A Success Story of Post-it Notes

In 1968, Spencer Silver was a Senior Chemist at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (now called 3M). Adhesives were among 3M’s top-selling products, and Silver was busily researching adhesives in the laboratory, trying to create a super strong adhesive for use in the aerospace industry for building planes. “We wanted to develop bigger, stronger, tougher adhesives,” said Silver. Unfortunately his prototype was a failure: the glue was too weak to be useful for anything. It was more of a sticky substance than a bonding glue. Still, the substance had three important properties: One, it had a high level of tack, two, it had a low degree of adhesion, and three, it was strong. In other words, the adhesive was strong enough to stick to surfaces, but left no residue after removal and could be peeled off easily. The substance also resisted breaking, dissolving, or melting, which meant that the adhesive was reusable.

Silver struggled to find a use for this new glue. He said, “My discovery was a solution waiting for a problem to solve.” The adhesive did not interest 3M management; it was deemed too weak to be useful. Even with Silver promoting the product for five years straight to various 3M employees, the adhesive was more or less shelved. He came to be known as “Mr. Persistent” because he just wouldn’t give up.In 1973, when Dr. Geoff Nicholson was made products laboratory manager at 3M, Silver approached him immediately with the adhesive and gave him samples to play with. Silver suggested that the adhesive be sprayed onto a bulletin board. Users could then stick pieces of paper to the board without push pins or tape. The paper could also be easily removed without any residue. However, the idea wasn’t potentially profitable enough as annual bulletin board sales were rather low. Dr. Nicholson was told by his boss to kill the project. He agreed at first, but then kept the project afloat as part of 3M’s 15 percent programme, which allowed employees to use 15 percent of their working hours to work on experimental projects (If this sounds familiar, Dr. Nicholson says Google’s legendary 20 percent policy was based on 3M’s). Nicholson and Silver continued tinkering with the adhesive.

Meanwhile, Arthur Fry, another 3M product development researcher, was frustrated. Every Wednesday night, while practicing with his church choir in St. Paul, Minnesota, he would use scraps of paper to mark the hymns they were going to sing in the upcoming service. By Sunday, these scraps of paper would have fallen out of the hymnal, leaving Fry scrambling. “My mind began to wonder during the sermon,” Fry confessed. “I thought about Spence’s adhesive. If I could coat it on paper, that would be just the ticket for a better bookmark.” He had a eureka moment, “the one where you get the adrenaline rush”. Fry came up with the idea of a ‘sticky bookmark’ in 1974. He suggested to Nicholson and Silver that they were using the adhesive backwards. Instead of sticking the adhesive to the bulletin board, they should “put it on a piece of paper and then we can stick it to anything.” Spencer and Fry began developing a product, but this proved easier said than done.

In early prototypes, the adhesive would detach from the paper and stay on the object the paper was stuck to. There had been no such problem with the bulletin boards as Silver had made them specifically so that the adhesive would bond better with the board than the paper. Enter Roger Merrill and Henry Courtney, two other 3M employees. They invented a coating for the paper that would keep the adhesive bonded to it, rather than being left on objects after the paper was removed.

“When I used these ‘bookmarks’ to write messages to my boss, I came across the heart of the idea. It wasn’t a bookmark at all, but a note,” said Fry. “It’s a whole new way to communicate.” Fry decided to make 3M headquarters his test bed. He supplied the entire company with the new adhesive notes. Nicholson made sure that secretaries of 3M senior executives received samples. Before long, their bosses were borrowing the little yellow pads. 3M employees soon began writing messages on sticky paper to communicate around the office. Everyone who tried them wanted more. The team could not keep up with demand. “We have a saying at 3M,” said Nicholson. “Every great new product is killed at least three times by managers.” Even though the notes were extremely popular at 3M labs, management still didn’t think the product would be commercially successful. Management shelved the project yet again, this time for three years. Finally, in 1977, 3M began test sale runs of the Post-It Note, then called “Press ‘n Peel”, in four different cities to see if people would use the product.

No one bought the product, which confirmed in the minds of the executives that it wasn’t a viable commercially. But Dr. Nicholson and Joe Ramey, Nicholson’s boss, were not ready to give up. They decided to put the product in directly in consumers’ hands, to let them see for themselves how useful the notes could be. One year after the initial flop, 3M tried again to introduce the Post-It Note to the world, this time giving huge amounts of free sample Post-It Note pads away in Boise, Idaho. The campaign came to be known as “The Boise Blitz”. The notes spread "like a virus," said Fry. "It was always a self-advertising product because customers would put the notes on documents they sent to others, arousing the recipient's curiosity. They would look at it, peel it off and play with it, and then go out and buy a pad for themselves." Silver said, that like many groundbreaking innovations, theirs was a product nobody thought they needed until they did. This time, the re-order rate went from almost nothing, in the previous attempt, to ninety percent. That was double the best initial rate 3M had ever seen for any other product they’d introduced. 3M also conducted a direct mail program to the secretaries of CEOs of Fortune 100 companies. The team received letters from Lee Iacocca, Chrysler’s Chairman and CEO, and the CEO of Phillip Morris, telling them how much they loved the product, and asking how they could get more. On April 6, 1980, Post-it Notes launched in the United States. One year later, the product received a Golden Step Award, the highly coveted 3M internal award recognizing teams that develop significant profitable products generating major new sales for 3M. By 1990, Post-it Notes were one of the five top-selling office supply products in America. In 1998, a 3M spokesman said that worldwide sales of Post-in notes and related products were worth around one billion dollars a year.

Today, Post-it Notes are sold in more than 150 countries. A workplace study showed that the average professional now receives 11 messages on Post-it Notes each day.