Nick McKay Was Late For The Dance
Nick McKay was preparing to leave the house to chaperone a school dance with his wife when he realized he’d forgotten to take his sportcoat to the dry cleaners. It was covered in lint and he couldn’t stand to bare it, so he hacked together a solution: a toilet paper tube covered in strips of masking tape, held in his hands with a twisted metal coat hangar. It was crude but it worked. The next day he and his wife launched their accidental product as the Lint Pic-Up under the name of Helmac Products (Hel for his wife’s name of Helen, Mac for McKay). Since that day in 1956, Helmac (now Evercare) has sold the majority of the lint rollers in America. I am never without one.
As it turns out McKay wasn’t just a keen inventor, he was also a paragon of restraint. Even as Helmac created and dominated the lint roller market, he sloughed off advice to bring all forms of manufacturing the rollers in house. “He still dominates that market — over 60% share worldwide,” says Ed Zimmer in a comment on a Edd Tury post from April of 1993. “Yet he still buys from the same plastics molder that helped him when he was starting. Nick is expert in lint remover marketing and technology. He’s perfectly content to let his supplier — and friend — be the expert in plastics.”
(Photo by mag3737)
