In the early 1950s, a Cincinnati company called Rainbow Crafts made a compound designed to strip coal soot from wallpaper. It was a grayish, pliable putty not particularly interesting, not especially pleasant, and it did its job. Then American homes switched from coal to natural gas heating, and the soot problem disappeared. The product had no future.
Or so it seemed.
Noah McVicker, whose family ran Rainbow Crafts, had a sister-in-law named Kay Zufall who taught nursery school. She had heard that modeling clay was too stiff for small children’s hands and wondered if the wallpaper compound might work better. She brought some in, the kids loved it, and Zufall encouraged McVicker to repackage it as a toy.
He reformulated it, softer, safer, non-toxic, added bright colors and that distinctive almond scent (still there today), and in 1956, Play-Doh hit toy store shelves. Within a year, three million cans had been sold. Today, more than three billion cans have been sold in over 75 countries, making it one of the best-selling toys in history.
The moral of the story: the coal industry’s loss was every four-year-old’s gain. And sometimes the best product idea comes from the person who had nothing to do with making the original one.