I often have entrepreneurs who come to us with an idea for a product or a service they believe will set the world afire with sales with just a little marketing behind it. Sometimes those ideas are totally original, but more than often they are combining ideas that someone else has already tried and they are putting them together in a new way. Take the eraser on the end of a pencil. Good ideas come and go, but great ideas last a lifetime and beyond. So it is with the pencil and eraser combination. As ingenious as it was, the eraser embedded pencil didn’t become a common item all by itself without some very savvy marketing.

The idea of putting a rubber eraser on the end of a graphite pencil was conceived by Hymen Lipman, an envelope maker and stationer from Philadelphia. Lipman designed a wooden pencil with graphite inserted on one end of the pencil and the rubber eraser encased in the wood on the other end. You actually sharpened both ends of the pencil: one to expose the writing lead and the other to uncover the eraser. Lipman patented his all-in-one pencil and eraser in 1858. He sold his patent to businessman Joseph Reckendorfer four years later for $100,000 – big money in the mid-19^th century. One year prior to this business transaction, Johann Eberhard Faber had established his own pencil-making factory in New York. Eberhard Faber had emigrated from Germany where his family had been making pencils for a century. He realized the impact Lipman’s invention could have on the pencil market and began to produce his own pencils topped with erasers that were attached with a metal ferrule. He took Lipman’s idea and revised it without paying any kind of licensing fees to Reckendorfer, who in turn sued Faber for patent infringement. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1875. The Court nullified the patent, after Faber’s attorneys argued that Lipman had not invented anything new, but had simply taken two "known technologies” – an eraser and a pencil – and put them together – the very thing that Eberhard Faber had also done. Faber was free to produce billions of eraser tipped pencils without paying any royalties and Reckendorfer was left with nothing for his hefty investment.

However, gaining clearance to produce a product and actually getting someone to buy it are two different matters. Pen and ink were still the preferred method of writing in the late 19^th century. How would you get someone to buy a pencil with an eraser on the end of it? Eberhard Faber focused their marketing on schools. Schoolchildren learning to write with a fountain of ink and a pen were destined to cause a mess. The pencil was much neater. And since children were prone to making mistakes, the handy eraser at the end of the wooden pencil was all you needed. Eberhard Faber created a market by selling pencils with embedded erasers through schools. As children aged to adults, their writing tool of choice became the Eberhard Faber pencil.

The company did not stop there with their marketing efforts. They also continued to create new pencils with style. They branded their pencils. Educational names like "Elementary” and "Factor” were commonly associated as schoolchildren’s pencils. Later, catchy names were added to the branded lineup pitched specifically to kids, such as "Tomahawk” and "Comet.” People began to prefer one brand over the other. The "Mongol” and "VanDyke” were common in the U.S. Specific brands of the Eberhard Faber pencils were collected and traded. In Canada, the "Hockey” and "Grey Cup” pencils became popular collector’s items. During the Great Depression, the Eberhard Faber Black Wing 602 pencil was introduced and became a status symbol when novelist John Steinbeck endorsed it. It had a sleek design and a marketing slogan that claimed it to be "Feathery Smooth” and that it would write with "Half the pressure, twice the speed.” An original Black Wing 602 sells today for about $50.

If you have a great idea for a product or service that you think will sell – or even a new way of taking an old product and making it better, it will not sell without a very smart marketing strategy. Eberhard Faber won its Supreme Court battle in 1875, but the real battle for the eraser embedded pencil was convincing the market to give up pen and ink for something new. Eberhard Faber made their pencils a household item not by ingenuity, but by intelligent marketing.

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Who Made That Built-In Eraser? by Pagan Kennedy, nytimes.com, September 13, 2013

Hymen Lipman Pencil Patent: Innovation in the Pencil Industry, pencils.com/hymen-lipman-pencil-patent