Taking on Crayola?
Note: This is an excerpt from a manuscript under development about innovation and the development of the Trapper Keeper. (Copyright: Ken Crutchfield 2023)
For a kid growing up in the United States, Crayola® was likely a part of childhood. Crayola and crayons are as synonymous as Kleenex® and tissues. Who doesn’t remember drawing a picture with crayons? Sure, there are other crayons on the market, but Crayola has been the market leader for as long as one can remember. Two cousins, Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith started manufacturing crayons in 1903. Back then a box of crayons from Binney & Smith cost 5 cents and contained 8 crayons. By the 1960s, Crayola was an acquisition target for Westab, and for Mead after Mead acquired Westab. Mead was never able to convince the privately held Binney & Smith to sell.
So what did they do? They tried to build a better crayon. In 1968, Mead received a US patent for an erasable and sharpen-able crayon made out of polyethylene. The technology was originally developed in France and the inventor, Jean Ferdinand Gros, had applied for a patent in France in 1964. He assigned the rights to the US patent over to Mead as part of a US filing in 1965.
The thought process was simple. If Mead couldn’t acquire Crayola, then perhaps they could build a better product and leverage their national reach to pressure Binney & Smith to sell. Or perhaps beat them head to head in the market. Westab’s Sargent Arts division had a series of products in the market. They included construction paper, watercolor paints, art supplies, and a wax crayon competitor to Crayola. The Plasti-color crayon as it was named, was an attempt at extending Westab’s Sargent Arts product line to create a better crayon.
As the name suggests, Plasti-color crayons were not made out of wax. They were made out of plastic and were much harder than a traditional crayon. The crayons had several benefits that differentiated them from wax crayons. First, wax crayons melt when exposed to heat. How many mothers experienced the frustration of opening the dryer to find all the clothing in the dryer covered with melted crayon? How many parents of small kids have tried to remove melted crayons from automobile upholstery? For those that have experienced this first hand, you scrape as much of the crayon as possible off the upholstery. Icing the area helps. And then a solvent must be applied with a towel and matted to undo most of the damage. Plasti-color crayons solved that problem as they wouldn’t melt under the same conditions. Plasti-color crayons were harder and would last “twice as long” as traditional crayons according to Crutch (my father). For parents, there would certainly be appeal.
For kids, there were a couple of advantages. First, you could sharpen the pencil in a pencil sharpener which was kind of cool. That was interesting all by itself. And brand new wax crayons start sharp, but they quickly dull into a fat point that makes it hard to color with precision. Maybe that doesn’t matter for kids just trying to color between the lines of a coloring book. But the more detailed, artistic kid may notice. Another finer point was that crayons don’t “mix” well. Plasti-color crayons blended better than wax crayons. So an aspiring artist use a couple of crayons could create the perfect color.
So with what appeared to be a better product, Westab began to test market Plasti-color crayons in Arkansas in 1969. The results were strong with Plasti-color gaining a 24% market share according to Crutch. The results were strong enough to extend the test market locally in Dayton, Ohio in 1971. Eventually, the decision was made to take the product national. Sales reps were equipped with a pitch to get the product into retail stores around the country. Part of the pitch was coverage from national advertising. A “space age” commercial was developed for the national roll out. Sales were strong. According to Bill White, the former president of Mead Products, the decision was made to double or triple the manufacturing capacity in their Hazelton, Pennsylvania plant for the following year. (Hazelton was less than 80 miles from the Binney & Smith headquarters in Easton, Pennsylvania.)
Initial sales were strong, but something happened. The re-order sales weren’t there. Mr. White speculated that because the crayons lasted longer, perhaps they were too good and lasted more than one school year. There may have been more simple answers though. A student who found themselves as the only kid in class with Plasti-color crayons may have felt left out because their crayons weren’t Crayola. Even kindergartners want to fit-in and belong. Being one of the only kids in class with “different” crayons might be a turn off.
And teachers who had specific lesson plans may have struggled with the surprise of “plastic crayons” that didn’t match their expectations. One salesperson for Westab at the time recalls salespeople were asked to visit schools to help with awareness.
There may have been other issues. Imagine the maintenance person at the school opening up the pencil sharpener in a class room and there were plastic shavings. While it may not have damaged a pencil sharpener, pencil sharpeners were designed to sharpen wooden pencils with lead, not plastic crayons.
Plasti-color crayons may have been a better product. But it takes more than a “better product” to displace a market leader like Crayola crayons. Some might think of this as a very bold idea and other might think of it as a fool’s errand. Westab did test the idea and had good results for a time. As a tactic supporting a broader strategy of getting Binney & Smith to consider acquisition talks, perhaps the Plasti-color initiative served its purpose and outperformed expectations. But Mead never acquired Binney & Smith. In 1984, Hallmark, the greeting card company, announced the acquisition of Binney & Smith and the Crayola business.
The market failure of a better crayon likely provided important learnings that contributed to the eventual successful launch of the Trapper Keeper. A product needs to meet the needs of all stakeholders including teachers and school administrators. And a consumer product, even if it has better features, also needs to have commercial appeal. Appealing to emotional needs and “cool” factor matter. The Trapper Keeper also didn’t need to displace the “Crayola of the binder market”. To the extent that the Trapper Keeper displaced products, it was competing against the broad array in the Mead Products (Westab) product line.
