and he starts selling Bic ball point pens for like 23 cents- so of course they blow up and of course the ball point pen becomes a household item.
He starts distribution in the US.
Now fast forward about 20 years. Disposable lighters weren’t really a thing as we know them until the 60’s. DuPont is making them
In… France. The Cricket. Well, Gillette, yeah, the razor guys, who also used to own paper mate (we’ll come back to that) buy cricket for the US and start selling disposable lighters.
Now- why did Gillette buy papermate in the 50’s and then make lighters…? Diversification. After WW2 demand was booming, technology was booming. Globalization was booming. Cheap foreign labor and materials were abundant and there was both pent up demand and surplus of many things from the war. Almost any big company with money was branching out at this time. General Electric, American automakers, everyone was buying stakes in cars and boats and consumer goods and all sorts of things.
So there is alot more to this and a lot of history but let me it it blunt and editorially.
Gillette made razors and is credited as inventing the consumer disposable “safety razor,” the early version of the plastic razors most of us are familiar with. While they seem dissimilar, a lot of the concepts and supply chains and knowledge cross over. Razors are plastic and metal, lighters, pens. Chemicals in a tube, precision tolerances with a margin, disposable, small, sold at your general goods and housefuls stores and such so the supply chain and relationships are already there on the retail side. Ok.
The next part is editorial but you can check the dates. Gillette makes razors, Bic makes pens. Gillette buys paper mate and starts making pens. Bic starts making lighters around the same time give or take a year or so that Gillette brings the DuPont disposable lighter stateside.
Gillette has some internal shakeups and such and there is some tussling going into this period. When the dust settles Gillettes new management reinvests in the advertising the previous managers cut and so there is back and forth a bit. Going into the 1980’s Gillette had introduced a line of pens cheaper than Bics staple Cristal pen brand and consumers buy especially bulk buyers like governments and businesses noticed. Gillette started to be the pen guys.
Of course since Bic (trading as Bic and not as Bich’s company) started out as the pen guys and their claim to fame as well as feather had been a long dominance of the pen market and being known as the household name in pens- well, one could say they decided to hit Gillette where it hurt, so they released the ubiquitous bic disposable lighter shorter after Gillette brought the cricket to the US. The Bic was advertised for 3000 lights, it was cheap, the styling was an instant industrial consumer design classic, and they had a catchy and for the time edgy slogan “flick your bic.” Basically Bic really found a market with especially younger people who would be the next generation of consumers.
Bic also doubled down on their razor game. Again, making cheap buy relatively high quality products. It took them some time but by the onset of the 80’s they were getting Gillette good. Fortunes flipped in the 80’s a bit and Gillette started to dominate the razor game and make solid footing in stationary. There was more back and forth and Gillette had already reorganized and placed their pens and stationary etc. into a group internally as the stationary department. in the 2000’s Gillette sold off its stationary business to rubber made who folded it in with their own affiliates.
So there are a combination of reasons bic (and Gillette!) sell or for a long time sold, among other things, lighters, pens, and disposable razors.
Each company had started with a different core product- Gillette made razors and Bic made pens. Each had diversified into various fields because the economy was booming, conditions were right, there were overlaps in small mass produced personal consumer goods they could leverage, those products were in demand and innovative with little or no overwhelmingly dominant players or market saturation, and it was generally smart. Gillette made razors through two world wars and war time business booms. They’d also seen that things like the Great Depression could effectively gobble the razor market. When people aren’t working, aren’t going out, shaving is low on the list.
Pens believe it or not have long been important for war. Before the ball point pen- well, asides leaking and being sharp and possibly bending especially in rough conditions- classic fountain pens don’t work well at high altitude. Pencils work but have their own problems. So especially before mass digital technology or before it was predictable- pens tend to be good business in peace as well as the types of wars fought classically. Lighters, especially back when smoking was prolifically common, were also just good business and another product that has pretty good versatility. Historically when the market is up Smokers smoke and when it is down smokers smoke. The popularity of drugs like marijuana and smoking that didn’t hurt lighters either, but war, peace, low markets… asides smoking people use disposable lighters as survival tools which come in handy in war or the type of poverty caused in depressions.
So the business cases were there and the products were reasonably robust and things you could at one point count on just about everyone being a customer.
For Bic specifically there is and were strong arguments that they were at least in part motivated by spite at Gillette encroaching on their niche and so they responded in mind in a way that made business sense for lucrative markets and diversification. even if that isn’t true it certainly makes sense to try and prevent a competitor from pushing you out of your market. Arguably if Bic hadn’t responded in such a way to capture business from Gillette and somewhat balance things out, Gillette in theory could have grown across its segments to a point where they could leverage far more resources in the pen space than Bic and could potentially have pushed Bic off of shelves or even bought Bic out.
So there are actually quite a few reasons the whole thing may seem random at a glance but when we dig deeper there are confluences of chance sprinkled with sound business strategy and leveraging existing infrastructure and such.
Bic as a company was just very good at finding ways to make products at competitive prices in lucrative markets with room to grow. They had good marketing and brand recognition and perhaps a little bit of a grudge and that’s more or less the not entirely accurate or comprehensive but reasonably close story.
The ballpoint pen had been patented over 60 years before that but was expensive and had flaws. Enter a couple brothers in Budapest on the run from the Nazis who ended up in Argentina and patented the capillary action ballpoint pen. Stateside Milton Reynolds caught on to ballpoint pen fever and figured people would buy in. The pens hadn’t made it into the US market yet but the brothers capillary action pen was under patent so Reynolds used a gravity feed design that had problems but was still novel and had potential. The problem being that in the late 1940’s his pens cost just shy of $200 each (adjusted to todays dollars) and were sold at high end department stores. People did buy them, huge crowds rushed in when they first went on sale.
So Bich does alright for himself and catches on to the whole ballpoint pen thing and figures out some ways to improve the pens. He buys up the patterns from our brothers in Argentina for the superior capillarity design pens and he starts selling Bic ball point pens for like 23 cents- so of course they blow up and of course the ball point pen becomes a household item.
He starts distribution in the US.
Now fast forward about 20 years. Disposable lighters weren’t really a thing as we know them until the 60’s. DuPont is making them
In… France. The Cricket. Well, Gillette, yeah, the razor guys, who also used to own paper mate (we’ll come back to that) buy cricket for the US and start selling disposable lighters.
Gillette made razors and is credited as inventing the consumer disposable “safety razor,” the early version of the plastic razors most of us are familiar with. While they seem dissimilar, a lot of the concepts and supply chains and knowledge cross over. Razors are plastic and metal, lighters, pens. Chemicals in a tube, precision tolerances with a margin, disposable, small, sold at your general goods and housefuls stores and such so the supply chain and relationships are already there on the retail side. Ok.
Gillette has some internal shakeups and such and there is some tussling going into this period. When the dust settles Gillettes new management reinvests in the advertising the previous managers cut and so there is back and forth a bit. Going into the 1980’s Gillette had introduced a line of pens cheaper than Bics staple Cristal pen brand and consumers buy especially bulk buyers like governments and businesses noticed. Gillette started to be the pen guys.
Each company had started with a different core product- Gillette made razors and Bic made pens. Each had diversified into various fields because the economy was booming, conditions were right, there were overlaps in small mass produced personal consumer goods they could leverage, those products were in demand and innovative with little or no overwhelmingly dominant players or market saturation, and it was generally smart. Gillette made razors through two world wars and war time business booms. They’d also seen that things like the Great Depression could effectively gobble the razor market. When people aren’t working, aren’t going out, shaving is low on the list.
For Bic specifically there is and were strong arguments that they were at least in part motivated by spite at Gillette encroaching on their niche and so they responded in mind in a way that made business sense for lucrative markets and diversification. even if that isn’t true it certainly makes sense to try and prevent a competitor from pushing you out of your market. Arguably if Bic hadn’t responded in such a way to capture business from Gillette and somewhat balance things out, Gillette in theory could have grown across its segments to a point where they could leverage far more resources in the pen space than Bic and could potentially have pushed Bic off of shelves or even bought Bic out.
Bic as a company was just very good at finding ways to make products at competitive prices in lucrative markets with room to grow. They had good marketing and brand recognition and perhaps a little bit of a grudge and that’s more or less the not entirely accurate or comprehensive but reasonably close story.