July 17, 2019 • 34 mins
Can you see treasure in another man's trash? Maybe. Can you turn no into yes? Lots of salespeople do it everyday. But - would you spend a decade trying to turn black smelly stuff into a useable household product? Robert Chesebrough did. And that's just the beginning of his story. The history of Vaseline is the story of a crazy genius, self-mutilating salesman, and savvy businessman all rolled into one.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Thanks to ghosts. She'll make your breakfast. She'll make you toast,
but she don't use butter, she don't use cheese, she
don't use jelly. Any of these. She bad fast, fast sleep.
(00:39):
I'm about to reveal my biggest beauty seq whenever that
was tired of banks, My friends. When you have a
product that's been around for over a hundred years that
almost everyone has a home, and when your brand is
(00:59):
so well known that it makes it into songs and movies,
you can rest assured it's here to stay. But if
the late eighteen hundreds had been like our modern fail fast,
pivot or diye culture, Vassiline might never exist. This is Bisiography,
(01:28):
the show where we dive into the strange but true
stories of iconic companies. Whether they're a household name, the
butt of jokes, or sliding into history, they all have
a pass worth knowing. See what I did there. I'm
Dana Barrett. I'm a former tech executive and entrepreneur and
a TV and radio hosts, and over the course of
my career, I've interviewed thousands of business leaders and reported
(01:49):
on the bright beginnings and massive flame outs of the
brands we know and love. Some of their stories are inspiring,
some get my blood boiling, and some are just plain weird.
Today our story is one of pivots, perseverance, and punch
lines and hanging out with me today as always is
new guy Nick. Can we Nick get the punch lines
(02:11):
and the dirty jokes and the giggling out? Early? Well?
What are you? What are you talking about? What do
you mean with vassilin what punch lines? I'm just saying,
I know there's gonna be a lot of snickering. When
we were pitching the story idea, there was a lot
of snickering. There's been a lot of snickering already before
we've even got into the show. So yeah, you're right, Okay,
so probably we can't get it out of the way early.
(02:32):
Let's just admit it. Vassoline has a lot of uses,
including some in the bedroom. There are we done? Are
we good? Uh? No, we're not. We're not done. No, Yeah,
we're good. Because f y I it's probably not the
best to use in the bedroom. But okay, fine, what
hold on a second, did you actually google my Yeah?
I did actually look that up. Now you know that
(02:52):
all of the ads that follow you around from here
on out are going to be quite trouble, quite questionable. No,
you're absolutely right. Only question is so vasoline. You're right,
it's it's a little you know. Why did you why
did you want to bring this up? Well, here's the thing.
It is a good question. But you know, when we
started thinking about doing different companies for phisiography, I started
(03:14):
looking around the house at the various brands that exist,
and I thought, let me figure out what's going on
with this. We've had this in the house since I
was a kid. I remember it, you know, when I
had baby sisters, we had Vassoline on the diaper changing
table and I still have it, you know, for lip protection.
Settle down, and you know, I did some research and
(03:34):
this is a story. The story of Vassoline is a
story of perseverance, the likes of which we rarely see anymore.
And I think that's a story worth telling. So the
story starts with the inventor of Vassoline. His name was
Robert chess Abreu, which not gonna lie. When I first
read it, I thought was Robert cheesebrow. Um. See, I
(03:58):
told you there was gonna be a lot of giggling.
But his name is actually Robert chester Brew and he's
he was a British guy. It was Chessibrew. He was
born in London back in eighteen thirty seven, and I
don't know much about his super early years, but he
moved to Brooklyn, New York pretty early on and he
became a purveyor of illumination oil or lamp oil as
(04:19):
we would call it, and a bit of a chemist
at the time because you had to do that to
make the oils to sell for the various kinds of lamps.
Primarily Kerosene was of course the lamp lighting fluid of
the day, and there was a lot of competition in
that business. And that was an era in history in
general where I think there was, you know, there were
a lot of young men that were looking around for
(04:39):
ways to make it big, to get rich. Absolutely, you're
trying to find that next big opportunity. And yeah, it
was the kind of the beginning a little bit in
early eighteen hundreds of that what we now kind of
view is like the entrepreneurial spirit. Yeah, I mean, yes,
I think that's true. And it's like hard to maybe
imagine now for you millennials, especially because now it's all
(04:59):
about work binance, right, Well you say that with such disdain. Yeah,
we we we we want to balance everything. And back
then it was find what you can get into that
will set your career off in a whole new way. Right.
And there's also I think this, you know, this entire
story of Assilene is so easy to sort of compare
and contrast to what's happening now. And while yes, I'm
(05:20):
joking a little bit about millennials wanting work life balance,
because there's certainly a very intense startup culture now, but
I think one of the big differences now is there's
also a lot of venture capital money, and so people
may not realize that when they get into business now,
they still are going to have to struggle. I think
then they knew the struggle was going to be real,
and that, you know, maybe they would find somebody to
(05:40):
invest in their business. But it wasn't as free flowing
the cash, I think as it was back then. In
any case, our hero Robert Chessibru was one of those guys.
He was looking for some way to make more money.
And then a news story happened. It was eighteen fifty
nine and the first ever oil well in America was drilled.
Fun fact I oil in America was all about Texas.
(06:03):
Turns out the first oil well was not in Texas.
It was actually in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Who knew. Does anyone
go to Titusville, Pennsylvania anymore? I don't even know what's there.
I just always thought I pictured the TV set of Dallas,
and I just assumed it was all Texas. But that's
just me. In any case, it was Titusville, Pennsylvania. That's
where the oil rush began. People heard about this oil
(06:25):
well and they started flocking to Titusville, Pennsylvania to see
if they could make it big in oil. And Robert
chester Brew was one of those guys. He spent his
life savings to leave Brooklyn and go to Titusville, Pennsylvania
to see if he could make his fortune. And he
was there for a little while. And this was not
like a one day trip. I mean, he spent some
time in Titusville and he figured out, I think pretty quickly,
(06:45):
that he was one of many. There was a lot
of competition and it wasn't going to be that easy
to you know, make his fortune in oil. He did not.
He couldn't, you know, create his own oil. Well, he
didn't have the funds for that. So he was looking
around trying to figure out what he could do. And
he I think had one of those modern kind of
(07:06):
inventor brains and that he was able to see things
that other people didn't necessarily see. So he pretty quickly
realized he would have to find a better idea, a
better way to to strike it rich if you will. Hey, guys,
I just had a thought. Okay, so this is it. Right,
A lot of successful startups launched with a different business
model and when they ran into trumple they pivoted to
(07:29):
something new. Don't lose faith, guys, right, look at me,
Look at me, Look at me. We've got a great name,
we've got a great team, we've got a great logo,
and we've got a great name. Now we just need
an idea. Let's pivot. Let's pivot. Let's pivot. That of
course is from Silicon Valley, the beloved current TV show,
And well, he didn't have a great name and a
(07:49):
great brand. Not at that point, he did know he
needed to pivot from trying to become an oil baron
to something else. So, just like our heroes in Silicon Valley,
it was time for our old time hero Robert Tessa
Brew to pivot. Luckily he Robert was only twenty two
at the time, and he was a bit of a
risk taker and an outside of the box thinker. So
while he was touring around on the oil field, he
(08:10):
happened to notice this rigger, a guy who worked there,
scraping this like thick, dark, blackish goo from the oil pumps.
I feel like this is a dirty joke from the
oil pumps. He's scraping goof from the oil pumps joint.
It's a little dirty. Anyway, he asked about it, and
apparently this gunk, which was called rod wax, tended to
(08:31):
come up with the crude oil and just collect on
the rigging, and if they didn't clean it off periodically,
it would just totally gum up the works. So it
was basically, you know, a byproduct that was worthless that
was coming up off the oil rigs. And you know,
he'd been hanging around for a while and he started
hearing from some of the riggers that they would use
this smelly, nasty black gunk um to heal their wounds.
(08:55):
And that's when he got the magical idea. Only needed
so he asked if he could take some of this byproduct,
this trash, this goo, and that's how the whole thing started.
Except here's the thing. It was not anything like what
modern vassiline, modern petroleum jelly is today. It was stinky,
it was black, it was gross, and it was not
(09:17):
something he was going to be able to sell easily,
certainly not to the housewives of America in the late
eighteen hundreds. So this was a guy who literally saw
something that nobody else even looked at and thought I
could do something with this. It's really interesting that he
saw that. And you know that, like you said in
the Inventor Brain, you always try to think of maybe
the source of where your stuff is gonna come from.
(09:40):
How genius to go, Hey, this is something they're literally
just tossing to the side. There's zero cost forgetting this product, genius,
no investment up front, something but profit after that. And
if these guys on the oil fields are willing to
use it to heal their wounds, and it must work, now,
how can I make it work and get people to
buy it? And the thing that this always makes me
(10:03):
think about is how many people have brains like that
even today? I think there's a fairly small percentage of
people who can see an opportunity where you know, nobody
else sees anything, you know, I mean, do you feel
like you think like that. No, I don't think most people.
Do you see something that's like that, that's waste? How
many of us if you were, especially back then, but
even now, if you're walking past something and it's black,
(10:25):
gooey tar junk and its stinks and get that away
from me. That's that's useless, that's junk. Throw it in
the trash. I'm done with it. Yeah, I mean, look,
there are clearly other products in the world that come
from nothing where someone just thought like this is going
to waste, I can do something with it. And you know,
the first example of that that came to my mind
when I was thinking about this story is duncan munchkins.
(10:46):
I mean right, it's like the donut hole. They're stamping
the donuts. They got this extra dough and they're like,
we could do something like that. Absolutely, and it's genius.
How many people do you know prefer the donut holes
over the actual doughnuts themselves? Brilliant? I mean, let's put
it this way. We are seeing potentially the end of
the era of natural oils of fossil fuels being used,
(11:08):
but petroleum, jelly and vasoline will live on forever, my friends,
just like the donut holes, you know. But I do
think it's really rare for people to see that, because
even if you think about the donut hole example, why
are all of the jokes just I feel like that
it's all dirty um. But you know, you stamp the
donut and you think, well, the shape isn't good for anything,
(11:28):
and all this excess dough, what are we gonna do
with it? You can make more doughnuts, but then you
still have waste every single time. Eventually you gets you
don't have enough dough left of doing to make it right.
But somebody got creative. They thought of a way, and
here we are, and now they created a whole other
product line, you know, that ends up being more popular
in the original product was intended to be. And also,
(11:48):
as far as I'm I understand, the donut holes don't
have any calories, because you know, right, it's just it's
just what I've heard. I don't know if it's true.
In any case, it was genius. They were throwing this
you away, this rod wax away. It's kind of like
in the Grinch movie. Remember this part drove it back,
We don't come back with the right. It's amazing can
(12:11):
throw away one. I'm not a mins Paul Parree, So
are you suggesting that chess a Brew was kind of
a grinch? He was mean and he was like, yeah, whatever,
I'll make something out of this. I don't know if
he was really a grinch, but he was odd and
he was persistent. We'll get into that next one. So
(12:41):
after his tour of the oil fields, chess a Brew
asked if he can have some of that rod wax,
and he takes it back to Brooklyn, to the lab
that he had been using to make his oil lamp,
and he starts trying to figure out how to make
this black gunk clear and odorless. It takes him, wait
for it, ten years, ten years of experimenting. I don't
(13:04):
think I have the patience of like a gnat by comparison,
I can't do anything for more than a year or two,
and I get bored. I mean, especially with something where
you're sitting in a lab dealing with gunky junk and
trying to clarify. Yeah, I'm surprised at surprised. He gave
it ten months. Yeah, but he kept on trying and
failing and trying and failing, and the stuff was free,
(13:25):
so I guess he just got more when he needed it. Uh.
And it's not until ten years later that that trip
to the oil fields was when he again, he was
like twenty two when this all started. It was eighteen
fifty nine when he brought the stuff home. It wasn't
until eighteen sixty nine that he officially discovers the secret
and makes the clear, odorless vasseline that we now know.
(13:48):
So by comparison the Sistine Chapel four years, that's it. Yeah,
we think of that as the thing that took forever.
Apparently vasseline is more of a masterpiece the Sisteen Chapel.
I'm not saying. I'm just saying the Pyramids twenty years.
But they're a little bigger, just a little bit in fairness,
(14:09):
and they took more people, and I don't know if
they count because there was a whole like slave labor
thing going on there. That's for another show. In any case,
clearly our Silicon Valley guys would have pivoted after like
a few months at most, don't you think absolutely. But
there were some other things too that did take some time.
For example, w D forty. You know why it's called
w D forty not because it was the concoction they
(14:32):
had made, and it took them about six months to
try each one, so it was almost a twenty year
experiment for w D forty. Another one to bubble wrap,
was actually introduced in the early sixties as take a guess.
It was invented as something else. It was initially very close.
That was its second use, the first one textured wallpaper.
(14:52):
He was to say, now, now that I think about it,
bubble wrap would pretty cool. I was about to say,
I think I see my next three decoration and happening
right there. And fun fact, a recent episode of Doctor
Hill had exploding bubble wrap just saying awesome. But right
then it was how sinstallation in it all failed And
somebody at IBM happened to have some laying around and
(15:12):
they were shipping a computer they ran out of like
the packaging foam. They tossed it and they're wrapped it
up in that because they figured out there's enough padding,
we'll just put a lot on it and bubble wrap
as we know it for packaging was formed, and it
took about, you know, from nineteen sixty to IBM. It's
quite some time. Very interesting to know. Yeah, I wonder
if they were as cookie as Robert Chester b just wondering,
but yeah, who knew. I didn't know bubble wrap at that.
(15:33):
Maybe they'll be a future episode of Bosiography. In any case,
very amazing ability in all those cases. Really to stick
to it once again, not something I think a lot
of people can do. But I do think it's lost
in modern times, that stick tuitiveness, perseverance. I feel like
if more people had that, there'd be more success, don't you. Absolutely.
(15:54):
I think so many people, even if it's not an
entrepreneurial venture, even if it's just something you're like a
project around the house or just a job in general,
after like a year, year and a half, most people
are like, oh, this isn't working. It's time to move on, right,
And I don't I think certainly even just for like
not necessarily just for inventions, but for careers. For you know,
people start something and a year to your point into it,
(16:15):
they're sort of like, well, if it hasn't worked this far,
it's not going to work, but w D forty ten
years to make vasoline if you just stick to it
and keep trying. I think it's all about really believing
in what you're doing right and yourself, maybe your own ability,
and maybe some of that's gotten lost, a little bit
of it too. Let's be fair. We've we've learned about
Chesa Brew and if you look, we're going to do
(16:36):
some more, I'm sure, research into these other companies. I
think some of that stick tuativeness we've heard before, there's
a little bit of crazy ingenius. I think some of
it's that too. He was so determined that he knew
these rigors told me it's going to heal wounds. He
believed it, He fully fully believed it. So you figure
he takes ten years to develop the product. The rest
is history right now, not even close. And that is
(16:57):
sort of almost when the perseverance started. So he gets
this product, he makes it, he packages it up, and
he takes it out to the pharmacies and he explains
to the you know, the pharmacists, how it's going to
cure all kinds of ills, and they all look at
him like he is in fact crazy, and they buy none.
They buy none. This is a guy who spent ten
years making this stuff, so he is not giving up.
(17:18):
He is going to figure out another way. So he
takes to the road. He literally starts giving roadside demonstrations
to convince the average Joe passersby to try it. He's
going after housewives, he's going after doctors. He's just got
a cart and he's on the road with his invention.
And this is, you know, not actually going well either.
(17:40):
So that's when it gets even weirder. Not gonna lie,
it gets weirder and more innovative and weirder. He decides
that the only way he can convince these roadside audiences
that this stuff works is by self mutilation. Who yeah,
self mutilation. He starts cutting himself, burning himself, stabbing himself,
(18:02):
and pouring acid on himself and then curing himself with massline.
Definitely a little bit of crazy ingenius. Yeah, that, in
my opinion, might be taking it a tad bit too far.
Like if my daughter came to me and said, I
have a great idea, Mom, I invented this stuff, and
to prove to people at works, I'm going to pour
(18:22):
acid on myself. I would take her to a facility.
I'm just saying. But in any case, he literally did that,
and he, in part, as you know, to prove that,
gave it to these folks for free. Said here's a
free sample, take it, try it at home, see if
you like it. That was also not something that was
(18:44):
ever done at the time. Now you hear about that
now and you immediately picture I don't know, the guy
at the food cart with the free chicken. You know.
I mean, there's free samples of everything now, but at
the time, nobody gave free samples. That was not done.
So Chester Breu was innovating with the idea of free samples.
He was innovating with an early form of the infomercial
out there demonstrating his product. And that is when the
(19:05):
magic finally happened. Again, took some time, but people took
the samples, they took it home, and they liked it.
So then what do they do. They go back to
the local pharmacies to get more, and the pharmacies don't
have any m They start calling Chessubreu and placing their orders,
and now the rest is history. So is there a
little bit of like maybe Elon Musk analogy. I mean,
(19:28):
I think there is. Certainly Elon Musk is not exactly
stabbing himself and pouring acid on himself, though he certainly
has been doing some damage to his reputation of late,
and I think it's part of the same thing. He's
like a frustrated, like crazy, mad scientist genius who is
creating things and people are sort of poo pooing him,
and he's frustrated by that. But he's determined and he
(19:51):
knows what he's doing is gonna work, and he's sticking
to it. He's gonna, you know, bore tunnels and create
spaceships and cars that run without fuel and all this
kind of crazy air quotes, crazy stuff, and he's going
to have to be a little crazy to make it happen.
But there's a distinct difference there though that Elon musklike
you said, he's doing crazy stuff like boring tunnels and
going to space and all the But that's a lot
(20:12):
of different things, right, jess A Brew made one thing. Yeah,
he was very single minded. So now he's got this
one great product that people are buying. Lots of people
did that all through time. We have people who created
a product and then nothing happened. So How did that
product that you know, really has no competitors to this
(20:34):
day and that has stood the test of time. How
did that happen out of this one product sold on
the side of the road. Well, I think that's an answer, world,
get to kissed a minute. Oh the new guy, nick
(20:56):
Head Bob kills me every time. Every time. So Roberts
us a brew had this one amazing product that launched
amazing commercials like that. I think that one was like
from the seventies, okay, amazing. Anyway, he made a lot
of smart moves in the early years, and they were
moves that not everybody was doing or even would trust
(21:17):
to do. I think in those days some were things
everyone did and others were just new and different. For example,
something he did that lots of people were doing, he
patented his product. So he patented the product and he
patented the name. That happened in eighteen seventy two. That stopped,
of course, people from imitating exactly what he did. They
couldn't use his formula even if they could, you know,
backwards engineer and figure out what it was. And of
(21:40):
course they couldn't use his name. And in fact, he
was one of the early people who went out and
protected his name. There were later a few people who
tried to use similar names, like Denteline. I think was
one of them. Suit him. Yeah, by bye Denteline. So
patenting certainly a lot of people do that. But he
also partnered with people. He was really smart early on
(22:00):
about creating some good partnerships. When he incorporated chess A
Brew Manufacturing, he let Standard Oil Trust become the biggest
shareholder that was back in so you would think, like
Standard Oil, they're selling oil and gas to heat people's
homes and for uses like that, why would they want
to be part of this medicinal product. Essentially, Well, it
(22:22):
was good for them because now they owned part of
a company that first of all had some patents they
thought they might be able to use for other things.
But also because they were selling a byproduct that was
essentially garbage and making money on both sides of the equations.
It was brilliant for Standard Oil, and of course it
was good for CHESSI Brew because it gave him this reliable,
(22:43):
ongoing source of the raw product, the raw materials, and
a little bit of protection from competitors because Standard Royal
is going to give it to him. Not a competitor.
So that was sort of early early genius on his part,
And I think that brings me to this other modern
in this philosophy that Chessa brou basically ignored. So he's
(23:04):
ignored really to fail fast and the constant pivoting of
modern times. But he also ignored that theme niches make riches.
Have you ever heard that? Oh? Yeah, it was that
like an inch wide and a mild deeps kind of
a phrase behind it, right look at you. Um. Yeah.
So this whole idea now that you know, when you
go to pitt your idea to venture capitalists or something,
they're like, tell me your market, who else is in
(23:25):
that market? Why will your version of this work? Well,
he sort of ignored that. Even though he only had
one product, he didn't advertise vasoline as being good for
healing acid burns. He advertised vassoline as being good for
literally everything, which is why we now land in the
world of dirty jokes. But I mean literally, it was
(23:48):
for everything. I'm about to say sounds dirty, it's gonna
say greasing your saddle, but literally it was for every
kind of household use you could think of. It was
for babies, it was for you know, cosmetic uses, for
hair tonic, you name it. You could use vasseling for it.
And he also repackaged it in a bunch of different ways.
(24:09):
That was kind of smart. So it was the same product,
but he put it in different shape jars and slightly
changed the name to use it for hair tonic and
household use and all of those things. I'm really trying
hard to stay away from the dirty jokes right now.
And the other thing is, despite the total lack of
any actual medical value, it's never been proven that it
actually does anything good for you. But he, by the way,
(24:30):
believed that till his dying day. He managed to get
the medical profession at the time on board. When he
was doing the free samples, he didn't only give them
to housewives, he gave them to doctors, and he got
doctors to buy into it. I think they thought at
the time that maybe it kept germs away from wounds,
which was good enough. I'm not sure that it really does.
I almost feel like it might be a germ magnet.
(24:53):
At least in the eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, that
was probably much better than most of the over the
counter things you could buy because that was when they
were selling like snake oil, crazy stuff, fairpoint. Fair point
was snake oil, actually snake oil. It was. It was
a joke. It never really did anything. That's that's a
whole other, all right. The other thing he did was
(25:14):
branch out, both geographically and from a product standpoint. So
he quickly had this product up and running and had
factories producing vassoline in France, in England and Germany and Italy.
In six he added new products by sort of making
slightly different formulas. He had lux or oil. He had
all kinds of medicinal i'll air quote that products, including
(25:38):
white vaseline. He put camphorated. It was like that smelling
camphorted oil version of vasoline they called that. They said
it was for rheumatism. I don't think it really did anything.
But they had all kinds of medical versions. They had
the sort of toiletry version. Palmade vaseline for hair, vasseline
oil which was perfumed. They put smell back into it,
(25:58):
ostensibly a good smell, but who knows. Vasseling cold cream.
They had something called vasseling cosmetique, which is interesting because
nobody really knows for sure what it was now. It's
kind of been lost to history, but people are thinking
it might have been the first hair color, like the
first hair die because at the time when women I
don't think really men dyed their hair at the time,
but when women started trying to get rid of their gray,
(26:20):
they used water based products that would would come off
if they sweat or if it rained, they'd have brown
stuff dripping down their faces. This was the first oil
based we think hair color cosmetique. So it was oil
with brown whatever mixed into it so it didn't come
off in the rain. And that is genius to use
the same based product all the way across the board.
(26:41):
That's what he did. Then there was also the household versions.
He had a product called phil Train, which was a
sewing machine oil. He had anti corrosive paste, axle paste, etcetera, etcetera.
So all kinds of things that could be used around
the house, on the farm, etcetera. One last, all important
set of smart moves for Robert chess A Brew was
(27:01):
the ability to use these strategic partnerships. We already talked
about standard oil. He recognized that early on, but he
also in reach an agreement with Colgate and Company to
distribute vasseline nationwide in the United States, So rather than
building out his whole own distribution network, he made an
early partnership to make that happen. And that partnership actually
(27:22):
lasted a really long time, as did the partnership with
Standard Oil. It actually asked until Standard Oil broke up,
and that was you know, twenty years or so, I
think of a partnership or maybe a little bit more. Anyway,
in the first half of the nineteen hundreds, Vassoline and
all of its products were staples around the world. So
by the time they merged with Ponds, which was another
(27:43):
face cream company in nineteen fifty to become chess Abreu Ponds,
they were huge. The two companies. Their branded products were
sold in a hundred and twenty five countries and manufactured
locally in thirty five of those countries, which for the
time it was pretty phenomenal. Absolutely, that's one of the
first kind of worldwide brands, if you think about it
(28:04):
that way, right, and it was really genius in a
way to be making the product where they needed it.
There are companies struggling with that now. I mean, think
about what's going on with trade in this country or
and in the world. Really right now about car manufacturers
being closer to where they're trying to deliver cars while
they were doing this, you know, with Vaseline back in
the early again, just sort of this for thinking, brilliant
(28:27):
sort of way of doing business. And he was not
a businessman. He learned all of this stuff on the go,
which I think is also kind of fascinating. It's also
really cool to think about the fact that he wasn't
necessarily scared to team up and maybe let someone else
have a little tiny part of what he was doing
for the overall greater success of the company. He wasn't
greedy with it, right. I think there's a there's a
(28:48):
tendency even now um to want to hold on to ownership.
You know, you see people saying I don't want to
give up more than or I need to hold on,
and in a way, sort of giving up more and
partnering could be the way to last forever, right, as
opposed to holding on so tight that you lose the
whole thing. So during those golden years with CHESSA Brew Ponds,
(29:09):
you know that's he By this point Chester Brew himself
was getting old. He passed away sort of before anything
went wrong the company was always good for Chessa Brew personally.
He passed away wait for it, at ninety six years old,
which was unheard of in those days. Think about that.
I mean, that's old for now, absolutely right, And though
(29:30):
the product was not ever proven to have any medical benefits.
Sometime before he died, he let it be known in
an interview that he had literally eaten, yes, swallowed, eaten
a spoonful of vasoline every day four years. You make
the X sound, But he lived to it's valid. Maybe
(29:53):
he kind of pickled his insides in a way. Everything
was so coated and vasoline that any of the bad
stuff that got in just right right through is probably
really good for his digestive system. Uh. In any case, Yeah, gross,
But ninety six. So it wasn't until after he had
long passed that things started to falter a little bit
for Chessa Brouke Ponds, the combined company in the earnings
(30:16):
declined for the first time in twenty nine years. I
don't really see a major fault in that. I just
feel like it's one of those things that happened sometimes
with an older company. It was really more of the
Ponds brand. If you go back and look at the
research that didn't stay as current vesseling was doing okay
as a product line in their combined company. In five
(30:36):
they made a big mistake. They bought a company called
Stouffer Chemical Company for one point to five billion. It
was an attempt to diversify, but that company that purchase
put them deeply in debt. And with the depressed earnings
of the company and that amount of debt, it made
them a takeover target. And so in December of nineteen
eighty six, the board agreed to be acquired by Unilever
(30:58):
for three point one billion dollars. So that brings us
really up to now. And I gotta say for Robert
chester Brew all good. Oh yeah, his entire life was
nothing but profit and success for his brand, which is
got to be crazy knowing that, first off, he lives
such a long life and saw the world change so much.
Yet Vasoline was always current. It was always in everyone's house.
(31:20):
And even the dip that they had towards the end
there that brought us to today and that allowed you
in a lever to purchase them ultimately was a success
for the product and the product line of Vasoline because
it lives on to this day. And as we sort
of said at the very beginning of the episode, it's
such a part of modern pop culture. Everybody knows what
(31:41):
it is. If you say vassoline, you get two responses
either one a total giggle and snicker admit it, but
too you picture the product in your head. You know
exactly what the logo looks like, what the container looks like.
You probably know where in your house you have it,
and I know you have it, so just stop pretending
you do. And so I think ultimately this is a
(32:03):
story of perseverance leading to like a forever product. You're right,
the vassoline tubs are known worldwide, and it's so interesting.
When we started the show, we're talking about how this
guy was kind of crazy in a good way. But
I know, I think it's so so looked down upon.
We see so many people in today's society that have
(32:25):
stuck with their idea or whatever they're doing and it's
not quite successful, and everyone's like, you're going to fail.
Look at you, Look at what you're doing. And a
hundred and sixty seventy five years ago, he did it,
and look where it is now. So yeah, absolutely, and
you know, before we wrap up, totally. I have to
share one more vasoline story, get your mind out of
(32:45):
the gutter. Vassoline is also part of the backstory of
another huge brand. I'll give you a clue. A young
man created a cosmetic empire by taking his sister Mabel's
trick of making her lashes look longer and darker with
a mixture of coal dust or what they called lamp black,
mixing it with vasoline. Any idea baby shooting for maybe yep,
(33:16):
Mabel line get it. Mabel plus vasoline equals mabelne. That's
for real and that's our show for today. Phisiography is
produced by the iHeart podcast Network. I'm your host Danta Barrett.
My co host and producer is Nick Beam. Our executive
(33:37):
producer is Christopher Hassiotis, and Josh Thame provides audio production.
Have questions, want to give us feedback or have a
company you'd like us to cover. Email us at info
at physiography dot Show, or contact us on social I'm
at the Danta Barrett on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or
just search for me on LinkedIn. Thanks for your support.
(34:00):
The
Thanks to ghosts. She'll make your breakfast. She'll make you toast,
but she don't use butter, she don't use cheese, she
don't use jelly. Any of these. She bad fast, fast sleep.
(00:39):
I'm about to reveal my biggest beauty seq whenever that
was tired of banks, My friends. When you have a
product that's been around for over a hundred years that
almost everyone has a home, and when your brand is
(00:59):
so well known that it makes it into songs and movies,
you can rest assured it's here to stay. But if
the late eighteen hundreds had been like our modern fail fast,
pivot or diye culture, Vassiline might never exist. This is Bisiography,
(01:28):
the show where we dive into the strange but true
stories of iconic companies. Whether they're a household name, the
butt of jokes, or sliding into history, they all have
a pass worth knowing. See what I did there. I'm
Dana Barrett. I'm a former tech executive and entrepreneur and
a TV and radio hosts, and over the course of
my career, I've interviewed thousands of business leaders and reported
(01:49):
on the bright beginnings and massive flame outs of the
brands we know and love. Some of their stories are inspiring,
some get my blood boiling, and some are just plain weird.
Today our story is one of pivots, perseverance, and punch
lines and hanging out with me today as always is
new guy Nick. Can we Nick get the punch lines
(02:11):
and the dirty jokes and the giggling out? Early? Well?
What are you? What are you talking about? What do
you mean with vassilin what punch lines? I'm just saying,
I know there's gonna be a lot of snickering. When
we were pitching the story idea, there was a lot
of snickering. There's been a lot of snickering already before
we've even got into the show. So yeah, you're right, Okay,
so probably we can't get it out of the way early.
(02:32):
Let's just admit it. Vassoline has a lot of uses,
including some in the bedroom. There are we done? Are
we good? Uh? No, we're not. We're not done. No, Yeah,
we're good. Because f y I it's probably not the
best to use in the bedroom. But okay, fine, what
hold on a second, did you actually google my Yeah?
I did actually look that up. Now you know that
(02:52):
all of the ads that follow you around from here
on out are going to be quite trouble, quite questionable. No,
you're absolutely right. Only question is so vasoline. You're right,
it's it's a little you know. Why did you why
did you want to bring this up? Well, here's the thing.
It is a good question. But you know, when we
started thinking about doing different companies for phisiography, I started
(03:14):
looking around the house at the various brands that exist,
and I thought, let me figure out what's going on
with this. We've had this in the house since I
was a kid. I remember it, you know, when I
had baby sisters, we had Vassoline on the diaper changing
table and I still have it, you know, for lip protection.
Settle down, and you know, I did some research and
(03:34):
this is a story. The story of Vassoline is a
story of perseverance, the likes of which we rarely see anymore.
And I think that's a story worth telling. So the
story starts with the inventor of Vassoline. His name was
Robert chess Abreu, which not gonna lie. When I first
read it, I thought was Robert cheesebrow. Um. See, I
(03:58):
told you there was gonna be a lot of giggling.
But his name is actually Robert chester Brew and he's
he was a British guy. It was Chessibrew. He was
born in London back in eighteen thirty seven, and I
don't know much about his super early years, but he
moved to Brooklyn, New York pretty early on and he
became a purveyor of illumination oil or lamp oil as
(04:19):
we would call it, and a bit of a chemist
at the time because you had to do that to
make the oils to sell for the various kinds of lamps.
Primarily Kerosene was of course the lamp lighting fluid of
the day, and there was a lot of competition in
that business. And that was an era in history in
general where I think there was, you know, there were
a lot of young men that were looking around for
(04:39):
ways to make it big, to get rich. Absolutely, you're
trying to find that next big opportunity. And yeah, it
was the kind of the beginning a little bit in
early eighteen hundreds of that what we now kind of
view is like the entrepreneurial spirit. Yeah, I mean, yes,
I think that's true. And it's like hard to maybe
imagine now for you millennials, especially because now it's all
(04:59):
about work binance, right, Well you say that with such disdain. Yeah,
we we we we want to balance everything. And back
then it was find what you can get into that
will set your career off in a whole new way. Right.
And there's also I think this, you know, this entire
story of Assilene is so easy to sort of compare
and contrast to what's happening now. And while yes, I'm
(05:20):
joking a little bit about millennials wanting work life balance,
because there's certainly a very intense startup culture now, but
I think one of the big differences now is there's
also a lot of venture capital money, and so people
may not realize that when they get into business now,
they still are going to have to struggle. I think
then they knew the struggle was going to be real,
and that, you know, maybe they would find somebody to
(05:40):
invest in their business. But it wasn't as free flowing
the cash, I think as it was back then. In
any case, our hero Robert Chessibru was one of those guys.
He was looking for some way to make more money.
And then a news story happened. It was eighteen fifty
nine and the first ever oil well in America was drilled.
Fun fact I oil in America was all about Texas.
(06:03):
Turns out the first oil well was not in Texas.
It was actually in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Who knew. Does anyone
go to Titusville, Pennsylvania anymore? I don't even know what's there.
I just always thought I pictured the TV set of Dallas,
and I just assumed it was all Texas. But that's
just me. In any case, it was Titusville, Pennsylvania. That's
where the oil rush began. People heard about this oil
(06:25):
well and they started flocking to Titusville, Pennsylvania to see
if they could make it big in oil. And Robert
chester Brew was one of those guys. He spent his
life savings to leave Brooklyn and go to Titusville, Pennsylvania
to see if he could make his fortune. And he
was there for a little while. And this was not
like a one day trip. I mean, he spent some
time in Titusville and he figured out, I think pretty quickly,
(06:45):
that he was one of many. There was a lot
of competition and it wasn't going to be that easy
to you know, make his fortune in oil. He did not.
He couldn't, you know, create his own oil. Well, he
didn't have the funds for that. So he was looking
around trying to figure out what he could do. And
he I think had one of those modern kind of
(07:06):
inventor brains and that he was able to see things
that other people didn't necessarily see. So he pretty quickly
realized he would have to find a better idea, a
better way to to strike it rich if you will. Hey, guys,
I just had a thought. Okay, so this is it. Right,
A lot of successful startups launched with a different business
model and when they ran into trumple they pivoted to
(07:29):
something new. Don't lose faith, guys, right, look at me,
Look at me, Look at me. We've got a great name,
we've got a great team, we've got a great logo,
and we've got a great name. Now we just need
an idea. Let's pivot. Let's pivot. Let's pivot. That of
course is from Silicon Valley, the beloved current TV show,
And well, he didn't have a great name and a
(07:49):
great brand. Not at that point, he did know he
needed to pivot from trying to become an oil baron
to something else. So, just like our heroes in Silicon Valley,
it was time for our old time hero Robert Tessa
Brew to pivot. Luckily he Robert was only twenty two
at the time, and he was a bit of a
risk taker and an outside of the box thinker. So
while he was touring around on the oil field, he
(08:10):
happened to notice this rigger, a guy who worked there,
scraping this like thick, dark, blackish goo from the oil pumps.
I feel like this is a dirty joke from the
oil pumps. He's scraping goof from the oil pumps joint.
It's a little dirty. Anyway, he asked about it, and
apparently this gunk, which was called rod wax, tended to
(08:31):
come up with the crude oil and just collect on
the rigging, and if they didn't clean it off periodically,
it would just totally gum up the works. So it
was basically, you know, a byproduct that was worthless that
was coming up off the oil rigs. And you know,
he'd been hanging around for a while and he started
hearing from some of the riggers that they would use
this smelly, nasty black gunk um to heal their wounds.
(08:55):
And that's when he got the magical idea. Only needed
so he asked if he could take some of this byproduct,
this trash, this goo, and that's how the whole thing started.
Except here's the thing. It was not anything like what
modern vassiline, modern petroleum jelly is today. It was stinky,
it was black, it was gross, and it was not
(09:17):
something he was going to be able to sell easily,
certainly not to the housewives of America in the late
eighteen hundreds. So this was a guy who literally saw
something that nobody else even looked at and thought I
could do something with this. It's really interesting that he
saw that. And you know that, like you said in
the Inventor Brain, you always try to think of maybe
the source of where your stuff is gonna come from.
(09:40):
How genius to go, Hey, this is something they're literally
just tossing to the side. There's zero cost forgetting this product, genius,
no investment up front, something but profit after that. And
if these guys on the oil fields are willing to
use it to heal their wounds, and it must work, now,
how can I make it work and get people to
buy it? And the thing that this always makes me
(10:03):
think about is how many people have brains like that
even today? I think there's a fairly small percentage of
people who can see an opportunity where you know, nobody
else sees anything, you know, I mean, do you feel
like you think like that. No, I don't think most people.
Do you see something that's like that, that's waste? How
many of us if you were, especially back then, but
even now, if you're walking past something and it's black,
(10:25):
gooey tar junk and its stinks and get that away
from me. That's that's useless, that's junk. Throw it in
the trash. I'm done with it. Yeah, I mean, look,
there are clearly other products in the world that come
from nothing where someone just thought like this is going
to waste, I can do something with it. And you know,
the first example of that that came to my mind
when I was thinking about this story is duncan munchkins.
(10:46):
I mean right, it's like the donut hole. They're stamping
the donuts. They got this extra dough and they're like,
we could do something like that. Absolutely, and it's genius.
How many people do you know prefer the donut holes
over the actual doughnuts themselves? Brilliant? I mean, let's put
it this way. We are seeing potentially the end of
the era of natural oils of fossil fuels being used,
(11:08):
but petroleum, jelly and vasoline will live on forever, my friends,
just like the donut holes, you know. But I do
think it's really rare for people to see that, because
even if you think about the donut hole example, why
are all of the jokes just I feel like that
it's all dirty um. But you know, you stamp the
donut and you think, well, the shape isn't good for anything,
(11:28):
and all this excess dough, what are we gonna do
with it? You can make more doughnuts, but then you
still have waste every single time. Eventually you gets you
don't have enough dough left of doing to make it right.
But somebody got creative. They thought of a way, and
here we are, and now they created a whole other
product line, you know, that ends up being more popular
in the original product was intended to be. And also,
(11:48):
as far as I'm I understand, the donut holes don't
have any calories, because you know, right, it's just it's
just what I've heard. I don't know if it's true.
In any case, it was genius. They were throwing this
you away, this rod wax away. It's kind of like
in the Grinch movie. Remember this part drove it back,
We don't come back with the right. It's amazing can
(12:11):
throw away one. I'm not a mins Paul Parree, So
are you suggesting that chess a Brew was kind of
a grinch? He was mean and he was like, yeah, whatever,
I'll make something out of this. I don't know if
he was really a grinch, but he was odd and
he was persistent. We'll get into that next one. So
(12:41):
after his tour of the oil fields, chess a Brew
asked if he can have some of that rod wax,
and he takes it back to Brooklyn, to the lab
that he had been using to make his oil lamp,
and he starts trying to figure out how to make
this black gunk clear and odorless. It takes him, wait
for it, ten years, ten years of experimenting. I don't
(13:04):
think I have the patience of like a gnat by comparison,
I can't do anything for more than a year or two,
and I get bored. I mean, especially with something where
you're sitting in a lab dealing with gunky junk and
trying to clarify. Yeah, I'm surprised at surprised. He gave
it ten months. Yeah, but he kept on trying and
failing and trying and failing, and the stuff was free,
(13:25):
so I guess he just got more when he needed it. Uh.
And it's not until ten years later that that trip
to the oil fields was when he again, he was
like twenty two when this all started. It was eighteen
fifty nine when he brought the stuff home. It wasn't
until eighteen sixty nine that he officially discovers the secret
and makes the clear, odorless vasseline that we now know.
(13:48):
So by comparison the Sistine Chapel four years, that's it. Yeah,
we think of that as the thing that took forever.
Apparently vasseline is more of a masterpiece the Sisteen Chapel.
I'm not saying. I'm just saying the Pyramids twenty years.
But they're a little bigger, just a little bit in fairness,
(14:09):
and they took more people, and I don't know if
they count because there was a whole like slave labor
thing going on there. That's for another show. In any case,
clearly our Silicon Valley guys would have pivoted after like
a few months at most, don't you think absolutely. But
there were some other things too that did take some time.
For example, w D forty. You know why it's called
w D forty not because it was the concoction they
(14:32):
had made, and it took them about six months to
try each one, so it was almost a twenty year
experiment for w D forty. Another one to bubble wrap,
was actually introduced in the early sixties as take a guess.
It was invented as something else. It was initially very close.
That was its second use, the first one textured wallpaper.
(14:52):
He was to say, now, now that I think about it,
bubble wrap would pretty cool. I was about to say,
I think I see my next three decoration and happening
right there. And fun fact, a recent episode of Doctor
Hill had exploding bubble wrap just saying awesome. But right
then it was how sinstallation in it all failed And
somebody at IBM happened to have some laying around and
(15:12):
they were shipping a computer they ran out of like
the packaging foam. They tossed it and they're wrapped it
up in that because they figured out there's enough padding,
we'll just put a lot on it and bubble wrap
as we know it for packaging was formed, and it
took about, you know, from nineteen sixty to IBM. It's
quite some time. Very interesting to know. Yeah, I wonder
if they were as cookie as Robert Chester b just wondering,
but yeah, who knew. I didn't know bubble wrap at that.
(15:33):
Maybe they'll be a future episode of Bosiography. In any case,
very amazing ability in all those cases. Really to stick
to it once again, not something I think a lot
of people can do. But I do think it's lost
in modern times, that stick tuitiveness, perseverance. I feel like
if more people had that, there'd be more success, don't you. Absolutely.
(15:54):
I think so many people, even if it's not an
entrepreneurial venture, even if it's just something you're like a
project around the house or just a job in general,
after like a year, year and a half, most people
are like, oh, this isn't working. It's time to move on, right,
And I don't I think certainly even just for like
not necessarily just for inventions, but for careers. For you know,
people start something and a year to your point into it,
(16:15):
they're sort of like, well, if it hasn't worked this far,
it's not going to work, but w D forty ten
years to make vasoline if you just stick to it
and keep trying. I think it's all about really believing
in what you're doing right and yourself, maybe your own ability,
and maybe some of that's gotten lost, a little bit
of it too. Let's be fair. We've we've learned about
Chesa Brew and if you look, we're going to do
(16:36):
some more, I'm sure, research into these other companies. I
think some of that stick tuativeness we've heard before, there's
a little bit of crazy ingenius. I think some of
it's that too. He was so determined that he knew
these rigors told me it's going to heal wounds. He
believed it, He fully fully believed it. So you figure
he takes ten years to develop the product. The rest
is history right now, not even close. And that is
(16:57):
sort of almost when the perseverance started. So he gets
this product, he makes it, he packages it up, and
he takes it out to the pharmacies and he explains
to the you know, the pharmacists, how it's going to
cure all kinds of ills, and they all look at
him like he is in fact crazy, and they buy none.
They buy none. This is a guy who spent ten
years making this stuff, so he is not giving up.
(17:18):
He is going to figure out another way. So he
takes to the road. He literally starts giving roadside demonstrations
to convince the average Joe passersby to try it. He's
going after housewives, he's going after doctors. He's just got
a cart and he's on the road with his invention.
And this is, you know, not actually going well either.
(17:40):
So that's when it gets even weirder. Not gonna lie,
it gets weirder and more innovative and weirder. He decides
that the only way he can convince these roadside audiences
that this stuff works is by self mutilation. Who yeah,
self mutilation. He starts cutting himself, burning himself, stabbing himself,
(18:02):
and pouring acid on himself and then curing himself with massline.
Definitely a little bit of crazy ingenius. Yeah, that, in
my opinion, might be taking it a tad bit too far.
Like if my daughter came to me and said, I
have a great idea, Mom, I invented this stuff, and
to prove to people at works, I'm going to pour
(18:22):
acid on myself. I would take her to a facility.
I'm just saying. But in any case, he literally did that,
and he, in part, as you know, to prove that,
gave it to these folks for free. Said here's a
free sample, take it, try it at home, see if
you like it. That was also not something that was
(18:44):
ever done at the time. Now you hear about that
now and you immediately picture I don't know, the guy
at the food cart with the free chicken. You know.
I mean, there's free samples of everything now, but at
the time, nobody gave free samples. That was not done.
So Chester Breu was innovating with the idea of free samples.
He was innovating with an early form of the infomercial
out there demonstrating his product. And that is when the
(19:05):
magic finally happened. Again, took some time, but people took
the samples, they took it home, and they liked it.
So then what do they do. They go back to
the local pharmacies to get more, and the pharmacies don't
have any m They start calling Chessubreu and placing their orders,
and now the rest is history. So is there a
little bit of like maybe Elon Musk analogy. I mean,
(19:28):
I think there is. Certainly Elon Musk is not exactly
stabbing himself and pouring acid on himself, though he certainly
has been doing some damage to his reputation of late,
and I think it's part of the same thing. He's
like a frustrated, like crazy, mad scientist genius who is
creating things and people are sort of poo pooing him,
and he's frustrated by that. But he's determined and he
(19:51):
knows what he's doing is gonna work, and he's sticking
to it. He's gonna, you know, bore tunnels and create
spaceships and cars that run without fuel and all this
kind of crazy air quotes, crazy stuff, and he's going
to have to be a little crazy to make it happen.
But there's a distinct difference there though that Elon musklike
you said, he's doing crazy stuff like boring tunnels and
going to space and all the But that's a lot
(20:12):
of different things, right, jess A Brew made one thing. Yeah,
he was very single minded. So now he's got this
one great product that people are buying. Lots of people
did that all through time. We have people who created
a product and then nothing happened. So How did that
product that you know, really has no competitors to this
(20:34):
day and that has stood the test of time. How
did that happen out of this one product sold on
the side of the road. Well, I think that's an answer, world,
get to kissed a minute. Oh the new guy, nick
(20:56):
Head Bob kills me every time. Every time. So Roberts
us a brew had this one amazing product that launched
amazing commercials like that. I think that one was like
from the seventies, okay, amazing. Anyway, he made a lot
of smart moves in the early years, and they were
moves that not everybody was doing or even would trust
(21:17):
to do. I think in those days some were things
everyone did and others were just new and different. For example,
something he did that lots of people were doing, he
patented his product. So he patented the product and he
patented the name. That happened in eighteen seventy two. That stopped,
of course, people from imitating exactly what he did. They
couldn't use his formula even if they could, you know,
backwards engineer and figure out what it was. And of
(21:40):
course they couldn't use his name. And in fact, he
was one of the early people who went out and
protected his name. There were later a few people who
tried to use similar names, like Denteline. I think was
one of them. Suit him. Yeah, by bye Denteline. So
patenting certainly a lot of people do that. But he
also partnered with people. He was really smart early on
(22:00):
about creating some good partnerships. When he incorporated chess A
Brew Manufacturing, he let Standard Oil Trust become the biggest
shareholder that was back in so you would think, like
Standard Oil, they're selling oil and gas to heat people's
homes and for uses like that, why would they want
to be part of this medicinal product. Essentially, Well, it
(22:22):
was good for them because now they owned part of
a company that first of all had some patents they
thought they might be able to use for other things.
But also because they were selling a byproduct that was
essentially garbage and making money on both sides of the equations.
It was brilliant for Standard Oil, and of course it
was good for CHESSI Brew because it gave him this reliable,
(22:43):
ongoing source of the raw product, the raw materials, and
a little bit of protection from competitors because Standard Royal
is going to give it to him. Not a competitor.
So that was sort of early early genius on his part,
And I think that brings me to this other modern
in this philosophy that Chessa brou basically ignored. So he's
(23:04):
ignored really to fail fast and the constant pivoting of
modern times. But he also ignored that theme niches make riches.
Have you ever heard that? Oh? Yeah, it was that
like an inch wide and a mild deeps kind of
a phrase behind it, right look at you. Um. Yeah.
So this whole idea now that you know, when you
go to pitt your idea to venture capitalists or something,
they're like, tell me your market, who else is in
(23:25):
that market? Why will your version of this work? Well,
he sort of ignored that. Even though he only had
one product, he didn't advertise vasoline as being good for
healing acid burns. He advertised vassoline as being good for
literally everything, which is why we now land in the
world of dirty jokes. But I mean literally, it was
(23:48):
for everything. I'm about to say sounds dirty, it's gonna
say greasing your saddle, but literally it was for every
kind of household use you could think of. It was
for babies, it was for you know, cosmetic uses, for
hair tonic, you name it. You could use vasseling for it.
And he also repackaged it in a bunch of different ways.
(24:09):
That was kind of smart. So it was the same product,
but he put it in different shape jars and slightly
changed the name to use it for hair tonic and
household use and all of those things. I'm really trying
hard to stay away from the dirty jokes right now.
And the other thing is, despite the total lack of
any actual medical value, it's never been proven that it
actually does anything good for you. But he, by the way,
(24:30):
believed that till his dying day. He managed to get
the medical profession at the time on board. When he
was doing the free samples, he didn't only give them
to housewives, he gave them to doctors, and he got
doctors to buy into it. I think they thought at
the time that maybe it kept germs away from wounds,
which was good enough. I'm not sure that it really does.
I almost feel like it might be a germ magnet.
(24:53):
At least in the eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, that
was probably much better than most of the over the
counter things you could buy because that was when they
were selling like snake oil, crazy stuff, fairpoint. Fair point
was snake oil, actually snake oil. It was. It was
a joke. It never really did anything. That's that's a
whole other, all right. The other thing he did was
(25:14):
branch out, both geographically and from a product standpoint. So
he quickly had this product up and running and had
factories producing vassoline in France, in England and Germany and Italy.
In six he added new products by sort of making
slightly different formulas. He had lux or oil. He had
all kinds of medicinal i'll air quote that products, including
(25:38):
white vaseline. He put camphorated. It was like that smelling
camphorted oil version of vasoline they called that. They said
it was for rheumatism. I don't think it really did anything.
But they had all kinds of medical versions. They had
the sort of toiletry version. Palmade vaseline for hair, vasseline
oil which was perfumed. They put smell back into it,
(25:58):
ostensibly a good smell, but who knows. Vasseling cold cream.
They had something called vasseling cosmetique, which is interesting because
nobody really knows for sure what it was now. It's
kind of been lost to history, but people are thinking
it might have been the first hair color, like the
first hair die because at the time when women I
don't think really men dyed their hair at the time,
but when women started trying to get rid of their gray,
(26:20):
they used water based products that would would come off
if they sweat or if it rained, they'd have brown
stuff dripping down their faces. This was the first oil
based we think hair color cosmetique. So it was oil
with brown whatever mixed into it so it didn't come
off in the rain. And that is genius to use
the same based product all the way across the board.
(26:41):
That's what he did. Then there was also the household versions.
He had a product called phil Train, which was a
sewing machine oil. He had anti corrosive paste, axle paste, etcetera, etcetera.
So all kinds of things that could be used around
the house, on the farm, etcetera. One last, all important
set of smart moves for Robert chess A Brew was
(27:01):
the ability to use these strategic partnerships. We already talked
about standard oil. He recognized that early on, but he
also in reach an agreement with Colgate and Company to
distribute vasseline nationwide in the United States, So rather than
building out his whole own distribution network, he made an
early partnership to make that happen. And that partnership actually
(27:22):
lasted a really long time, as did the partnership with
Standard Oil. It actually asked until Standard Oil broke up,
and that was you know, twenty years or so, I
think of a partnership or maybe a little bit more. Anyway,
in the first half of the nineteen hundreds, Vassoline and
all of its products were staples around the world. So
by the time they merged with Ponds, which was another
(27:43):
face cream company in nineteen fifty to become chess Abreu Ponds,
they were huge. The two companies. Their branded products were
sold in a hundred and twenty five countries and manufactured
locally in thirty five of those countries, which for the
time it was pretty phenomenal. Absolutely, that's one of the
first kind of worldwide brands, if you think about it
(28:04):
that way, right, and it was really genius in a
way to be making the product where they needed it.
There are companies struggling with that now. I mean, think
about what's going on with trade in this country or
and in the world. Really right now about car manufacturers
being closer to where they're trying to deliver cars while
they were doing this, you know, with Vaseline back in
the early again, just sort of this for thinking, brilliant
(28:27):
sort of way of doing business. And he was not
a businessman. He learned all of this stuff on the go,
which I think is also kind of fascinating. It's also
really cool to think about the fact that he wasn't
necessarily scared to team up and maybe let someone else
have a little tiny part of what he was doing
for the overall greater success of the company. He wasn't
greedy with it, right. I think there's a there's a
(28:48):
tendency even now um to want to hold on to ownership.
You know, you see people saying I don't want to
give up more than or I need to hold on,
and in a way, sort of giving up more and
partnering could be the way to last forever, right, as
opposed to holding on so tight that you lose the
whole thing. So during those golden years with CHESSA Brew Ponds,
(29:09):
you know that's he By this point Chester Brew himself
was getting old. He passed away sort of before anything
went wrong the company was always good for Chessa Brew personally.
He passed away wait for it, at ninety six years old,
which was unheard of in those days. Think about that.
I mean, that's old for now, absolutely right, And though
(29:30):
the product was not ever proven to have any medical benefits.
Sometime before he died, he let it be known in
an interview that he had literally eaten, yes, swallowed, eaten
a spoonful of vasoline every day four years. You make
the X sound, But he lived to it's valid. Maybe
(29:53):
he kind of pickled his insides in a way. Everything
was so coated and vasoline that any of the bad
stuff that got in just right right through is probably
really good for his digestive system. Uh. In any case, Yeah, gross,
But ninety six. So it wasn't until after he had
long passed that things started to falter a little bit
for Chessa Brouke Ponds, the combined company in the earnings
(30:16):
declined for the first time in twenty nine years. I
don't really see a major fault in that. I just
feel like it's one of those things that happened sometimes
with an older company. It was really more of the
Ponds brand. If you go back and look at the
research that didn't stay as current vesseling was doing okay
as a product line in their combined company. In five
(30:36):
they made a big mistake. They bought a company called
Stouffer Chemical Company for one point to five billion. It
was an attempt to diversify, but that company that purchase
put them deeply in debt. And with the depressed earnings
of the company and that amount of debt, it made
them a takeover target. And so in December of nineteen
eighty six, the board agreed to be acquired by Unilever
(30:58):
for three point one billion dollars. So that brings us
really up to now. And I gotta say for Robert
chester Brew all good. Oh yeah, his entire life was
nothing but profit and success for his brand, which is
got to be crazy knowing that, first off, he lives
such a long life and saw the world change so much.
Yet Vasoline was always current. It was always in everyone's house.
(31:20):
And even the dip that they had towards the end
there that brought us to today and that allowed you
in a lever to purchase them ultimately was a success
for the product and the product line of Vasoline because
it lives on to this day. And as we sort
of said at the very beginning of the episode, it's
such a part of modern pop culture. Everybody knows what
(31:41):
it is. If you say vassoline, you get two responses
either one a total giggle and snicker admit it, but
too you picture the product in your head. You know
exactly what the logo looks like, what the container looks like.
You probably know where in your house you have it,
and I know you have it, so just stop pretending
you do. And so I think ultimately this is a
(32:03):
story of perseverance leading to like a forever product. You're right,
the vassoline tubs are known worldwide, and it's so interesting.
When we started the show, we're talking about how this
guy was kind of crazy in a good way. But
I know, I think it's so so looked down upon.
We see so many people in today's society that have
(32:25):
stuck with their idea or whatever they're doing and it's
not quite successful, and everyone's like, you're going to fail.
Look at you, Look at what you're doing. And a
hundred and sixty seventy five years ago, he did it,
and look where it is now. So yeah, absolutely, and
you know, before we wrap up, totally. I have to
share one more vasoline story, get your mind out of
(32:45):
the gutter. Vassoline is also part of the backstory of
another huge brand. I'll give you a clue. A young
man created a cosmetic empire by taking his sister Mabel's
trick of making her lashes look longer and darker with
a mixture of coal dust or what they called lamp black,
mixing it with vasoline. Any idea baby shooting for maybe yep,
(33:16):
Mabel line get it. Mabel plus vasoline equals mabelne. That's
for real and that's our show for today. Phisiography is
produced by the iHeart podcast Network. I'm your host Danta Barrett.
My co host and producer is Nick Beam. Our executive
(33:37):
producer is Christopher Hassiotis, and Josh Thame provides audio production.
Have questions, want to give us feedback or have a
company you'd like us to cover. Email us at info
at physiography dot Show, or contact us on social I'm
at the Danta Barrett on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or
just search for me on LinkedIn. Thanks for your support.
(34:00):
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