Singapore Office Stories

was the advice given to King Camp Gillette by his boss. Gillette was a 21 year old traveling salesman for a company that made cork lined bottle caps, and an aspiring inventor when the owner of the company, William Painter, gave him the secret to making a fortune.

“King, you are always inventing something. Why don’t you concentrate on just one thing something like our cork bottle caps—something that people use once and throw away.”

“But what?” King Gillette became obsessed with the idea of inventing something disposable. One morning in 1895 while shaving, in the days when shaving meant using a knife-like straight edged razor, he had a sudden burst of inspiration.

“As I stood there with the razor in my hand, my eyes resting on it as lightly as a bird settling down on its nest, the Gillette razor was born. In that moment I saw it all: they way the blade could be held in a holder; the idea of sharpening the 2 opposite edges on the thin piece of steel; the clamping plates, with a handle halfway between the 2 edges of the blade.”

The beauty of the idea was that when the blades for his razor became dull they would simply be thrown away and the user would have to buy more.

King Gillette was living in Boston at the time and visited MIT to discuss his idea of putting a sharp edge on a thin piece of sheet metal with the metallurgists there. They told him his idea was impossible. It took him six years to find an engineer and inventor named William Nickerson who was able to find a way to do it.

Gillette and Nickerson began selling their safety razor in 1903. They named the company Gillette, after deciding that they probably couldn’t sell a razor blade named Nickerson. They put the likeness of King Gillette on each package.

Gillette gave away millions of his razors, including shaving kits given away as bank promotions. He sold 3.5 million “Service Set” shaving kits to departing servicemen during World War I. When the boys came back from war, they were confirmed Gillette users.

King Gillette sold the razors dirt cheap. He became rich refilling them with his disposable blades.

One little twist to the story is that Gillette was a socialist who was against the system that made him wealthy. His great dream was to build a Utopia.

King Gillette planned to build a metropolis under a glass dome powered by Niagara Falls. He envisioned the entire United States population, 60 million at the time, living there in 100 million rooms served by vast dining halls. All production would be under the control of one company, the People’s Corporation, with all residents working toward the common good.

He gave up on Niagara Falls as the site for his idea and later formed the World Corporation just prior to World War I with plans to build his Utopia in Arizona. He even asked Teddy Roosevelt to be president.

King Gillette never saw his dream for Utopia come true and his fortune was wiped out by the stock market crash of 1929. He died a frustrated man in 1932. The Gillette company still survives, today, and we still use his invention and you can still make a fortune following the advice of Gillette’s mentor: Sell something people use up, throw away, and need to buy more.

It is before dawn and cars are pulling up in front of the Craig’s home. People are getting out and talking excitedly. By 7:00 AM, Cat Spring Road is lined with cars and more than a hundred people are standing in the yard. They press against the ropes that separate them from their bounty.

As the magic hour approaches, people are pushing and shoving and jockeying for position. They start screaming at latecomers who have bypassed the line and have taken position on the front line on the opposite side of the yard.

All eyes are focused on their goal.

8 AM. Don Craig drops the rope then hurriedly gets out of the way. He has been knocked down before. The crowd stampedes. The leaders sprint across the yard.

What is going on here? What would cause people to act this way at someone’s home? Is the last available stash on the planet of this year’s hottest Christmas toy sitting in the Craig’s front yard?

This is the annual kiln opening and they are after Burlon Craig’s clay pots.

A woman throws her coat over an entire table of miniatures and claims them in the name of herself.

Two men are wrestling, pulling on opposite handles of a five-gallon jug. The handles break off. A woman behind them says she will be happy to buy it anyway.

Another woman straddling a line of pots is knocked flat. Neat rows of jars are knocked over like dominoes.

Some people snatch pots out of other people’s plunder while they are not looking.

Everything has been scooped up in about sixty seconds. The frenzied mob switches gears. Civility returns. They quietly form a line to pay for their treasures. Irene Craig and her daughter, Sue, total up the purchases and collect the money from the back of pickup truck.

Some in line make trades while they are waiting.

By 10:30 AM, everyone is gone and there is no evidence that there was ever a clay pot sitting in the yard.

Burlon Craig of Vale, North Carolina in the Catawba Valley has been a potter since 1928. He was 14 and started apprenticing with his next door neighbor, Jim Lynn. He worked at various shops in the area and mastered the art. Later, he went into business for himself.

In the 1930s and 40s, 10 cents a gallon was the going rate for a clay pot.

Sometimes, Burl couldn’t sell all of his pots. He says that he has hauled pots until the glazing almost wore off then had to haul them back home. Sometimes he had to make deals with volume buyers. A hardware store owner might say “I’ll take 100 or 200 gallons for 8 cents a gallon.” He would take it because he didn’t know if he could sell them all at 10 cents a gallon or not.

Contrast that to his latest kiln openings where he gets $100 a gallon, and everything goes- culls, cracked jars, loose broken pieces, and jugs with underfired glazes. Everything.

Sale day is called the kiln opening, which he only holds once a year, now. He doesn�t advertise, but word gets around in a hurry throughout North Carolina and surrounding states. Competition to get one of his pots is fierce.

At the 1990 opening, his son, Don, was knocked down trying to get the rope down.

“I don’t know if they stepped on him,” he recalled. “I wasn’t out there. I just leave when they go to take it down. I just walk in here and get out of sight.”

Burl hates to see his year of hard work disappear so fast. Years ago, “People would come and pick up every piece. They would look at it and set it down. They might buy a piece or two.”

“They might stop and talk” about his creations and discuss their qualities. “Now, it’s hard to tell what they like and what they don’t when they grab it all like they do here.”

There still appears to be no limit to the market. “There’s a lot of people here that I don’t know and I’ve never seen before. You know, a lot of the old ones quit buying. They don’t want to come out here and get run over. Well, they, a lot of them run out of room, too.’

“Tell you what. It’s the best investment they ever made!” he adds with a grin.

For a man who spent most of his life trying to make 10 cents a gallon, his later day fame and fortune seems like a miracle.

In the old days, his jugs were a necessity item. Rural families had to have jars, milk crocks and jugs and churns to put up enough food for the winter. Now, buyers pay hundreds of dollars for jugs they will never use. The less people needed them to use, the more valuable they became. Most current buyers wouldn’t know how to use them.

In the old days, utility was the only thing that was important. Burl’s mentor Floyd Harris told him “Don’t make any difference what they look like. Just so they hold what they are supposed to and have a good glaze on it. People are going to set ‘em in the smokehouse or cellar and nobody’ll ever see ‘em anyway.”

The jugs were judged by their ability to hold a full capacity and not leak. Now, they are valued for their appearance and are prominently displayed on a collector�s mantel or china cabinet.

The collector’s get most excited about the “face jug”. They are, also, called “ugly jugs” or “voodoo jugs”.

Burl tries to put a face on everything he makes because that is what the people want.

“Anything with a face on it will sell. That’s the big seller. People come here: “You got a face jug? I’d like to have a face jug” That’s the first thing they ask about.”

So, he makes face jugs. He puts faces on jugs, jars, pitchers, wall pockets, vases, wig stands, spittoons, chamber pots and even birdhouses.

Burl first made a few face jugs in the 1920s and 30s to sell to the tourists.

He says that making face jugs “is getting old, but what I like is the money I get out of it.”

Miniature versions of jugs, storage jars and chamber pots that are about one to three inches tall, are also good sellers. They don’t take up much space and collectors can buy large numbers at a time because they are easy to carry home. Boys of the area have long learned how to become potters turning the toys these miniatures once were considered.

Also, Burl makes mega-pots, 5-gallon pitchers that stand 18 inches tall and weigh 15 pounds empty. If it were filled with milk, no one could pick it up. But, it makes a striking conversation piece and of course it has that ugly face.

The faces are indeed quite ugly. The faces probably look like the crazy aunt or uncle that Ross Perot once said during his presidential campaign “you keep down in the basement and nobody talks about.

Whether undersized or oversized, today, his jugs have no utility and their only use or uselessness is “fine” art.

Burl still does everything from scratch, himself. He goes down the bottomlands of the South Fork of the Catawba River and digs up his clay. He trucks it back to the shop and lets it sit and weather. He grinds it to the right consistency in his clay mill then breaks it into 75-pound balls.

For years he used a wheel that he pumped with his leg, but after a bout with blood poisoning in one leg he switched to an electric.

He dips the greenware into homemade alkaline glaze. When he makes enough greenware to fill the kiln it is time to “burn” them. His kiln is known as a groundhog kiln. Made from bricks, it is about twenty-five feet long and has a firebox on one end and the chimney on the other end. The temperature inside the kiln reaches over 2,000 degrees. Burlon Craig’s kiln was built in the 1930s.

The day of the firing has become almost as much of an event as the day of the sale. It is a social gathering that attracts curious onlookers, apprentice potters and folklorists that come to see the flames and smoke.

People bring food and play music. In the old days it was customary to roast potatoes and corn over the hot chimney, and the men would entertain themselves by boxing on the lawn. A current entertainment is to shoot potatoes out of a potato gun. Potatoes are stuffed in PVC pipe then someone ignites hairspray at the other end.

Everyone wants to help load wood into the kiln. Getting people to help load wood into the kiln is kind of like Tom Sawyer talking his friends into painting Aunt Polly’s fence.

It takes two days for the kiln to cool down enough to enter after the firing. The pottery is taken out and stored until sale day. The tradition of the Catawba Valley potters is to have an outside sale (instead of in a gallery) at the event called the kiln opening. The sale usually takes place on the next Saturday.

So, why are Burl’s clay pots in such demand? Because, he is the real thing. He is the last of the potters who actually made pottery that was intended to be used. He is a hero to the “turners and burners” (the name for someone who turns clay on a wheel then fires it in a kiln). He still does things the way they did it at the turn of the century. The buyers feel like they are buying a piece of history as well as a work of art.

She got in an argument with her son over how to run the carpet department of the store. So, she quit the business she had started in 1937 with $500 worth of furniture in the basement of her husband’s second hand store, and opened a new store directly across the street.

Rose Blumkin, was only 95 years old. Known affectionately as Mrs. B, she zipped around her new store, Mrs. B’s Warehouse, in a motorized cart working like she always had- seven days a week and fourteen hours a day.

Three years later, she made up with her family and sold her store back to the original store and went back to work.

Her store located in Omaha is the Nebraska Furniture Mart, the worldïs largest furniture store in one location. It sits on 77 acres with over one million square feet under roof and over $160 million in sales per year. It sells two-thirds of the furniture in Omaha and large department store chains, which sell furniture in other markets, refuse to sell furniture there. NFM’s customer base is a radius of 300 miles.

She built it by selling furniture and carpeting at a huge discount. Rose Blumkin said the key to her success was “telling the customers what they want or should want.” and “sell cheap and tell the truth.”

In 1983, Warren Buffet- Omaha resident and the second richest man in the United States bought an 80% interest in Nebraska Furniture Mart on a handshake from the Blumkin family for $55 million. He said that he would want to be involved in any business Rose Blumkin was a part of even if it was a popcorn stand. Buffet had often thought of buying the store, and on his birthday just walked in and asked how much they would sell it for and wrote them a check.

About the transaction he said, I would rather have her word than that of all the Big 8 auditors. It’s like dealing with the bank of England.” The deal has been called the “historic Omaha handshake”.

Rose Blumkin’s son, Lou and grandchildren Ron and Irv as well as other family members still run the business.

She was one of eight children and grew up in a small town near Minsk in western Russia. Her father was a rabbi and her mother ran a small grocery store. She said watching how hard her mother worked motivated her to keep working and try to do better.

She married Isadore Blumkin, a shoe salesman in 1913. In 1914, Isadore fled Russia in order to avoid World War I military conscription. She followed in 1917. Rose made her way to the United States by way of Siberia and China. She had to use a little bribery to get across the border.

“I told the guard that I was buying leather for the army and I would bring back a bottle of Vodka,” she once said in an interview.

“He is still waiting.”

Rose Blumkin arrived in the United States not knowing a word of English and with only $66.

During the Depression, to keep her family from starving, she visited clothing stores and noted their prices. She passed out 10,000 flyers advertising that she would outfit a man from head to toe for only $5. She made over $800 in one day.

When Rose was 44 years old, in 1937, she borrowed $500 from her brother and bought furniture from the American Furniture Mart in Chicago and set up shop in the basement of her husbandïs pawn shop.

She established her businesses number one principle- sell cheap. Rose priced the furniture 10% over her cost.

Her carpet suppliers sued her for violating Fair Trade Laws by selling so low. She won the case and gained considerable free publicity. Plus, she sold the judge $1400 worth of carpet when it was over.

She built her business despite the fact that manufacturers would not sell to her and banks would not loan her money. The business grew and she built a bigger store in 1948 with her savings.

Rose was a tireless worker, but loved every minute of it. She once told a newspaper, “I come home to eat and sleep, and that’s about it. I can’t wait until it gets daylight so I can get back to business.”

When her legs started bothering her in her nineties, she bought a motorized cart nicknamed The Rose B. Rose zipped around the store and made sales. She said she drove the cart “like a Russian Cossack.” If she saw a salesman standing around not helping a customer she would ram him with her cart.

She was quite blunt in her speech and was quick to fire employees she thought weren’t working hard enough or had disagreements with. Her son, Lou, was there to smooth out the conflicts caused by her bluntness. He would usually hire the newly fired employee right back.

She quit the Nebraska Furniture Mart in 1988, opened her new store across the street and was soon outselling the original. When she quit she demanded $96,000 for all of the vacation time that she never took. She put up a sign in her new store that said They sell it for $104, we sell for $80.” When she merged her new store back with the Nebraska Furniture Mart in 1992, Warren Buffet made her sign a non-compete agreement. She was 99 year old. To sign the papers, she had to make her mark. Rose never learned how to read or write.

She developed her business plan from the beginning and stuck with it. Part of her plan was to make customers for life. When a young couple just starting out would come in, she had all of the wholesale prices memorized and she would cut her margin to nothing. She knew that they would be back again and again through the years when it came time to buy furniture.

During the slow times during her sixty-one years of owning the store, she went as far as selling off her own families furniture to pay the employees and bills to keep the store open. Even in her later years, she left the tags on her lamps and furniture. Perhaps, in case she needed to raise money again in a hurry.

She rented the Omaha Civic Auditorium for a weekend in 1951 and held an all-out three day sale of the storeïs inventory to combat the slow sales from an economy depressed by the Korean War. She sold $250,000 and eliminated all debt forever.

In 1975, a tornado nearly destroyed the entire store and caused millions in damage. But, her dream continued and they rebuilt the Nebraska Furniture Mart.

Warren Buffet in his famous letter to his shareholders wrote in 1984 about what he thought Rose Blumkinïs secrets were. He said, first, her and her family ïapply themselves with the enthusiasm and energy that would make Ben Franklin and Horatio Alger look like dropouts.” Second- “they define with extraordinary realism their area of special competence and act decisively on all matters within it.ï Third- ïthey ignore even the most enticing propositions falling outside of that area of special competence.”

Fourth- “they unfailingly behave in a high-grade manner with everyone they deal with.” (Mrs. B boils it down to “sell cheap and tell the truth.”)

Another of their business principles is “over-deliver and under promise”

Rose Blumkin was extremely generous. She donated a million dollars to the Jewish Federation of Omaha to build a 119-bed nursing home. When she was asked why? Mrs. B said that when she had first arrived in the United States the Hebrew Immigrant Society had given her a free meal. To repay them, she decided that one day she would do something nice for the Jewish people that had helped her.

During the 1930s, Rose and a friend met with supporters in her home to work for a Jewish homeland. That friend was the first prime minister of Israel, Golda Meier.

She saved The Rose, a classic downtown theater in Omaha from demolition. It is now the Rose Blumkin Performing Arts Center.

She stopped working only a few months before her death. She claimed her absence from the store was not because she was sick, but because she was lazy. She died in 1998 just shy of her 105th birthday.

Warren Buffet upon hearing of her death said, “We are partners. And in most ways, she’s the senior partner. She’s forgotten more than I’ll ever know.”