76 THE APRIL FOOL

Despite the fact that the company was founded on 1 April, William Wrigley Jr was to prove that he was no fool.

29-year-old William had moved to Chicago from Philadelphia in 1891 with $32 to his name and the idea of putting that name to a business selling “Wrigley’s Scouring Soap”. He quickly decided to offer incentives to encourage people to buy his soap, and one incentive he used was baking powder. The incentive proved to be so popular that he switched to selling baking powder. Keeping his policy of incentivizing sales, he began offering two packages of chewing gum for each purchase of a can of baking powder.

Yet again William found that there seemed to more interest in his incentive than in his core product, and so he changed direction again and began to produce chewing gum.

One of his first aims was to challenge the stereotype that only women should chew gum. Two of the company’s earliest products – Sweet Sixteen Orange and Lotta Gum – revolutionized chewing gum’s appeal, spreading interest to the youth market and then to the public at large.

In another act of what could have been foolishness, he decided during the economic depression of 1893 that he would introduce two new flagship products: Wrigley’s Spearmint and Juicy Fruit. Yet again he proved the sceptics wrong and the brands were an immediate success.¹⁵

So when an even more debilitating economic downturn arrived in 1907, Wrigley did another foolish thing and mortgaged just about everything he owned to launch a massive advertising campaign. Surprise, surprise – it was another success.

And the moral is that some see opportunities where others only see risk. What foolish thing should you be doing?

¹⁵ In another move that many at the time might have seen as foolish, Wrigley Jr established himself as one of the nation’s leading champions of employee rights and benefits, creating a health and welfare department in Wrigley’s Chicago factory in 1916 and granting his employees both Saturdays and Sundays off in 1924. During the Great Depression, the company went one step further, boldly setting minimum wage levels so its workers could have financial security during one of the nation’s darkest hours.