September 8, 2026 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, before PEZ dispensers came topped with Mickey Mouse, Santa Claus, and superheroes, PEZ was a benign Austrian peppermint marketed to adults as an alternative to smoking. Then PEZ came to America and flopped. Instead of giving up, the company decided to change course, and a candy once meant for adults found an entirely new audience in American children.
Shawn Peterson, author of PEZ: From Austrian Invention to American Icon, shares the surprising story of how a failed product launch transformed PEZ into one of the world's most recognizable candies and an icon of American pop culture.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
including yours. Send them to ouramericanstories.com. They're some of our favorites.
As you know, we're a nation of immigrants, but it's
not just people that travel. It's also their ideas. One
of these ideas is something that many of us loved
(00:30):
as kids. Sean Peterson of the Pez Visitor Center is
author of Pez, from Austrian invention to American icon, and
he's here to share how it evolved into the brick-shaped
candy dispenser that we all know and love today. Here's Sean.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Pez, the brand or the candy, was invented by a
man named Edward Haas III.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
He was an Austrian.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
The family had been very successful in a variety of
businesses up to that point, and they had a nice
business providing baking products. And one of the things Mr.
Haas noticed was people were having a difficult time digesting
some of the cakes based on some of the ingredients
that were in them. and found that peppermint oil was
(01:19):
a good way to help in the digestion. And a
byproduct of that, you know, it was a way to
freshen your breath. And most of all, he really wanted
to provide an alternative to smoking. He was very much
a man ahead of his time. And didn't really think
too much of smoking and the health ramifications of that.
So his goal was to kind of come up with
(01:40):
an alternative to that. And he found peppermint oil and
through this, what's called a cold press method, where you
just kind of press the ingredients together, came up with
these little Pez tablets as the product and wanted to
see if there was interest. The German word for peppermint
(02:01):
is Pfefferminz.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
And it's actually quite a long word.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
So he used the first, middle, and last letter of
the word Pfefferminz, which was a P-E-N-Z. And he found
it was an easily pronounceable word in just about any language.
And it was a trademarkable brand name. So it served
two purposes in one. And that's really how Pez got
its start. For the first 20 plus years of its creation,
(02:27):
there was no dispenser. You either bought the product in
a little foil roll, similar to what is offered today,
or there was a little metal tin that you could
carry them in your pocket. If you're old enough to remember,
you know, you could get like Bayer aspirin and a
little metal tin, probably associated these days with like an
Altoid or something like that, that you could carry in
(02:47):
your pocket. And that was really the only way you
could get Pez for its initial creation. It wasn't until
the late 1940s that his success was growing and business
was increasing that he wanted to try something different with
that because he was a bit of a germaphobe. You know,
I've got this great candy. I'm the founder and inventor
(03:10):
of this. But if I want to offer it to you,
you've got to put your fingers in that tin to
get a piece of candy.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
And it's not really what I want.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
So he found a freelance.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
Designer, a man named Oscar Usha.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
And commissioned him to come up with some kind of
dispensing device for the candy. You know, he put a
little thumb grip at the top and some spring mechanisms
inside to be able to offer them one at a time.
And that's really how the shape of the dispenser was born.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
Mr.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Haas started selling these in 1927 in Austria, found success
rather quickly and expanded the product throughout Europe and other
parts of the world And for him, the last great
market to conquer was the United States. So in 1952,
they came to lower Manhattan. They had offices in New
(04:03):
York City. They imported all of the products from Europe
and tried to sell them as they had throughout the
rest of the world as an upscale adult product and
marketed as an alternative to smoking. And it really didn't
have the success that it had in Europe. In fact,
it It really did poorly, unfortunately. Well, I say unfortunately,
(04:24):
but actually it was probably one of the best things
that could have happened to it. It was the lack
of success, really, that drove Pez to innovate and create
the changes that have made us successful to this day.
They were selling the dispenser without a character head. It
just had a little thumb grip, and the only flavor
(04:45):
you could get was peppermint. and as I said it
didn't really have the success that they had hoped for
so somebody in marketing said let's don't pull out of
the market let's let's think about what we're doing and
how we could do it differently and they came up
with the idea of putting a three-dimensional character head on
top of that dispenser and children generally don't like peppermint
(05:09):
you know the strong flavors like that so The idea was,
let's add fruit flavors to the candy, put the three-dimensional
cartoon character head on top, and let's shift the marketing
from adults to children. And it changed, really, the direction
of the brand. They found success very quickly, and, you know,
it changed the business model here in the United States,
(05:32):
as well as globally, and we've been primarily a children's.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Product ever since. The Pez Girl was a It was.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Kind of the grassroots marketing campaign of how they wanted
to advertise Pez. This is something that nobody was really
familiar with. So they had these outfits for ladies to wear.
They would hire models to go out and share the brand.
And a lot of the early ones had skirts with
big pockets so they could keep a lot of the
(06:01):
refills in them. And they would just go out to
events and hand the candy to people, get them to
try this new brand, and hopefully get people enthused about
what this new product was. It was very pinup girl-esque
when it started in the 1950s, so a lot of
the early Pez girls were kind of leggy, and this
(06:21):
is when the marketing was being directed towards adults, and
certainly that shifted in the 60s and 70s as it
shifted to children. In the 1970s, you can see what
looks like a superhero. They had knee-high boots on the model.
She had a cape, and instead of the full Pez logo,
it just had a giant P on the chest, so
it looked kind of like a superhero.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
And it worked.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
And you're listening to Sean Peterson of the Pez Visitor
Center and telling a story we tell again and again
here on this show that a failure, and that's the
failure to launch the Pez product that had worked internationally,
here in the United States. And what did they do? Well,
they learned from the market, they adapted, and actually took
Pez to a place they'd never been before. Again, a
(07:07):
failure leads to a success. When we come back, more
from Sean Peterson, author of Pez, from Austrian invention to
American icon, here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you
love the stories we tell about this great country, and
especially the stories of America's rich past, Know that all
(07:27):
of our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture,
and faith, are brought to us by the great folks
at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the
things that are beautiful in life and all the things
that are good in life. And if you can't get
to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free
and terrific online courses. Go to hillsdale.edu to learn more.
(08:09):
And we return to Our American Stories and to Sean
Peterson with the story of Pez, the manual candy dispenser.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
The first traditional head on a stem that you're familiar
with today was a witch for Halloween, and that was 1957.
And then the first licensed character was 1958, and that
was Popeye. And then we followed that with a couple
of additions to the seasonal line. We added Santa for
the first time. We've been doing Santa ever since. It's
(08:40):
coincidentally one of our best selling, probably our number one
seller to this day. We added an Easter line with
the Easter bunny that year. And then about 1959, 1960,
Casper and Bozo came into the mix. And then 1961,
we did Mickey Mouse with Disney.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
For the first time.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
And I think we're actually the second longest licensed partner
with Disney next to Donald Duck Orange Juice. We've been
working with Disney consecutively since 1961. So we've probably produced
more Disney characters over the year than any other licensed partner.
You know, how many are there? Referring to the dispensers.
And this is what collectors like to talk about and argue.
(09:23):
You know, I mentioned Santa Claus. We've done many, many
iterations of Santa Claus. And is it a variation or
is it a different dispenser? And, you know, there's really
no right or wrong answer. So if we had to
go with just different character heads on top of the
dispenser base, somewhere in the 1400-ish number range right now,
(09:44):
but If you start factoring in variations and there's really
no right or wrong answer as to what constitutes a variation,
start adding zeros to that and it easily goes into
thousands upon thousands. Right now we have 15 different fluids
that we offer the six core fruit flavors and that's
(10:04):
cherry grape lemon strawberry orange raspberry you know the things
that you're familiar with we do four sour flavors and
then we do some seasonal flavors candy corn for Halloween
we do cotton candy We just introduced a new dragon
fruit flavor to go with our Game of Thrones gift
set that we introduced. And then we do sugar cookie
(10:26):
for Christmas and vanilla cupcake for Easter. So that gives
us 15 current flavors that we offer. But we rotate
things in and out. Every few years, we try to
introduce something new. And to do that, we usually retire
a different flavor to try to keep it fresh and different.
There's been many, many dozens of different flavors offered throughout
(10:46):
the year. We just retired cola flavor.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
And chocolate.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
We made those for probably a couple of decades and
finally decided it was time to retire and try something different.
We produce here at the factory about 12 million individual
candy tablets per day. There's certainly some top collectors out
there that have some incredible collections.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
There's people, um, it's really surprising.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Uh, you know, they'll go in and do buyouts of
other collectors and it's things they already have. And they've
got like mini warehouses in their basement, you know, and
they may have 5,000 of the same dispenser, but that's
part of the enjoyment for them.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
They like just having the quantity.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
And then there's other people that focus on not having duplicates,
but they want something different. And they have thousands upon thousands,
you know, in their collection. So it's really up to
how you want to enjoy and collect. It's what makes
the hobby so much fun is, you know, everybody's got
their own take on it. But there's certainly some really
impressive collections out there when you look at what people
(11:53):
have been able to put together. The factory's been here
since 1973. This is the site that they chose when
they first decided to manufacture. They ended up moving the
offices from New York City to here in Connecticut in
the early 70s. And we've been manufacturing in this facility
(12:15):
ever since. And then the visitor center came to be,
I think the original idea was around 2006. And it
actually came from me. I approached the company. They were
familiar with me through some of the books that I'd
published about the history of Pez and documented all the
various dispensers and things like that.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
And they were using the books.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
People would come into marketing and they would share my
book with them. And, you know, look, you can get
some ideas from this and see what we've done. And
when I approached, they kind of knew who I was
at that time and met with the CEO of the company.
And I said, I know you guys haven't done this before,
but I think it'd be a great idea if you
had some kind of historical museum aspect to the business
(13:01):
and maybe a retail piece attached to that that people
could come in and get a sense of the Pez
history and how it's changed and evolved and have an
opportunity to sell them all things Pez right there at
the same facility. And if you like the idea, I'd
like to be the guy to put that together and
run it for you. He said, we're just not ready
(13:22):
for that step yet, but let's stay in touch. So
I took every opportunity that I could for the next
few years to remind him that I'm still around and
had interest in doing this. And it was about late 2009,
he called and said, you know, if you're still interested,
let's talk about doing this.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
I'm actually from Kansas City.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
So not only did I have to move a household,
I had to move an entire collection halfway across the country.
And We figured out how to do that and got
me here to Connecticut and began the process of constructing
the visitor center. So while we were doing that, we
got a general contractor and started figuring out who can
supply giant PEZ dispensers and PEZ related fixtures and all
(14:07):
the cool stuff that we have here in.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
The visitor center.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
We started that process and then I began work on
the website, pez.com, and figuring out how to get the
online store aspect together.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
That all took about a year and a half. And
in the meantime, the visitor center is being constructed.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
And then we finally got it open December of 2011.
To me, coming into work every day, you know, I
see this every single day and I still find myself
stopping and looking around and.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Just kind of enjoying the space.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
And I'm the one that, you know, kind of put
the stuff on the walls and put everything in the
display cases.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
But I still enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
You know, 10 years later, it's still so much fun
for me to have not only a place for my collection,
but being able to share it with everybody now that
comes in to see us. The majority of business that
we have and people that come through the door you know,
to this day, 10 years later, I think that's the
thing that surprises me most. It's, you know, people that
(15:06):
had no idea they were going to be here today
and they just saw the signs along the highway and
it's the Pez factory.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
And we know what that is, but let's go. We've
never been.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
And they come in and the positive comments and feedback
that we hear from people, it's just like, you know,
it's amazing. We had no idea there was this much
to Pez. And To me, that's exciting. And really, one
of the goals behind this for me was just to
share it with people.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
It's been a big part of my life.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
I've been doing this for over 30 years, and I'm
still really enthusiastic about it.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
It's exciting.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
There's still things that are yet to be discovered. And
being able to share that with people and hopefully create
that spark of interest that maybe wants to get them
involved to where maybe they're going to start their own
collection themselves or maybe they think about Pez a little
bit differently the next time they see it in the
store and they've been to the factory and they watched
(15:58):
where it was being packaged and saw how we make
the candy. It kind of gives you a different appreciation
for the brand and what we do. So that's really
the most exciting thing for me. And it was just
kind of a happy mistake trying to adapt to the market.
And had they not done that, nobody would have probably
heard about Pez. It would just been a footnote in
history of a mint or an alternative to smoking like
(16:20):
many products that have come and gone. It certainly wasn't
intentional or the original idea of it, but, you know,
it was being able to adapt and just find the
right market. It changed and created a sense of Pez
being part of pop culture ever since. You know, it's
a relatable brand that everybody knows.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
And a special thanks to Madison for bringing us this
terrific story. And a special thanks to Sean Peterson of
the Pez Visitor Center. And by all means, pick up
his book, Pez, from Austrian invention to American icon. At
Amazon are the usual suspects. And if you're in the
Connecticut area, and that's orange, visit the Pez Visitor Center.
(17:00):
Better still, if you can't get there, go to pez.com
and take a virtual tour. And by the way, since
the partnership with Disney and Mickey, there have been many
other partnerships with brands and with characters. And you can
find the Muppets, Sesame Street characters, the Marvel characters, Star
Wars characters, The Wizard of Oz, Scooby-Doo, Looney Tunes, Mario,
(17:22):
the Ninja Turtles, the Simpsons, Pokemon, and Angry Birds. The
story of Pez, here on Our American Stories.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
¶ ¶ Thank you.
This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
including yours. Send them to ouramericanstories.com. They're some of our favorites.
As you know, we're a nation of immigrants, but it's
not just people that travel. It's also their ideas. One
of these ideas is something that many of us loved
(00:30):
as kids. Sean Peterson of the Pez Visitor Center is
author of Pez, from Austrian invention to American icon, and
he's here to share how it evolved into the brick-shaped
candy dispenser that we all know and love today. Here's Sean.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Pez, the brand or the candy, was invented by a
man named Edward Haas III.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
He was an Austrian.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
The family had been very successful in a variety of
businesses up to that point, and they had a nice
business providing baking products. And one of the things Mr.
Haas noticed was people were having a difficult time digesting
some of the cakes based on some of the ingredients
that were in them. and found that peppermint oil was
(01:19):
a good way to help in the digestion. And a
byproduct of that, you know, it was a way to
freshen your breath. And most of all, he really wanted
to provide an alternative to smoking. He was very much
a man ahead of his time. And didn't really think
too much of smoking and the health ramifications of that.
So his goal was to kind of come up with
(01:40):
an alternative to that. And he found peppermint oil and
through this, what's called a cold press method, where you
just kind of press the ingredients together, came up with
these little Pez tablets as the product and wanted to
see if there was interest. The German word for peppermint
(02:01):
is Pfefferminz.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
And it's actually quite a long word.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
So he used the first, middle, and last letter of
the word Pfefferminz, which was a P-E-N-Z. And he found
it was an easily pronounceable word in just about any language.
And it was a trademarkable brand name. So it served
two purposes in one. And that's really how Pez got
its start. For the first 20 plus years of its creation,
(02:27):
there was no dispenser. You either bought the product in
a little foil roll, similar to what is offered today,
or there was a little metal tin that you could
carry them in your pocket. If you're old enough to remember,
you know, you could get like Bayer aspirin and a
little metal tin, probably associated these days with like an
Altoid or something like that, that you could carry in
(02:47):
your pocket. And that was really the only way you
could get Pez for its initial creation. It wasn't until
the late 1940s that his success was growing and business
was increasing that he wanted to try something different with
that because he was a bit of a germaphobe. You know,
I've got this great candy. I'm the founder and inventor
(03:10):
of this. But if I want to offer it to you,
you've got to put your fingers in that tin to
get a piece of candy.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
And it's not really what I want.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
So he found a freelance.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
Designer, a man named Oscar Usha.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
And commissioned him to come up with some kind of
dispensing device for the candy. You know, he put a
little thumb grip at the top and some spring mechanisms
inside to be able to offer them one at a time.
And that's really how the shape of the dispenser was born.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
Mr.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Haas started selling these in 1927 in Austria, found success
rather quickly and expanded the product throughout Europe and other
parts of the world And for him, the last great
market to conquer was the United States. So in 1952,
they came to lower Manhattan. They had offices in New
(04:03):
York City. They imported all of the products from Europe
and tried to sell them as they had throughout the
rest of the world as an upscale adult product and
marketed as an alternative to smoking. And it really didn't
have the success that it had in Europe. In fact,
it It really did poorly, unfortunately. Well, I say unfortunately,
(04:24):
but actually it was probably one of the best things
that could have happened to it. It was the lack
of success, really, that drove Pez to innovate and create
the changes that have made us successful to this day.
They were selling the dispenser without a character head. It
just had a little thumb grip, and the only flavor
(04:45):
you could get was peppermint. and as I said it
didn't really have the success that they had hoped for
so somebody in marketing said let's don't pull out of
the market let's let's think about what we're doing and
how we could do it differently and they came up
with the idea of putting a three-dimensional character head on
top of that dispenser and children generally don't like peppermint
(05:09):
you know the strong flavors like that so The idea was,
let's add fruit flavors to the candy, put the three-dimensional
cartoon character head on top, and let's shift the marketing
from adults to children. And it changed, really, the direction
of the brand. They found success very quickly, and, you know,
it changed the business model here in the United States,
(05:32):
as well as globally, and we've been primarily a children's.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Product ever since. The Pez Girl was a It was.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Kind of the grassroots marketing campaign of how they wanted
to advertise Pez. This is something that nobody was really
familiar with. So they had these outfits for ladies to wear.
They would hire models to go out and share the brand.
And a lot of the early ones had skirts with
big pockets so they could keep a lot of the
(06:01):
refills in them. And they would just go out to
events and hand the candy to people, get them to
try this new brand, and hopefully get people enthused about
what this new product was. It was very pinup girl-esque
when it started in the 1950s, so a lot of
the early Pez girls were kind of leggy, and this
(06:21):
is when the marketing was being directed towards adults, and
certainly that shifted in the 60s and 70s as it
shifted to children. In the 1970s, you can see what
looks like a superhero. They had knee-high boots on the model.
She had a cape, and instead of the full Pez logo,
it just had a giant P on the chest, so
it looked kind of like a superhero.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
And it worked.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
And you're listening to Sean Peterson of the Pez Visitor
Center and telling a story we tell again and again
here on this show that a failure, and that's the
failure to launch the Pez product that had worked internationally,
here in the United States. And what did they do? Well,
they learned from the market, they adapted, and actually took
Pez to a place they'd never been before. Again, a
(07:07):
failure leads to a success. When we come back, more
from Sean Peterson, author of Pez, from Austrian invention to
American icon, here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you
love the stories we tell about this great country, and
especially the stories of America's rich past, Know that all
(07:27):
of our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture,
and faith, are brought to us by the great folks
at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the
things that are beautiful in life and all the things
that are good in life. And if you can't get
to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free
and terrific online courses. Go to hillsdale.edu to learn more.
(08:09):
And we return to Our American Stories and to Sean
Peterson with the story of Pez, the manual candy dispenser.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
The first traditional head on a stem that you're familiar
with today was a witch for Halloween, and that was 1957.
And then the first licensed character was 1958, and that
was Popeye. And then we followed that with a couple
of additions to the seasonal line. We added Santa for
the first time. We've been doing Santa ever since. It's
(08:40):
coincidentally one of our best selling, probably our number one
seller to this day. We added an Easter line with
the Easter bunny that year. And then about 1959, 1960,
Casper and Bozo came into the mix. And then 1961,
we did Mickey Mouse with Disney.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
For the first time.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
And I think we're actually the second longest licensed partner
with Disney next to Donald Duck Orange Juice. We've been
working with Disney consecutively since 1961. So we've probably produced
more Disney characters over the year than any other licensed partner.
You know, how many are there? Referring to the dispensers.
And this is what collectors like to talk about and argue.
(09:23):
You know, I mentioned Santa Claus. We've done many, many
iterations of Santa Claus. And is it a variation or
is it a different dispenser? And, you know, there's really
no right or wrong answer. So if we had to
go with just different character heads on top of the
dispenser base, somewhere in the 1400-ish number range right now,
(09:44):
but If you start factoring in variations and there's really
no right or wrong answer as to what constitutes a variation,
start adding zeros to that and it easily goes into
thousands upon thousands. Right now we have 15 different fluids
that we offer the six core fruit flavors and that's
(10:04):
cherry grape lemon strawberry orange raspberry you know the things
that you're familiar with we do four sour flavors and
then we do some seasonal flavors candy corn for Halloween
we do cotton candy We just introduced a new dragon
fruit flavor to go with our Game of Thrones gift
set that we introduced. And then we do sugar cookie
(10:26):
for Christmas and vanilla cupcake for Easter. So that gives
us 15 current flavors that we offer. But we rotate
things in and out. Every few years, we try to
introduce something new. And to do that, we usually retire
a different flavor to try to keep it fresh and different.
There's been many, many dozens of different flavors offered throughout
(10:46):
the year. We just retired cola flavor.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
And chocolate.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
We made those for probably a couple of decades and
finally decided it was time to retire and try something different.
We produce here at the factory about 12 million individual
candy tablets per day. There's certainly some top collectors out
there that have some incredible collections.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
There's people, um, it's really surprising.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Uh, you know, they'll go in and do buyouts of
other collectors and it's things they already have. And they've
got like mini warehouses in their basement, you know, and
they may have 5,000 of the same dispenser, but that's
part of the enjoyment for them.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
They like just having the quantity.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
And then there's other people that focus on not having duplicates,
but they want something different. And they have thousands upon thousands,
you know, in their collection. So it's really up to
how you want to enjoy and collect. It's what makes
the hobby so much fun is, you know, everybody's got
their own take on it. But there's certainly some really
impressive collections out there when you look at what people
(11:53):
have been able to put together. The factory's been here
since 1973. This is the site that they chose when
they first decided to manufacture. They ended up moving the
offices from New York City to here in Connecticut in
the early 70s. And we've been manufacturing in this facility
(12:15):
ever since. And then the visitor center came to be,
I think the original idea was around 2006. And it
actually came from me. I approached the company. They were
familiar with me through some of the books that I'd
published about the history of Pez and documented all the
various dispensers and things like that.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
And they were using the books.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
People would come into marketing and they would share my
book with them. And, you know, look, you can get
some ideas from this and see what we've done. And
when I approached, they kind of knew who I was
at that time and met with the CEO of the company.
And I said, I know you guys haven't done this before,
but I think it'd be a great idea if you
had some kind of historical museum aspect to the business
(13:01):
and maybe a retail piece attached to that that people
could come in and get a sense of the Pez
history and how it's changed and evolved and have an
opportunity to sell them all things Pez right there at
the same facility. And if you like the idea, I'd
like to be the guy to put that together and
run it for you. He said, we're just not ready
(13:22):
for that step yet, but let's stay in touch. So
I took every opportunity that I could for the next
few years to remind him that I'm still around and
had interest in doing this. And it was about late 2009,
he called and said, you know, if you're still interested,
let's talk about doing this.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
I'm actually from Kansas City.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
So not only did I have to move a household,
I had to move an entire collection halfway across the country.
And We figured out how to do that and got
me here to Connecticut and began the process of constructing
the visitor center. So while we were doing that, we
got a general contractor and started figuring out who can
supply giant PEZ dispensers and PEZ related fixtures and all
(14:07):
the cool stuff that we have here in.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
The visitor center.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
We started that process and then I began work on
the website, pez.com, and figuring out how to get the
online store aspect together.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
That all took about a year and a half. And
in the meantime, the visitor center is being constructed.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
And then we finally got it open December of 2011.
To me, coming into work every day, you know, I
see this every single day and I still find myself
stopping and looking around and.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Just kind of enjoying the space.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
And I'm the one that, you know, kind of put
the stuff on the walls and put everything in the
display cases.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
But I still enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
You know, 10 years later, it's still so much fun
for me to have not only a place for my collection,
but being able to share it with everybody now that
comes in to see us. The majority of business that
we have and people that come through the door you know,
to this day, 10 years later, I think that's the
thing that surprises me most. It's, you know, people that
(15:06):
had no idea they were going to be here today
and they just saw the signs along the highway and
it's the Pez factory.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
And we know what that is, but let's go. We've
never been.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
And they come in and the positive comments and feedback
that we hear from people, it's just like, you know,
it's amazing. We had no idea there was this much
to Pez. And To me, that's exciting. And really, one
of the goals behind this for me was just to
share it with people.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
It's been a big part of my life.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
I've been doing this for over 30 years, and I'm
still really enthusiastic about it.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
It's exciting.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
There's still things that are yet to be discovered. And
being able to share that with people and hopefully create
that spark of interest that maybe wants to get them
involved to where maybe they're going to start their own
collection themselves or maybe they think about Pez a little
bit differently the next time they see it in the
store and they've been to the factory and they watched
(15:58):
where it was being packaged and saw how we make
the candy. It kind of gives you a different appreciation
for the brand and what we do. So that's really
the most exciting thing for me. And it was just
kind of a happy mistake trying to adapt to the market.
And had they not done that, nobody would have probably
heard about Pez. It would just been a footnote in
history of a mint or an alternative to smoking like
(16:20):
many products that have come and gone. It certainly wasn't
intentional or the original idea of it, but, you know,
it was being able to adapt and just find the
right market. It changed and created a sense of Pez
being part of pop culture ever since. You know, it's
a relatable brand that everybody knows.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
And a special thanks to Madison for bringing us this
terrific story. And a special thanks to Sean Peterson of
the Pez Visitor Center. And by all means, pick up
his book, Pez, from Austrian invention to American icon. At
Amazon are the usual suspects. And if you're in the
Connecticut area, and that's orange, visit the Pez Visitor Center.
(17:00):
Better still, if you can't get there, go to pez.com
and take a virtual tour. And by the way, since
the partnership with Disney and Mickey, there have been many
other partnerships with brands and with characters. And you can
find the Muppets, Sesame Street characters, the Marvel characters, Star
Wars characters, The Wizard of Oz, Scooby-Doo, Looney Tunes, Mario,
(17:22):
the Ninja Turtles, the Simpsons, Pokemon, and Angry Birds. The
story of Pez, here on Our American Stories.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
¶ ¶ Thank you.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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