Kutol Products, watching its wallpaper cleaner go unsold as coal furnaces disappeared, relaunched the identical formula as Play-Doh after a schoolteacher reported children loved molding it

the problem

Coal-to-gas heating killed demand for its flour-and-salt wallpaper cleaner

background

the move

Joseph McVicker's sister-in-law Kay Zufall, a nursery-school teacher, had her students mold the leftover wallpaper compound like clay and watched them love it; she told Joseph, brought him to see her classroom's creations, and pushed the company to sell the exact same formula as a children's toy rather than a cleaner. In 1956 Kutol spun up a subsidiary, Rainbow Crafts, stripped the cleaner's detergent smell and added colors and scent, and launched it as Play-Doh.

the payoff

Rainbow Crafts was shipping over one million cans a year by 1964 after Captain Kangaroo promoted it on television; General Mills bought the company for roughly $3 million in 1965, folding it into Kenner (1971), then Tonka (1987) and finally Hasbro (1991), which still sells it under Playskool today. More than two billion cans have sold since the mid-1950s, with roughly 95 million cans sold annually across 75 countries by the mid-2000s.

what came after

Play-Doh remains one of the best-selling toys in history and a standard business-school illustration of a product surviving its original market by chasing an accidental use rather than defending the dying one.

references

1. [1]Play-DohWikipedia, 2026en.wikipedia.org
2. [2]The History of Play-Doh: Good, Clean Fun!The Strong National Museum of Play, 2023museumofplay.org

was it genius?

same kind of clever

• 1968 · Dick FosburyFosbury jumped over the bar backwards — the rules never said which way to face
• 1761 · John HarrisonThe longitude problem sat inside astronomy for decades until a self-taught carpenter decided it was actually a clock problem
• 1893 · Fridtjof Nansen / Colin ArcherNansen built a ship too round to be crushed by pack ice, then sailed straight into the ice on purpose