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Exclusive of Local News Only.com -
Nelson Thibodeaux
If At First You Don't Succeed
He Risked Everything
He Had No boy in the world was more determined to become a
success than Willie Jr. In his day millionaires were being made
every minute. And Willie just knew he had it in him to make it
too. And so in the early 1870s, he struck out on his own. His
search for fame and fortune took him from his hometown of
Philadelphia all the way to New York City. And it didn't much
bother him that he was only 11 years old.
But life in the Big Apple was a whole lot tougher than Willie
thought. The only work he could find was selling newspapers on
the streets. Even a nickel for a carton of milk was hard to come
by. It wasn't too long before he slunk back home - a failure at
12. He tried school again, but quit after just a few weeks and
went to work in his dad's soap factory. Now, stirring soap in a
piping hot kettle all day long wasn't Willie's idea of success
either. So he begged his parents to let him go on the road as a
salesman, or in this case, a sales boy. Reluctantly, they let
their young teenager take to the streets.
Selling soap out of a basket door to door suited Willie just
fine. The truth is, he sold all the soap his dad's factory could
make. But for a young boy wanting to travel and see the world,
even this sort of success grew stale. And Willie knew in his
heart that selling soap would never get him the fortune he
wanted. So at 19, he took off again. This time Willie went in
the other direction and took a friend with him.
They were headed for Leadville, Colorado, a booming mining town.
But they ran out of money long before they got there and found
themselves stranded in Kansas City. Willie worked for a while in
a restaurant and found that the kind of wages he made were just
enough to live on.
After weeks of barely getting by, he scraped up enough money to
buy a truckload of rubber stamps, and sold them with enough
profit to get back to Philadelphia and the soap factory. But his
second bid for fame and fortune was as much a failure as the
first one; only this time Willie was a man and failure was just
that much harder.
Willie stayed in Philadelphia and sold soap for 11 years,
marrying along the way and slowly worked up his courage for
another try at making it big. He realized that if he struck out
again, it would be his last chance. He was 31, and he was still
a long way from his first million. With $32 of his own savings
and a small investment from his uncle, Willie made his move -
this time to Chicago. He rented just enough office space for two
desks and storage for a carload of soap. But Willie wasn't the
only guy around selling soap, and competition was stiff.
In desperation, Willie bought a bunch of umbrellas for 85 cents
each. He then raised the price of his soap, and gave away an
umbrella with each case full. His scheme worked so well he had
to hire another salesman. Giving away something extra became
Willie's motto, and it provided him with just that extra edge he
needed to compete.
But Willie decided early on that his dedication to soap would
only go so far. If what he was giving away proved to be a bigger
seller than his base product, he had no problem with changing
directions completely. That's how he found himself selling
baking powder. Sales were up, but fortune still seemed a long
way off.
And then he tried another get-it-for-nothing scheme. And this
time he hit pay dirt. It's a Little Known Fact that Willie
started giving away two packs of gum with every box of baking
powder, and wouldn't you know it, that gum proved to be the
bigger draw. So he switched his product line one last time, and
proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that chewing gum was the right
thing to sell - at least if your name was William Wrigley, Jr.
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