Robert R. Taylor, who took soap out of dishes, put it in pump bottles and forever changed the way people wash up, has died. He was 77.
Taylor's family said yesterday the entrepreneur died of cancer Aug. 29 in Newport Beach.
An entrepreneurial visionary, Taylor created and sold more than a dozen businesses during his lifetime, including those that produced toothpaste, shampoos and popular fragrances.
Most well known among the latter was likely the Calvin Klein fragrance Obsession, which Taylor marketed in the 1980s with what was for the time a winkingly risque ad campaign.
"Between love and madness lies Obsession," became the fragrance's popular and sometimes parodied catchphrase.
It was SoftSoap, however, that made his reputation as a business genius.
"He was just driving to work one day and he had been looking at the soap in the sink and seeing how messy it was and he was like, 'There's got to be a way to not have to deal with that,'" his daughter, Lori Lawrence, told The Associated Press yesterday.
He came up with the marketing concept first. Then, through home experimentation and some trial and error, created the soap.
He planned to begin selling SoftSoap in 1980 through his small company, Minnetonka Corp., but realised that if it caught on, huge home products manufacturers such as Johnson & Johnson, where he had once worked, would copy the soap-in-a-pump-bottle idea and quickly put him out of business.
So he leveraged his company for every penny it was worth, USD 12 million, and bought 100 million little bottle hand-pumps from the only two US manufacturers that made them.
It created a back order so huge that the businesses couldn't make pumps for anybody else for more than a year, giving Taylor's brand time to become established.
In six months, he had sold USD 25 million worth of SoftSoap. Earlier this year the industry trade publication Inc. Magazine declared his cornering of the hand-pump market one of the three shrewdest business moves ever made.
