If you dye eggs every Easter, you're probably a PAAS customer. So were your parents and their parents, and unless an unlikely challenger with a revolutionary new egg dye materializes, PAAS will probably continue to dominate the Easter egg dye market for generations to come.
Like so many legendary products, PAAS started with a mishap. A Newark pharmacist named William Townley accidentally stained his suit while measuring out powdered dye for a customer, an incident that irritated him so much that he devised a way to compress the powder into dissolvable tablets. Packets of Townley's Easter Egg Dye contained five colors of easy-to-use tablets and sold like hotcakes at a cool nickel apiece.
Townley smelled an opportunity and pounced. He gave his business a new name: the PAAS Dye company, cribbed from "Passen," the Pennsylvania Dutch word for Easter.
PAAS kits have changed somewhat over the years — stickers, perforated holes to hold freshly dyed eggs, wire holders to lower the eggs into the dye — but the signature dye tablets and their commercial appeal haven't changed. Families dyed eggs at Easter long before William Townley wrecked a perfectly good suit, but his handy little innovation ensured that PAAS would almost always be part of the celebration.
