“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
—Andy Warhol
One hot summer day, Dina Campion, a Starbucks district manager, threw ice in a coffee drink and blended it. She tried it, liked it, started making it for coworkers, and then started selling the cold coffee drink to customers. She received an edict from the corporate office saying staff couldn’t just start selling items randomly and must stop. Fortunately, Dina believed in the idea enough to wait until the end of the month to be able to report a full month’s sales results. She subsequently received a call from Howard Schultz, Starbucks CEO, thanking her for ignoring the edict she had received and sticking with an idea she believed in. Dina had created the Frappuccino, which became a $50 million dollar product line the first year it rolled out.
One of 3M’s employees, Art Fry, sang in a choir at the Cathedral of St. Paul and used index cards in his hymnal to mark the next hymn to sing. Unfortunately, the index cards would often fall out. It seemed to Art that 3M could figure out how to put a low-grade adhesive on a piece of paper so it would stick to another piece of paper. The research department at 3M told him it would never work because it would be very difficult to get consistency in a low-grade adhesive. Art’s response: “That’s great news, because it means that when we figure out how to do it, it will be hard for our competition to duplicate.” He wasn’t dissuaded and took his idea to the marketing department which tested the product in seven different markets and concluded the product was a bomb. Art said they tested it wrong, so he and a buddy walked the streets of St. Paul, Minnesota, and gave out free samples to small businesses (the first time in the history of 3M free samples had been used!). He came back a week later, and 90 percent of the businesses wanted to order more. After that, Art started distributing “the yellow pads of paper” to administrative assistants within 3M until overwhelming popularity led it to become an official new product. In its first year, Post-it Notes became a $300 million product line.