Part IThe Story
The umbrellas were red, and they were cheap, and when it rained the dye ran.
That last detail survives in nearly every account of how William Wrigley Jr. began, usually as comedy, and it is funny: a stocky salesman of twenty-nine, newly arrived in Chicago in the spring of 1891, buys 65,000 umbrellas to give away with boxes of his father's scouring soap, and the umbrellas bleed onto the coats and hands of the merchants and housewives who carried them home. But the joke hides the more interesting thing, the decision that came before the umbrellas. Chicago's retailers did not want Wrigley's Scouring Soap. It sold for five cents a box, they told him, and at five cents there was almost nothing in it for them. Most salesmen hearing that complaint would have cut the price. Wrigley persuaded his father to double it, used the new margin to make the merchant whole, and tossed in a gift to make the customer forget she was paying more.
He didn't give them a cheaper soap. He gave them something extra.
Everything that followed (the baking powder, the gum, the Juicy Fruit introduced the year Chicago hosted the world, the Spearmint, the panic-year advertising gamble, the ballpark, the island, the white terra-cotta tower on the river) came from that one inverted instinct. The thing that is free is the thing that persuades, and you find out what people want by watching which part of the bargain they reach for. Wrigley spent four decades watching hands. Twice in his first eighteen months in Chicago the hands went past the product and closed around the premium, and twice he followed them, abandoning soap for baking powder and baking powder for gum, until he was standing in a business he had never meant to enter, selling a thing he had been giving away.
It is tempting to call that luck. The people who called it luck mostly sold soap.
By the Numbers
A Five-Cent Empire
$32Cash in Wrigley's pocket on arriving in Chicago, 1891
65,000Red umbrellas bought to give away with soap
$284,000Advertising spent in the 1907 panic, buying space worth ~$1.5M
$100M+Lifetime advertising spend: the largest single-product advertiser of his day
$75MCompany revenue at his death in 1932, on $12M profit
$20.2MEstimated value of his estate, January 1932
$23BPrice Mars paid for the company in 2008
The Boy Who Stirred the Vat
The father made soap. That is the first fact and in some ways the governing one.
William Mills Wrigley Sr. came from a line of English Quakers out of Saddleworth, a manufacturing town in the Yorkshire hills; his grandfather Edmund had made woolens in Philadelphia. He married Mary Ann Ladley, of a well-placed Chestnut Hill family, in December 1860, went to war for the Union not long after, and left his firstborn, born September 30, 1861, to be raised for a time by an aunt and uncle. After the war he built things. He sat on the Philadelphia school board. In 1870 he opened a soap works near what is now the Wayne Junction station in Germantown and put his name on the box: Wrigley's Mineral Scouring Soap, made in part from pulverized quartz, wrapped in bright red paper that promised it would "clean, scrub, scour and polish." A respectable man selling an abrasive product. He would father nine children. He believed, by one account, that his soap was good enough to sell on its own merits.
His eldest son believed almost nothing on its own merits.
The boy was, in the vocabulary of the period, a trial. He was sent home from grammar school so often that his father became a familiar figure in the principal's office. At eleven he and a friend ran away to New York, where he sold newspapers on street corners, worked as a cook's helper on ships tied up in the harbor, and slept in doorways or under delivery wagons alongside the other boys who lived that way. He stayed until the weather turned cold, which is a practical reason to come home and possibly the only kind he respected. Back in Philadelphia he was enrolled again and expelled again, permanently this time, for throwing a pie at the nameplate over the school's main entrance.
His father's response has been preserved, and it is the response of a manufacturer: "Your school life hasn't been a success. Let's see how work strikes you."
Work, it turned out, was a wooden paddle and a vat of boiling soap. The elder Wrigley gave his son the most punishing job in the plant, ten hours a day, for $1.50 a week, and the boy stirred for a year. The labor made him strong (he exercised regularly for the rest of his life, which is the sort of thing that sounds like hagiography until you remember the paddle), but it also made him desperate to be anywhere else. By thirteen he had talked his way out of the vat room and onto the sales staff.
The rest of his adolescence was spent on the road: a horse-drawn wagon, later a bright red one pulled by four horses wearing bells, rolling through the small towns of Pennsylvania, New York, and New England, the soap stacked in back. His first sale reportedly came only after a two-hour presentation and was worth $1.80. What he took from it was not the money. Every prospect says no at first, he concluded; what counts is what they say last.
There is a passage in Nathan Aaseng's Business Builders in Sweets and Treats that gets at the temperament: "From the beginning, it was clear William had two of the key qualities for salesmanship: personality and persistence. He made friends wherever he went. No matter how desperate he was for a sale, he remained unfailingly polite and never argued with a customer." This is the boy who threw a pie at his school. He didn't stop being a rebel. He found the one occupation in which the rebel's restlessness and the courtier's patience could live in the same body, and then he refined the courtier until nobody noticed the rebel underneath.
Not entirely, and not right away. At eighteen he hopped a train west and lost his ticket in Kansas City. He made his way back to Philadelphia and the soap. At twenty-one his father gave him a share of the business. In 1885 he married Ada Elizabeth Foote; their daughter Dorothy was born in July 1886. He kept selling soap, on and off, for the better part of two decades, which is a long time to stay in your father's building when you have been trying to leave it since you were eleven.
Thirty-Two Dollars and a Cousin
The legend says he came to Chicago with $32. The legend is true and also not the whole story, the way legends usually are.
He did arrive with about that much in his pocket, in 1891, at twenty-nine, with Ada and five-year-old Dorothy, nominally to open a western agency for his father's soap. But an uncle, William Scotchard, lent him $5,000, roughly $130,000 in modern money, and the loan came with a single condition: Wrigley's cousin, Scotchard's son, would be his partner. The company that would one day sell to Mars for $23 billion was incorporated on April 1, 1891, a date someone in the family must have noticed, and its founding capital was a relative's check with a relative attached.
I like the $32 version for the same reason everyone does. The New York Times obituary forty-one years later led with it, more or less: "Starting With Nothing In Boyhood, He Amassed Fortune and Changed Habits of Nations." Time called him "the perfect example of the Poor Boy who made good." Neither of these is precisely right about a man whose father owned a factory and sat on the school board. But Wrigley had a gift for letting the convenient story stand. He understood, earlier than almost anyone in American business, that what people remember about a product is not a fact about the product. It is a feeling attached to a name.
The arithmetic of the first months went like this. Soap at five cents gave merchants nothing; he doubled the price, added premiums, and bought the 65,000 umbrellas. Then the premium became baking powder, a good choice, since home baking had changed over the middle of the century and powder was now central to it. Customers began buying soap to get the powder. So Wrigley started selling baking powder, and needed a new premium for that, and in 1892 he settled on two packages of chewing gum from a Chicago maker called the Zeno Manufacturing Company, given free with every can.
You can see where this goes.
Chewing gum was not new. It had become a minor American habit in the 1860s after a New York inventor named Thomas Adams brought chicle back from an encounter with the deposed Mexican strongman Antonio López de Santa Anna, who chewed the stuff while they talked. Adams had wanted to make rubber out of it and failed, and gum was what was left. (The founding stories of American confectionery are full of men who set out to make one thing and backed into another; Wrigley would become the most extravagant example, but he had predecessors.) By the early 1890s there were more than a dozen gum companies in the country, and the industry was, in the Candy Hall of Fame's polite phrase, "relatively undeveloped."
Wrigley pushed Zeno to make his gum with chicle rather than the paraffin and spruce that were still common, and in 1892 the firm began offering gum under its own brands, Lotta and Vassar. Nobody remembers either. The next year, 1893, Chicago staged the World's Columbian Exposition on the South Side, and a sweet, deliberately vague fruit-flavored gum called Juicy Fruit made its debut. Wrigley's Spearmint followed the same year, with a logo Wrigley designed himself: an arrow, or a spear, depending on whom you ask.
Juicy Fruit's original wrapper was plain, with the name in thin red block letters. Red again.
Watching the Hands
The pattern is easy to recount and hard to replicate. Here is what it actually required.
A salesman offering premiums is running an experiment whether he knows it or not. Each sale is a small vote. The customer buys the soap, but which item does she mention when she comes back? Which one does the grocer ask for by name? Most merchants of the period treated a premium as a cost of doing business, a sweetener, a bribe. Wrigley treated it as an instrument, and he read it twice and believed it both times, which is the rarer thing. Plenty of entrepreneurs notice that the side product is outselling the main one. Very few are willing to let go of the main one. His father, by one account, never approved of the premiums at all.
The son's willingness to let go had a source, I think, in the wagon years. A traveling drummer of the 1870s and 1880s lived, as the historian Daniel Robinson puts it, a life of "itinerant mystery, on the fringes of acceptable society." He owned nothing but his manner and his samples. He had no loyalty to the goods in the back of the wagon. In Chicago, before gum, Wrigley had also pitched rubber stamps and newspapers along with the soap, and he seems to have treated products as interchangeable vehicles for the one thing he was actually good at, which was the transaction itself. Soap, powder, gum: the medium changed. The salesman didn't.
Robinson's long paper on the company, "Marketing Gum, Making Meanings: Wrigley in North America, 1890–1930," published in Enterprise & Society in 2004, makes a point that most of the cheerful pivot stories miss. Wrigley's early focus was on retailers rather than consumers. "The focus on retailers, not consumers, reflected Wrigley's experience as a drummer," Robinson writes. The drummer's customer is the shopkeeper. So once gum became the main attraction, the premiums migrated up the chain: display cases, coffee grinders, clocks, cash registers, lamps, razors, cookbooks, fishing tackle, the size of the gift scaling with the size of the order. Wrigley eventually printed premium catalogs so dealers could browse for what they wanted, which means that at a certain point the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company was publishing a merchandise catalog in which chewing gum was, functionally, the currency.
— William Wrigley Jr.Everybody likes something extra, for nothing.
He said it often. It is a line that sounds like a greeting card until you notice its precision. Not "everybody likes a bargain." Not "everybody likes low prices." Something extra. The emphasis falls on surplus rather than discount, on the feeling of having gotten away with something. His soap cost twice what it used to. Nobody felt cheated, because they had an umbrella.
The Trust and the Panic
For most of its first fifteen years the company was not a success. This part of the story is underplayed in the retellings, which tend to jump from the gum premium in 1892 straight to Spearmint's dominance, as though the one followed from the other by gravity.
It didn't. The gum business in the 1890s was crowded and vicious, and Wrigley was a newcomer with a borrowed product made in somebody else's factory. In 1899 the six largest gum makers in the country merged into what the press called "the chewing gum trust," and they invited Wrigley to join. It was the age of trusts: sugar, oil, tobacco, all combining into single entities that could set prices and starve out holdouts. Joining was the sensible play. It offered safety and a seat at the table.
He said no.
What followed was a price war that nearly finished him. Accounts agree that he teetered at the edge of bankruptcy more than once in this period. A factory burned. He threw money at advertising and lost it. One retelling describes a $100,000 campaign aimed at the New York market, an enormous sum for a Chicago firm of that size, that failed outright, partly because a hundred thousand dollars could not buy enough noise to be heard. The premiums to retailers kept product moving but never broke it open. He had decided, early, that the company would concentrate its energy on Spearmint, a flavor, the old company history notes, that "no company had been able to achieve" any real popularity with. The public didn't want it. He kept pushing it anyway.
Then, in 1907, the bottom fell out of the country.
The Panic of 1907 froze credit, sank stocks, and sent businessmen everywhere scrambling to conserve cash. The first thing they cut, then as now, was advertising. Rates collapsed. In New York especially, publishers and billboard owners who had lost their customers would take almost anything.
The figures vary by source and I can't fully reconcile them. One account says Wrigley spent $284,000. Another, that he borrowed $250,000; another, that he mortgaged everything he owned. One telling has him buying the space in three days. What is consistent is the ratio: he bought somewhere around $1.5 million worth of advertising for roughly a sixth of its normal price, at the moment every competitor was retreating. A gambler's move by a man who had been on the edge of insolvency for a decade, made with borrowed money in a frozen market.
It worked. By 1908 Spearmint alone was selling more than $1 million a year. One account puts total company sales at $170,000 before the campaign and $3 million by 1910. Revenue topped $1.3 million in 1909 by another count. Whichever ledger you trust, by 1910 or 1911 Wrigley's Spearmint was the best-selling chewing gum in the United States, and the trust that had offered him a seat was now chasing him.
There is something almost too neat about it: the outsider who refused the cartel and then outspent it at precisely the moment it flinched. But the refusal and the gamble are the same act seen from two angles. A man who joins the trust doesn't need to bet the company in a panic, because the trust will protect him. A man who stays out has nothing but his nerve and his ad budget. Wrigley had chosen, in 1899, to be the kind of company that would have to win in the open. In 1907 the open finally arrived.
Tell 'Em Quick and Tell 'Em Often
His motto was six words long, and he was a man who believed six words were usually enough.
"Tell 'em quick and tell 'em often." The company rallied around it, and the advertising that came out of the Wrigley offices over the following two decades reads like a demonstration of the principle. At a time when most print ads were dense blocks of text that told whole stories, Wrigley's used bold graphics, bright colors, and almost no words. A historian interviewed for a Chicago public television documentary put it simply: it was "very innovative when a lot of advertisements were very text heavy." The ads introduced a cast of elfin "Spearmen," arrow-bodied mascots who carried the logo through the pages of national magazines.
He elaborated on the motto once, in a form that sounds less like a slogan and more like a confession of method:
— William Wrigley Jr.You must have a good product in the first place and something people want. Explain to folks plainly and sincerely what you have to sell, do it in as few words as possible — and keep everlastingly coming at them.
Everlastingly coming at them. The stunts were legendary, and some of them were very nearly literal. He wanted, he said, a mile-wide Wrigley billboard, and so he bought 117 billboards in a row along the rail line between Atlantic City and Trenton and covered them all. In 1915 he mailed sticks of gum to every person listed in every telephone directory in the United States, a sample sent to the slice of the country affluent enough to have a phone and, therefore, presumably affluent enough to buy a nickel pack of gum.
The claims were less charming. Early Wrigley ads promised that gum "aids your digestion." Robinson's paper argues that the company's real genius lay in positioning gum as something nearer to patent medicine than candy, a remedy for nervous stomachs and overworked minds, at a time when respectable opinion still held that chewing gum in public was vulgar. "Despite popular perceptions that chewing gum was rude," as a summary of Robinson's work puts it, "Wrigley prevailed, convincing Americans that they were stressed and sick and providing them with a stick of respite." The modern reader may wince. The Wrigley Company itself would, nearly a century later, fund a Wrigley Science Institute to study whether chewing gum helped with stress, concentration, and weight management. The claim, it seems, never fully left the building.
The brand was worth enough by now to steal. In 1914 the company sued a Kentucky merchant named A. Colker for putting out goods dressed as Wrigley's. The federal judge, Andrew McConnell January Cochran, wrote a sentence that could serve as the founding charter of American brand law: "A man has a right to sell his own product to anybody that wants to buy it; but he has no right to put forth his goods as another's goods." What Colker was trying to take was not the gum, which anyone could make. It was the feeling attached to the name.
Doublemint arrived the same year, 1914, and soon became the favorite. Juicy Fruit's wrapper changed that year too, from plain red letters to thin white-and-green vertical stripes with the name set in a stylized Maltese Cross on black.
And something else had shifted. For almost two decades the gum that carried Wrigley's name had been manufactured by Zeno. In 1911, with Spearmint on top of the market, Wrigley bought his supplier outright, and the newly named William Wrigley Jr. Company became a manufacturer for the first time. He had waited nineteen years to own the means of making the thing he sold. He had waited, that is, until he was sure. The company went public; by 1919 it was worth $12 million. By then the gum was already crossing borders: a Canadian operation in 1910, Australia in 1915. Britain would come in 1927. Eventually the company advertised in some thirty languages, adapting flavors to local palates. The best-performing product overseas was a pellet-shaped gum sold under the brand "P.K." — the initials of the founder's son.
The company's paperwork, for what it's worth, recorded it as a West Virginia corporation. And the founder never used a comma in his name. The comma, as it happens, would come back.
A Five-Cent Business
The numbers that came out of all this were not modest. Annual profits grew from $8.5 million in 1921 to $12.2 million in 1930, the latter figure struck in the first full year of the Depression. At his death, company revenues stood at roughly $75 million on $12 million of profit. Over his lifetime he spent more than $100 million on advertising, which made him the largest single-product advertiser of his era.
All of it in nickels.
That was the fact he never let anyone forget, least of all the son who would inherit it. Philip Knight Wrigley was born in Chicago on December 5, 1894, the year after Juicy Fruit; he went east to Phillips Academy in Andover, graduated in 1914, and spent only a short time at the University of Chicago before coming into the business. In 1925 his father made him president and moved himself up to chairman of the board. The phrase the father repeated to him, constantly, is the closest thing the company had to scripture:
— William Wrigley Jr., to his son PhilipWe are a five-cent business, and nobody in this company can ever afford to forget it.
The line works on two levels at once. It is a lesson in humility, a warning against the airs of a man who has made enough money to buy an island. It is also a lesson in economics. A five-cent product is bought on impulse, a thousand times, by people who do not deliberate; it lives or dies on whether the name is in front of them at the moment their hand moves toward the register. Every cent of margin matters, and so does every second of attention. The giant ad budgets and the obsessive cost discipline came from the same arithmetic. A nickel business cannot afford a bad batch, either. "Even in a little thing like a stick of gum," he liked to say, "quality is important."
Note the phrase a little thing. He never pretended gum was more than it was. He just understood, better than the trust or his father or the men who laughed at him in the 1890s, how much a little thing could add up to, if you sold enough of them and never let anyone forget your name.
The Friendly Confines
He loved baseball the way some men love a bar: as a place to be among friends, a little loose, spending money. He spent afternoons at the North Side ballpark joking with acquaintances, drinking beer, handing out cigars to the Cubs players.
The park in those years belonged to Charles Weeghman, a Chicago lunch-counter magnate who had owned the Chicago Whales of the short-lived Federal League and built a brick ballpark for them at Clark and Addison. When the Federal League collapsed, Weeghman bought the Cubs and moved them in. In 1916 Wrigley took a minority stake in Weeghman's group. Then Weeghman's lunch counters began to fail. He was forced, piece by piece, to sell his Cubs stock to his richest partner, and by 1918 he had sold it all. Wrigley was the largest shareholder. By 1921 he was the majority owner, and in 1925 he bought out the last significant holder, Albert Lasker, and took full control.
Weeghman deserves a sentence of his own, because his story rhymes. A man who also sold cheap things to Chicagoans in volume — quick lunches, at a counter — and who also used his fortune to buy a ball club and put his name on a park. Weeghman Field it was called, for a while. It became Cubs Park in 1920. In 1926 it was renamed Wrigley Field, and it has carried that name for a century, through three owners who were not named Wrigley. The lunch-counter man's name disappeared from the park almost as soon as his money did. The gum man's name stayed even after his family's money left.
Wrigley put more than $5 million into the team. He brought in Hack Wilson and Rogers Hornsby. He expanded the box seats, added permanent bleachers, and oversaw the building of an upper deck. In 1929 the Cubs won their first pennant since 1918, the first of four they would take over the following decade. They lost the World Series, as Cubs teams did. In 1921 he also bought the Los Angeles club of the Pacific Coast League and a minor-league team in Reading, Pennsylvania. The Los Angeles team got a ballpark of its own, also named Wrigley Field, designed in 1925 by Zachary Taylor Davis, the same architect who had built Weeghman's park on the North Side. It later served as the set for TV's Home Run Derby and a long list of Hollywood baseball pictures. It has since been torn down.
Was this vanity? Some of it, certainly. A man doesn't put his name on two ballparks out of humility. But a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, a fellow Philadelphian who discovered Wrigley's origins with some surprise, insisted that "giving the ballpark his name wasn't mere egotism." And there is a commercial logic underneath the sentiment that Wrigley would have recognized at once. A ballpark is a billboard people pay to sit inside, and that a city's newspapers mention by name every day from April to October. Every box score was an ad. Tell 'em quick and tell 'em often.
The Island
In 1919, the same year his company was valued at $12 million, Wrigley bought a controlling interest in the Santa Catalina Island Company, and with the company came the island: some twenty-six miles off the coast of Los Angeles, a long ridge of chaparral and canyon with a small harbor town called Avalon on its eastern shore. The family would come to own ninety-nine percent of it.
He did with Catalina roughly what he had done with gum. He saw an undeveloped thing with a small existing market and poured capital into making it famous. He installed public utilities. He bought steamships to carry tourists across the channel; there is a photograph from 1924 of his ship, the Catalina, pulling away from the Los Angeles docks. He built a hotel. He planted trees, shrubs, and flowers in quantity. He imported birds from around the world and housed them in an enormous aviary. He mined the island and found silver, copper, and zinc. And when it became clear that the town's residents needed steady work outside the tourist season, he looked at the clay and minerals at a beach near Avalon and, in 1927, opened the Pebbly Beach quarry and tile plant. It gave Avalon people jobs and supplied materials for his own construction, and after he built the great round Casino overlooking the harbor in 1929, the Catalina Clay Products plant began turning out glazed tile, dinnerware, and household goods. Bookends, among other things.
Bookends. The gum man owned an island that manufactured its own bookends.
The Cubs came out for spring training, beginning in 1921 and continuing until 1951, wartime excepted. On a hill above Avalon Bay he built a summer house between 1919 and 1921, Georgian Colonial Revival, designed by Zachary Taylor Davis, the ballpark architect, the one man in the story who drew both of Wrigley's Wrigley Fields and his house. The family called it Mount Ada, after his wife. Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge visited. So did the Prince of Wales.
Ada Elizabeth Foote Wrigley is a hard person to see clearly through the sources, which mostly mention her as the reason a house was named or a garden planted. She married a soap salesman with a habit of running away and followed him to Chicago at the age when most of their contemporaries were settling down. She raised two children through the years the company nearly went under. On Catalina it was her idea to build a botanical garden of plants from around the world, a garden that now stretches across thirty-seven acres. She outlived him by more than a decade. One radio retelling of their life frames his whole fortune as something he spent on her; I can't verify that reading, but I notice that it is her name on the hill.
The son, Philip, caught the island's logic early. In the early 1930s he founded the Wilmington-Catalina Airline to fly visitors from the Port of Los Angeles out to his father's resort. A way of getting more people to the product faster.
Towers and Lodging Houses
The 1920s were the years of monuments. In 1924 the Wrigley Building rose on Michigan Avenue where it crosses the Chicago River, a gleaming white tower with a clock modeled on the Giralda in Seville, actually two buildings joined by a sky-bridge, built to give a nickel business a headquarters that looked like a cathedral. It became one of the most photographed buildings in Chicago, a fixture of movies and television, the first thing many visitors see when they come up out of the Loop onto the Magnificent Mile. It was lit at night. It was, of course, an advertisement.
In 1929 he was on the cover of Time. That October the market broke.
What he did next is less often told than the billboards. In 1930, with Chicago full of men who had lost their jobs, Wrigley gave the Salvation Army the use of a six-story factory building he owned on the West Side, to serve as a lodging house for the unemployed. The Chicago Tribune reported its opening on October 14, 1930. They called it New Start Lodge. The following year he donated the building outright, and later in 1931 it was renamed Wrigley Lodge.
It would be easy to be cynical about the renaming. I find I can't quite manage it. A man who had once slept in doorways and under delivery wagons in New York, who had come home only because the weather turned cold, gave a building to men with nowhere to sleep in a Chicago winter. That his name ended up on it seems less like vanity than like habit. Everything he touched ended up with his name on it. He couldn't help it any more than he could help offering you a stick of gum.
That same year he bought the Arizona Biltmore, a winter resort outside Phoenix whose design drew on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, a hotel he had helped finance and now owned outright. Nearby he finished a house of his own, La Colina Solana, at 2501 East Telawa Trail. It came in at 16,000 square feet and was, his biographers note with a straight face, the smallest of his five residences. He called it a winter cottage.
He did not get much of a winter in it. On January 26, 1932, at the house in Phoenix, William Wrigley Jr. died at seventy, stricken by what the papers called acute indigestion, complicated by a heart attack and apoplexy. His estate was valued at $20,215,000 and went to Dorothy and Philip. The man who had sold gum as a digestive aid was killed, officially, by indigestion. Nobody in 1932 seems to have remarked on it.
The family published a private memorial biography three years later, William Zimmerman Jr.'s William Wrigley, Jr.: The Man and His Business, 1861–1932, issued in a limited edition under Philip's name, in a slipcase. Copies now trade among collectors for prices that would have bought him a great many billboards. For a less reverent, more accessible account, Daniel Alef's short profile William Wrigley, Jr.: The Great American Legend tells the familiar Horatio Alger version, which is the version Wrigley himself would have preferred.
What the Name Outlived
The heirs inherited the gum, the team, the island, and the instincts, though not in equal measure.
Philip K. Wrigley ran the company for decades and the Cubs until he died. He was a quieter man than his father: visible at the ballpark in his younger years, then almost never, communicating with the club mainly by memo and, now and then, a full-page newspaper ad. A utility player named Pete LaCock once went to the Wrigley Building and asked to see him. Asked what he wanted, LaCock said: "Nothing. I just wanted to see if you really exist!"
But the father's instincts surfaced in him in strange, sometimes brilliant forms. During World War II, when ingredient shortages made it impossible to supply both soldiers and civilians, P.K. sent the entire output of Spearmint, Doublemint, and Juicy Fruit to the U.S. Armed Forces, and then kept advertising a product no civilian could buy, under the slogan "Remember this Wrapper." Juicy Fruit vanished from American stores and into C-rations. It came back in 1946 in a bright yellow wrapper, its name bracketed between two chevrons meant to echo the arrow his father had drawn for Spearmint in 1893, and described on the pack as a "fascinating artificial flavor." (Which fruit, exactly, the company has never said. Banana and pineapple, an ad agency suggested in 2003. Peach, according to one source. People who have eaten jackfruit say it tastes exactly like Juicy Fruit. The likely culprit is a compound called isoamyl acetate. The mystery is the point. Everybody likes something extra.)
When the war drained baseball's rosters, P.K. founded the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League as a promotional sideline to keep fans interested. Half a century later it became A League of Their Own. He gave the Cubs' games away, too, first on radio, where competing stations sometimes carried the same game for minimal fees, and then on WGN-TV, which aired every home game and many road games. Other owners were appalled at what they saw as "giving away the product." The broadcasts built a national fan base that kept Wrigley Field full for decades, whether or not the team was any good, and it mostly wasn't: seven winning seasons in the thirty-two years after 1945. Something extra, for nothing. The father would have understood perfectly.
He also tried, in 1961, to replace the manager with a rotating "College of Coaches," which anticipated modern coaching specialization and was otherwise a famous disaster. In 1966 he gave up and hired Leo Durocher. That same year as the College, he handed the gum company's presidency to his son.
William Wrigley III, born January 21, 1933, Yale class of 1954 and manager of its football team, ran the company from 1961 until 1999 and kept it the largest gum maker in the world. He launched Orbit, Freedent, Big Red, Hubba Bubba, and, in 1984, a sugar-free gum called Extra. Under him, on June 26, 1974, at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a cashier passed a ten-pack of Juicy Fruit over a new kind of scanner. It was the first product in history scanned by a Universal Product Code. A facsimile of that pack sits today in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
In April 1977 P.K. died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage in Wisconsin, and his widow, Helen, died only months later. The estate taxes fell on William III all at once. His money was tied up in the company and the team. In 1981 he sold the Cubs to the Tribune Company, ending more than six decades of Wrigley ownership. The new owners kept the name on the park.
William III died in March 1999, at sixty-six, of pneumonia contracted while recovering from a broken hip. His youngest child, Bill (later known as Beau), born October 6, 1963, Duke 1985, a Wharton MBA, a company man since he was twenty-two, became president at thirty-five, while his stepmother fought the family over his father's estate.
What he found, by his own account, was a company that had forgotten the lesson of the umbrellas. He gave Forbes a rare interview in his sixteenth-floor office off the Chicago River in early 2001. The company had $2.2 billion in sales, all of it from a single product, operating margins of twenty-four percent, zero long-term debt, about half the global gum market. In eighty-one years it had bought exactly one company. And it had stopped watching the hands.
— William Wrigley Jr. II, to Forbes, 2001We became very insular and very inward-focused, to the point where we really weren't listening to our customers very hard.
"Our sales were in serious decline, especially in the U.S.," he said. "We really hadn't been building for the future as much as we should have." He wanted, he said, to take "a late-19th-century company and bring it into the 21st century with guns blazing." Would that mean mints? "Highly likely." He hired a chief financial officer from Gillette and two senior marketers from Procter & Gamble, one of them, Gary McCullough, the company's first African-American in a senior post. In late 2004 he agreed to pay Kraft $1.5 billion for Life Savers and Altoids, the largest deal in the company's history. In 2006 he gave the chief executive's office to William Perez, formerly of Nike and S.C. Johnson, the first person outside the family to run the company in its 115 years. On the Sarbanes-Oxley certifications he filed with the SEC as chairman and chief executive, he signed his great-grandfather's name, with a comma: WILLIAM WRIGLEY, JR.
On April 28, 2008, Mars, Incorporated announced that it would buy the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company for about $23 billion, a premium over a market capitalization of $17.3 billion. Part of the financing came from Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett's first business, as a boy of six, had been selling Juicy Fruit.
The building on Michigan Avenue was sold in 2011 to a group that included two of the founders of Groupon, a company whose entire business was offering people something extra for less. At the end of 2022 Mars stopped making Wrigley's Spearmint in Germany and Austria, along with Juicy Fruit, citing declining sales. Beau Wrigley went on to run a company called Parallel, which sells cannabis products. In 2021 the Wrigley Company, by then a division of Mars, sued five businesses for selling cannabis edibles packaged to look like Skittles, Starburst, and Life Savers, putting forth their goods, Judge Cochran might have said, as another's.
The island went a different way. In 1972 Philip established the Catalina Island Conservancy and transferred the family's ownership of most of Santa Catalina to it, fulfilling, the family has always said, the founder's wish that the place be protected for future generations. Mount Ada went to the University of Southern California in the 1970s and is now a small hotel, the Inn on Mt Ada. The gardens Ada imagined are open to anyone who makes the crossing.
That openness came at a small, specific cost. When Wrigley died in 1932, his body was brought back to Catalina and placed in a sarcophagus of his own design, set in the tower of the memorial built for him in 1933 and 1934 above the botanical gardens. In 1947, the same year Ada stopped coming to the house on the hill and retired to the family mansion in Pasadena, his remains were taken off the island so that the gardens could be opened to the public. He was reinterred in an alcove at the end of a corridor called the Sanctuary of Gratitude, at Forest Lawn in Glendale, where his son's ashes would later be placed beside him.
The original grave marker was left behind. It is still there, in the tower above the garden, bearing his name, over a tomb that no longer holds him, so that strangers could walk among the flowers for free.
Part IIThe Playbook
Wrigley left no business treatise, only a handful of maxims repeated so often that his employees could recite them, and a sequence of decisions that, laid end to end, describe a remarkably consistent method. What follows is an attempt to extract that method, the operating logic underneath the soap, the gum, the billboards, and the ballpark, along with the failure mode it produced in the generations that inherited it without fully inheriting the instinct.
The principles
- 1.Raise the price and add the gift.
- 2.Let the premium tell you what business you're in.
- 3.Sell to whoever controls the shelf.
- 4.Refuse the comfortable cartel.
- 5.Buy attention when everyone else is dumping it.
- 6.Compress the message to the length of a glance.
- 7.Commit to the product nobody has made work.
- 8.Own the supply only after demand is certain.
- 9.Run a nickel business with nickel discipline.
- 10.Count what they say last.
- 11.Turn assets into stages for the name.
- 12.Beware the founder's success becoming the heir's insulation.
Principle 1
Raise the price and add the gift
Wrigley's first decision in Chicago is also his most counterintuitive. Merchants refused his soap because a five-cent box left them no margin. The obvious fix was a cheaper product, or a deeper wholesale discount. He did the opposite: he persuaded his father to double the retail price, which gave the merchant something worth stocking, and then made the customer whole with a premium. The umbrella, the baking powder, the gum cost him far less than the price increase brought in.
The logic is about perceived surplus. A discount tells the customer the product was overpriced. A gift tells her she got more than she paid for. The first trains people to wait for sales; the second trains them to feel lucky. Wrigley's whole career rests on the second feeling. "Everybody likes something extra, for nothing" is not a statement about price sensitivity. It is a statement about delight, and delight can be bought far more cheaply than a lower price.
The approach has an important precondition: the channel must be fixed first. Wrigley raised the price to solve the merchant's problem, then used the gift to solve the customer's. A premium that sits on top of a channel that doesn't want your goods is wasted.
Tactic: Before cutting a price to win adoption, test raising it to fund the channel's margin and a well-chosen bonus for the end buyer.
Twice in eighteen months, Wrigley's customers voted for the giveaway over the product, and twice he changed businesses to follow them. Soap gave way to baking powder; baking powder gave way to gum. Modern writers call these pivots, but the word flatters the process by making it sound like strategy. It was closer to surrender. He did not decide gum was the future. He noticed that people kept reaching for it and stopped arguing.
What made this possible was a detachment from the original product that most founders cannot manage. Wrigley had spent his adolescence as a drummer who sold soap, rubber stamps, and newspapers interchangeably; his loyalty was to the transaction, not to the goods. His father, the maker, reportedly thought the soap should sell on its merits. The son, the seller, thought nothing should be required to sell on its merits alone, and treated each premium as a cheap, constant experiment in what people actually wanted.
The discipline is to design side offers so that they generate signal: varied enough to compare, cheap enough to run continuously, and watched closely enough that a shift in which item customers mention, request, or come back for gets noticed within weeks rather than years.
W
Two Pivots in Two Years
Each turn followed the customer's preference for the giveaway.
1891
Arrives in Chicago; sells father's scouring soap with premiums, including 65,000 red umbrellas and cans of baking powder.
1891–92
Baking powder outsells the soap. Wrigley switches to selling baking powder.
1892
Offers two packs of Zeno-made chewing gum with each can. Launches Lotta and Vassar gum brands.
1893
Gum outsells baking powder. Juicy Fruit and Wrigley's Spearmint debut.
1899
Refuses to join the six-company chewing gum trust.
1907
Spends roughly $284,000 during the panic for ~$1.5M of advertising.
1911
Buys Zeno and becomes a manufacturer. Spearmint leads the U.S. market.
Tactic: Treat every bonus, add-on, or free tier as an instrument, and track which piece of the bundle customers ask for by name.
Principle 3
Sell to whoever controls the shelf
Daniel Robinson's history makes the point that Wrigley's early gum business focused on retailers, not consumers, a habit learned on the wagon. Once gum became the product, the premiums moved up the chain: display cases, coffee grinders, clocks, cash registers, fishing tackle, scaled to order size, with catalogs for the dealer to choose from.
For an impulse product, this is exactly right. A nickel pack of gum is bought in the second before payment, from whatever is in front of the customer. The person who decides what is in front of the customer is the shopkeeper. Win him, and you have won a thousand small, unconsidered purchases you never had to argue for.
This principle explains why the consumer advertising, when it finally exploded in 1907, worked so fast. The distribution was already there, bought and paid for in coffee grinders. Advertising created demand in a market where the product was already sitting on the counter.
Tactic: For low-consideration products, spend your first incentive dollars on the people who control placement, and save consumer advertising until shelves are secured.
Principle 4
Refuse the comfortable cartel
In 1899 the six largest gum makers combined into a trust and offered the newcomer a seat. Wrigley turned it down and spent the next eight years near bankruptcy. The refusal looks reckless until you consider what joining would have cost: his gum would have become one line in someone else's portfolio, priced and positioned by committee, and the persistent, unpopular bet on Spearmint would likely never have been allowed to run.
Independence was expensive, but it bought freedom of action at the decisive moment. When the 1907 panic arrived, there was no board of rival gum makers to veto a borrowed-money advertising blitz. A cartel optimizes for stability; an outsider can optimize for opportunity. Wrigley's choice in 1899 is the reason his choice in 1907 was even available.
The general lesson is less "never cooperate" than "know what cooperation costs in optionality." Joining a consortium, a platform, or an acquirer's umbrella usually trades upside for safety. That trade can be right. Wrigley's case shows what it would have foreclosed.
Tactic: Before accepting any alliance that offers protection, list the bold moves it would prevent you from making, and price that loss explicitly.
Principle 5
Buy attention when everyone else is dumping it
The 1907 campaign is the most cited episode in the Wrigley story and deserves to be. Sources disagree on the figures ($284,000 spent, or $250,000 borrowed, or everything mortgaged), but they agree on the structure: during a panic, competitors pulled ads, rates collapsed, and Wrigley bought about six times the normal value of space for his money. Spearmint went from a product the public had rejected to the nation's top gum within roughly three years.
What makes this replicable rather than merely brave is that he had already failed at the same thing. The earlier New York campaign, by one account $100,000, had not bought enough volume to be heard. Wrigley learned that advertising has a threshold below which it is wasted. The panic was the only moment when his budget could clear that threshold. He did not advertise because times were bad. He advertised because bad times made his money big enough to matter.
Attention is a market like any other. It gets cheap when everyone panics at once, and the firms that can act then, with cash or credit and a product already on shelves, buy a position that would cost far more in good times.
Tactic: Keep a reserve, or a pre-arranged credit line, earmarked for buying media in downturns, and know in advance the spend threshold below which your message won't register.
Principle 6
Compress the message to the length of a glance
"Tell 'em quick and tell 'em often." The advertising that followed was radical by period standards: bold graphics, bright color, minimal copy, at a time when most print ads were dense, story-driven text. The extended version of the maxim — "do it in as few words as possible — and keep everlastingly coming at them" — puts brevity and repetition in the same sentence for a reason. They are one strategy. Short messages can be repeated endlessly without exhausting the audience; long ones cannot.
The stunts were repetition at landscape scale: 117 consecutive billboards between Atlantic City and Trenton, gum mailed to every listing in the 1915 telephone directories. Not clever arguments but saturation. Wrigley seems to have understood that for a nickel product, the goal is not to persuade but to be remembered at the instant of the impulse.
There is a darker footnote. Brevity also left room for claims that would not survive scrutiny, like "aids your digestion" and the broader framing of gum as remedy for stress. The method is powerful, which is exactly why it requires a conscience behind it.
Tactic: Reduce your core message to something absorbable in a single glance, then invest in frequency rather than in elaborating the argument.
Principle 7
Commit to the product nobody has made work
Wrigley chose to concentrate on Spearmint precisely because no company had made the flavor popular, and the public initially rejected it. He kept pushing it for fourteen years. This is the inverse of following the customer's hand, and it is worth holding both principles in tension: he let the market tell him which category to be in, then made a contrarian bet within it.
The logic is about open ground. Juicy Fruit competed with other sweet gums. A popular spearmint gum did not yet exist, which meant whoever finally made it work would own it outright. The risk was that it might never work. The reward was a category with his name as its synonym. When the 1907 advertising landed, it landed on a product with no real rival.
The distinction matters for operators. Listen to customers about what problem they want solved. Do not necessarily listen to them about which specific solution they will someday love, because they cannot yet imagine it.
Tactic: Once the market has chosen your category, pick one unclaimed position inside it and back it long past the point where early indifference would make most people quit.
Principle 8
Own the supply only after demand is certain
For nineteen years the gum bearing Wrigley's name was made by someone else. He nudged Zeno toward chicle, designed the logos, set the brands, and left the factory risk to his supplier. Only in 1911, with Spearmint leading the country, did he buy Zeno and become a manufacturer.
This sequencing kept his scarce capital in the place where it compounded fastest: distribution, premiums, and advertising, the things that created demand. Manufacturing was a commodity until volume was assured. Once it was, owning the factory protected margins and quality at scale, which mattered more for a nickel product than almost anything.
Modern founders face the same choice with contract manufacturers, cloud infrastructure, and outsourced fulfillment. The Wrigley sequence suggests renting the means of production while the product is still finding its market, and buying them only when the brand is strong enough that controlling supply becomes a moat rather than a millstone.
Tactic: Outsource production until demand is proven and stable, then acquire or build the supply chain to lock in margin and quality.
Principle 9
Run a nickel business with nickel discipline
"We are a five-cent business, and nobody in this company can ever afford to forget it." Wrigley told his son this repeatedly, and it held two lessons. The first is humility: a man who owned an island, two ballparks, and a skyscraper still needed to remember that his fortune came from loose change. The second is unit economics. Low-priced, high-frequency products live or die on margin per unit, consistency, and the cost of being remembered.
Note how the maxim coexisted with enormous spending. Wrigley spent more than $100 million on advertising across his life. Nickel discipline is not cheapness. It is the clarity to know which costs drive volume (attention, availability, quality) and which merely flatter the owner. "Even in a little thing like a stick of gum, quality is important" belongs to the same doctrine: in a five-cent product, one bad experience costs a customer for life, and you need that customer a thousand times.
Tactic: Write your company's equivalent of "we are a five-cent business" (the single number that defines your economics) and repeat it until every manager can quote it.
Principle 10
Count what they say last
The boy's first sale on the wagon came after a two-hour pitch and was worth $1.80. The lesson he drew was that every prospect says no at first; what counts is what they say last. Paired with his other code, "to be always pleasant, always patient, always on time, and never to argue," it describes a specific style of persistence: relentless but never combative.
That combination is rarer than either half. Persistent salesmen often grow pushy; polite ones often give up. Wrigley's approach treated the first no as information about timing, not about the eventual answer, and treated courtesy as the thing that kept the door open for the next visit. The same pattern runs through the company story: Spearmint rejected, then pushed for fourteen years; the trust's pressure endured without capitulation; the failed New York campaign followed by the successful one.
Tactic: Track your pipeline by final outcomes rather than first responses, and train your team to treat an early rejection as a scheduling problem, handled without argument.
Principle 11
Turn assets into stages for the name
Wrigley's purchases outside gum (the Cubs, two Wrigley Fields, Catalina, the Wrigley Building, the Biltmore) can be read as a rich man's indulgences, and partly were. But each also carried the name into daily life in a way paid advertising never could. A ballpark appears in every box score; a lit white tower dominates a skyline; an island resort fills magazines; even a Depression lodging house for the unemployed became Wrigley Lodge.
The test of this principle is durability. The family sold the Cubs in 1981; the park is still Wrigley Field. The company sold the building in 2011; it is still the Wrigley Building. Mars owns the company; it is still Wrigley. The name outlived the ownership of nearly every asset it was attached to. That is what a well-placed name does: it compounds independently of the balance sheet.
N
Where the Name Outlasted the Owner
Assets that left the family but kept the name.
| Asset | Named | Left family control | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wrigley Field, Chicago | 1926 | 1981, sold to Tribune Co. | Name intact |
| Wrigley Building | 1924 | 2011, sold to investor group | Name intact |
| Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company | 1891 | 2008, acquired by Mars | Name intact |
| Santa Catalina Island holdings | 1919 | 1972, given to Conservancy | Memorial and gardens |
| Wrigley Field, Los Angeles | 1925 | Later sold | Demolished |
Tactic: When making a large non-core investment, ask whether it will put your brand into people's daily routines in a way that will outlast your ownership of it.
Principle 12
Beware the founder's success becoming the heir's insulation
The founder's method was to listen relentlessly: to customers reaching for premiums, to retailers wanting margin, to a market telling him what business he was in. By 2001 his great-grandson was describing a company that had become "very insular and very inward-focused, to the point where we really weren't listening to our customers very hard." It had made exactly one acquisition in eighty-one years and derived all of its $2.2 billion in sales from a single product category.
This is the classic inheritance trap. The founder's results (three great brands, global share, a pristine balance sheet) are easy to hand down. His behavior, the restless watching and willingness to abandon the core product, is not. Each successor generation did innovate (WWII wrapper advertising, free broadcasting, sugar-free Extra, the first UPC scan) but the reflex to question the core business itself had faded. The fourth generation's response, which brought in outside executives, bought Altoids and Life Savers, and finally handed the chief executive's office to a non-family leader, was essentially an attempt to reinstall the founder's original reflex from the outside.
G
Four Generations, Four Postures
How the founder's instincts were inherited and transformed.
| Leader | Tenure | Signature move | Posture |
|---|---|---|---|
| William Wrigley Jr. | 1891–1932 | Followed the premium; 1907 ad gamble | Explore |
| Philip K. Wrigley | 1925–1961 (president) | WWII "Remember this Wrapper"; free broadcasts | Protect the brand |
| William Wrigley III | 1961–1999 | Global expansion; new gum brands | Extend the core |
| William "Beau" Wrigley Jr. II | 1999–2006 (CEO) | Kraft brands deal; outside hires; non-family CEO | Break insularity |
Tactic: Institutionalize the founder's listening behavior, not just the founder's products, by building a recurring process that forces leadership to question whether the core business is still the one customers are reaching for.
Free playbook
Get The Business Model Playbook
58 business models, one visual page each: how the money flows, the metrics that matter, and who runs it. Free when you join the Faster Than Normal email.
Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— William Wrigley Jr.To be always pleasant, always patient, always on time, and never to argue.
— William Wrigley Jr.Even in a little thing like a stick of gum, quality is important.
— William Wrigley Jr.Tell 'em quick and tell 'em often.
— William Wrigley Jr., as quoted in the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company's 2003 annual reportTo make a success of life or business, you've got to hang on to the knack of putting yourself in the other person's place.
— William Wrigley Sr., to his son after his expulsion from schoolYour school life hasn't been a success. Let's see how work strikes you.
Maxims
- Gifts beat discounts. A bonus makes customers feel lucky; a price cut makes them suspect they were overcharged.
- Watch which hand reaches. The part of the offer people grab first is telling you what business you are actually in.
- Fix the channel before the customer. If the merchant earns nothing stocking you, no consumer incentive will save you.
- Stay out of the trust. Protection costs you the freedom to make the move that wins.
- Panics put attention on sale. Buy media when everyone else is fleeing, and buy enough to clear the threshold of being heard.
- Short and constant. Few words, repeated everlastingly, outperform the clever argument made once.
- Rent the factory until you're sure. Spend scarce capital on demand; own supply once the brand can carry it.
- Remember the nickel. Know the single price point your fortune depends on and never let success make you forget it.
- The first no is about timing. Count what they say last, and never argue on the way there.
- Put the name where life happens. Ballparks, towers, and gardens outlast the deeds, and the name outlasts the owner.
