The WD-40 Story
There are some products which work so effectively and
are so useful that they become a part of daily life.
Over time, they become household names and dominate
the market. One such product is WD-40 and it is so
popular in the USA that one survey discovered that
the product is found in more homes than Coke! This
month, WD-40 celebrates its 50th birthday and a
product that has been around that long certainly
deserves a story here.
The story of WD-40 began in 1953 at the 3-man Rocket
Chemical Company in San Diego, a city in the south of
California. It was the start of the space age and the
aerospace industry was just starting off. There was a
need for many types of fluids for the industry and
these had to perform in extreme conditions like high
up in the atmosphere and at ever increasing speeds.
The 3 guys at the company wanted to create a line of
rust-prevention solvents and degreasers and it took
them 40 attempts to get a water-displacing formula
which worked. Being scientists and not marketing men,
they probably did not think much about a catchy name
and settled for something as plain as `WD-40´ and you
can guess how that originated!
The first applications were to prevent corrosion on
rockets which were exposed to desert air or cold
weather. They worked so well that some employees
pinched some cans home to use; at that time, the
product was not sold in the open market yet and was
supplied for industrial use only.
A few years following WD-40's first industrial use,
Rocket Chemical Company founder Norm Larsen
experimented with putting WD-40 into aerosol cans,
reasoning that consumers might find a use for the
product at home as some of the employees had. The
product made its first appearance on store shelves
in San Diego in 1958.
Within a few years, WD-40´s fame spread across the
nation as more and more people discovered its
effectiveness. 1961 saw the product´s superior
attributes being clearly demonstrated when a
truckload of WD-40 was shipped to Florida where a
hurricane had hit. The WD-40 was used to recondition
vehicles that were damaged by water.
The formula for WD-40, like Coke, is Top Secret. Its
components can be analysed but the precise blend is
the secret and it is tightly guarded so much so that
even the number of people who know the formula is a
secret! Another impressive thing is that the formula
is said to be unchanged in 50 years. It is that good
(even Mobil 1 has been reformulated a few times).
While `WD´ stands for Water Displacement, the
product´s uses go beyond just that capability and it
can also be used like a light oil. Thus, it is good
for silencing squeaky hinges, removing rust and
stains and protecting battery terminals. In fact,
when WD-40 invited consumers to tell how they used
the product, it received thousands and the best 2,000
are listed on its website.
While many relate to mechanical things, there are
also some wacky ones. For example, some people swear
that spraying WD-40 on their joints can eliminate
arthritis! However, the company doesn´t endorse that
usage in any way, reminding consumers that it is a
chemical so they don´t really know if it may have any
adverse side effects.
And when it comes to real-life situations where WD-40
has been used, the stories are like the stuff in
`Ripley´s Believe it or Not´! One story tells of a
naked_thief_who got stuck in a pipe and the police
used WD-40 and he slid out; a guy with a number of
girlfriends used WD-40 on himself to hide the smell
of someone he had been out with earlier when he went
out with another one later in the night; and
fishermen discovered that spraying it on their lures
would get better results because it took away the
human smell left by their hands!
WD-40 is a global brand today and is on sale all over
the globe. 140 million cans are sold each year
worldwide, with half of them going to the US market
(which means more than a million a week). Asia takes
10 million cans with Korea having the largest share
of 3 million; Malaysia, where WD-40 has a 70% share
in multi-purpose lubricants, presently takes a
million cans a year - that's 114 cans an hour on
average. Mind-boggling, isn't it?
The company makes almost all the products at its
factory in California but had to set up factories in
Korea and India due to severe protectionist policies
that made importing troublesome. It does not see the
necessity to set up too many plants so as to maintain
very good economies of scale at its main factory.
Furthermore, in countries like Malaysia, there is no
import duty so it is unnecessary to make the product
locally to beat any tariff barriers.
For most of its history, WD-40 (the company changed
its name to the same as the product name in 1969)
sold only one product. However, in 1995, it started
to diversify and acquired some very well established
products, one of them being the 3-In-One Oil which
was around 100 years. Since then, it has also added
other strong brands with established products to its
range and last year, all these added some US$116 .8
million to the US$100 million from WD-40 sales alone.
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