#559 1937 · Joseph B. Friedman / Flex-Straw Company · Consumer products manufacturing
The bendy straw failed as a novelty for a decade before someone realized hospital patients actually needed it
the problem
A genuinely useful invention can fail commercially for years if it's pitched to a market that treats its core function as a nice-to-have convenience rather than an actual necessity — the same feature that's ignorable in one context can be essential in another
background
In the 1930s, Joseph B. Friedman, watching his young daughter struggle to drink a milkshake through a straight paper straw at his brother's soda fountain, built a working bendable straw by inserting a screw into a paper straw, wrapping dental floss around the ridges it created, then removing the screw to leave a permanent accordion-fold section. He patented the design in 1937 and formed the Flexible Straw Corporation in 1939 to sell it — but soda fountains and drugstores, the obvious retail market for a novelty drinking straw, showed little interest, since a bend in a straw solved a problem (tilting your head slightly while drinking) that ordinary soda-fountain customers didn't consider a problem worth paying for.
The straw's real market wasn't people who could sit up and drink normally with mild inconvenience — it was people who couldn't. Friedman's company found actual commercial traction only once it turned to hospitals, where bedridden patients unable to sit upright genuinely could not use a straight straw at all; a bent straw for them wasn't a convenience feature, it was the only way to drink through a straw without spilling or requiring assistance.
the move
The same physical product that consumer soda-fountain customers treated as an unnecessary novelty became, in a hospital setting, a functional necessity solving a real physical limitation — the invention itself never changed, but moving it from a market where its core benefit was optional to one where the identical benefit was essential converted a commercially struggling novelty into a product hospitals actively wanted.
the payoff
Friedman's company made its first documented hospital sale in 1947, and hospital adoption established the commercial foundation that let the bendy straw later spread into mainstream consumer use, where it remains the standard straw design sold worldwide today; in 2001, Friedman's family donated his patent records and company artifacts to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
what came after
The bendy straw's invention and market history is a standard case study in innovation and product-market-fit literature for the specific lesson that a genuinely useful feature can fail in a market that treats it as optional convenience, while succeeding immediately once positioned in a market where the same feature is a functional necessity rather than a nice-to-have.
references
- [1]Smithsonian Lemelson Center — The Straight Truth About the Flexible Drinking StrawSmithsonian Institution, Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, 2019invention.si.edu
- [2]99% Invisible — Last Straws: Inventing the Modern 'Drinking Tube' & Flexible 'Bendy Straw'99% Invisible, 202099percentinvisible.org