Thread by @zhr_jafri

When a small company bought 100 million soap pumps to protect its market share from Colgate Palmolive and P&G

And delayed their entry in the market for 2 years

1/

1979 - Robert Taylor owned a small regional company, Minnetonka producing soap. It was one of the first companies to launch liquid hand soap in the US under the brand Softsoap

2/

When Softsoap was launched at a small scale, consumers liked the product. Robert decided to push the product nationally spending 6 million $ on advertising campaigns



3/

1980 - In no time, it became very popular across the country capturing close to 75% of the liquid soap market share. Yardley, another small player had around 24% share.

Softsoap clocked sales close to 60 million $ in 1980

4/

The big soap players: P&G and Colgate Palmolive took notice of this new growing market

Given their superior resources, they could easily produce/market/distribute the liquid soap much better and stop Softsoap from growing

5/

To stop this from happening, Robert did something crazy. To sell liquid soap, brands would need small pumps which fit in the bottle. There were 3-4 manufactures of these pumps in the country at that point

6/

Robert spent 12 million $ (more than the entire company's worth) to give order 100 million small pumps which was all that these pump manufacture could produce for next 2 years

7/

This stopped P&G and Colgate Palmolive in their tracks. With no pumps available for next 2 years, they could not sell liquid soap anytime soon.

Softsoap on the other hand continued to capture this growing market with no new competition

8/

Finally after 2 years, Softsoap was acquired by Colgate Palmolive for 61 million $

9/9