Fuller Brush Company

Fuller Brush Company
Privately held subsidiary (since 2007)[1]
Founded 1906 (1906)
Founder Alfred Fuller
Products Branded and private label products for personal care as well as commercial and household cleaning[2]
Parent Sara Lee (1968–1989); Privately held (1989–1994); CPAC Inc. (1994-2012); Victory Park Capital and David Sabin (Since 2012)
Website www.fuller.com

The Fuller Brush Company sells branded and private label products for personal care as well as commercial and household cleaning; it is a subsidiary of CPAC Inc.,[2] which from 2007 - 2012 was owned by the private equity group Buckingham Capital Partners.[1] Since December 2012, the Fuller Brush Company has been owned and operated by David Sabin and Victory Park Capital. Fuller Brush was founded in 1906, by Alfred Carl Fuller, and since 1968 it has been owned by CPAC.

History

Early years

Alfred C. Fuller began what was to become Fuller Brush Company in a basement shop in Somerville, Massachusetts; In 1906 he moved to Hartford, Connecticut and founded the company.[3]

The company began with door-to-door sales of brushes of various sorts, including hairbrushes with a lifetime guarantee for which they are famous.[4]

In 1931, the establishment of the first of what became known as the Green River Ordinance led Fuller Brush to challenge the ordinance's limits on door-to-door sales; the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where on March 1, 1937 it dismissed the appeal "for want of a substantial federal question."[5]

In the mid 1930s, Fuller relocated from rented space on Union Place opposite Hartford's railroad station, to a purpose-built sprawling factory and office complex on North Main St at the Windsor town line.

World War II saw the company "cut its normal civilian output drastically to make brushes for the cleaning of guns"; Fuller's son Howard became president in 1943.[3] After the war, Fuller added Daggett & Ramsdell, Inc.'s Débutante Cosmetics to its line of products it sold house-to-house, sold by a sales force of women, a strategy resurrected after a wartime attempt to have "Fullerettes" sell their core products.[3] Fuller had evidence that women could succeed at sales since Stanley Beveridge, who had left his position as Fuller's sales vice president in 1929, had by 1949 employed women as "dealers" to grow sales at his own company, Stanley Home Products, to $35 million, exceeding Fuller's sales for the first time.[6]

Fuller's oldest son Howard succeeded his father as president, serving until he and his wife Dora died in the high-speed crash of his Mercedes 300SL gullwing sports car in New Mexico in May 1959.[7]

1959 to 1994

In 1959, Avard E. Fuller, 44, the founder's younger son, became Fuller Brush's president.[8]

Having long outgrown the Hartford location, in 1960, the company moved to a new, purpose-built campus on Long Hill St. in East Hartford, Conn.

In 1966, Fuller Brush hired 17,500 women, motivated by the lack of qualified men (the unemployment rate was 3.8%) and the example set by Avon Products.[9]

Consolidated Foods, now Sara Lee Corporation acquired Fuller Brush in 1968;[10] Avard Fuller retired a year later.[8] Office operations moved initially to Niles, Ill., then relocated along with manufacturing and research to Great Bend, Kans in 1973.[11]

By 1985, all of the company's sales were still generated door-to-door.[10] By the mid-1980s, in recognition of the increasing number of women working outside the home, Fuller Brush began introducing other sales channels beyond door-to-door, including a mail-order catalog that sent out 10 million catalogs a year, and several outlet stores selling "slow-selling items, returned merchandise or slightly flawed goods"; by mid-1989, 35% of that year's estimated $160 million in sales came from catalogs, with another 5% of coming from its stores.[10] Later that same year, a group of investors from Kansas headed by Lee Turner, a trial lawyer, took Fuller private; by 1991 the company now known as Fuller Industries and led by Stuart A. Ochiltree, had integrated its door-to-door and catalog business, with its 12,000 mostly part-time sales representatives receiving commissions for sales from either channel.[12]

CPAC subsidiary

In June 1994, Fuller, once again known as Fuller Brush Company, was acquired by CPAC Inc., a Leicester, New York-based manufacturer of photographic chemicals; CPAC took on the "heavy debt burden" accumulated while the company was private and whose annual sales, increasingly focused on chemicals, had shrunk to $24 million.[13]

In 2007, CPAC Inc. was acquired by Buckingham Capital Partners in a leveraged buyout.[1]

In February, 2012, Fuller Brush Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.[14]

Victory Park Capital and David Sabin

After Fuller Brush Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Victory Park Capital and CEO, David Sabin, bought the iconic American company. The headquarters were moved from its most recent home in Great Bend, KS to Napa, CA.[15]

Locations

Connecticut

The main factory for the Fuller Brush Company was located in East Hartford, Connecticut during the 1960s, where Fuller's son Avard ran the company. It had moved from Hartford on the other side of the Connecticut River some years earlier. The Research Division was there, led by Hank Whitman, along with the plastics molding operation.

The Industrial Division, under Verne Joy, was also at the East Hartford plant, where they made large motor-driven brushes for developing newspaper printing photo metal plates. All the mops were sewn at this plant. The perfuming operation was there also, including a large machine to detect what was in perfume made by other companies.

In front of the East Hartford plant was a large glass case with a stuffed large boar that represented the boar hair used in some of the original Fuller brushes.

Fuller had a "private label" division, Charter Products, that sold duplicate products under other brand names chosen by the distributor. Avard's interest in boating resulted in experiments at the plant with plastic molding of port lights (windows) for boats, including full plastic hardware.

New York

The plastic bottle and toothbrush manufacturing operation was in Philmont, New York. According to Fuller's memoir, Fuller Brush distributed the Bristlecomb, a hairbrush introduced by the Mohawk Company in 1928. In 1942, Fuller Brush bought out the Mohawk Brush Company and subsequently all the hairbrushes and industrial floor brushes were manufactured at the Mohawk Plant in Albany, New York.[16]

Great Bend, Kansas

Since 1973, Fuller brushes and over 2,000 other Fuller products have been manufactured in Barton County, near Great Bend, Kansas.

Napa, CA

Headquarters for this iconic brand were moved from Kansas to California shortly after being purchased by David Sabin and Victory Park Capital, while the manufacturing remains in Great Bend, KS.

Former employees

Former employees include evangelist Billy Graham, who became a Fuller Brush salesman during the summer after high school, and outsold "every other salesman in North Carolina";[17] in his 1997 autobiography, Just As I Am, Graham describes in some detail his experiences selling Fuller brushes door-to-door. Ellen Barkin was "born in the Bronx to a father who worked as a Fuller Brush man".[18] Clifford Irving "was a Fuller Brush man in Syracuse."[19]

More recently, Paul Reubens of Pee-wee Herman fame, worked as a Fuller Brush salesman while attending California Institute of the Arts.[20]

Other former employees include Frank Gross, photographer Tom Leutwiler, Dennis Quaid, Dick Clark, J. Bruce Llewellyn (co-founder of 100 Black Men of America), Ed Mirvish, Jack Sensenbrenner, Kin Shriner, and Ed Stelmach. Jack Nicholson and Felicia Farr were also featured in a few pictures in "The Fuller Magazine." Broadcaster Lowell Green admitted during his April 24, 2014 program to selling Fuller Brushes in Montreal's Westmount area during his college days in the 1950s.

In popular culture

References

  1. 1 2 3 "CPAC Inc. and Buckingham Capital Partners II, L.P. Complete Merger". Press release. CPAC Inc. April 16, 2007. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
  2. 1 2 "Fact Sheet". CPAC Inc. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
  3. 1 2 3 "Business & Finance: Fuller's Fillies". Time. July 12, 1948. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
  4. ↑ http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~dickbolt/FullerBrushCo.html. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  5. ↑ "Railroad Workers Demand Protection of Their Daytime Sleep". Green River, Wyoming. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
  6. ↑ "The Brush Man". Time. January 16, 1950. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
  7. ↑ http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~dickbolt/FullerBrushCo.html. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  8. 1 2 "Avard E. Fuller, 76, Fuller Brush Executive". The New York Times. October 27, 1992. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
  9. ↑ "Jobs: A Good Man Is Hard to Find—So They Hire Women". Time. November 4, 1966. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
  10. 1 2 3 Berg, Eric N. (May 18, 1989). "Fuller Brush Tries New Approach". The New York Times. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
  11. ↑ http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~dickbolt/FullerBrushCo.html. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  12. ↑ Barmash, Isadore (February 13, 1991). "Fuller Industries Picks Executive From Avon". The New York Times. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
  13. ↑ "CPAC Agrees to Acquire Fuller Brush". The New York Times. June 17, 1994. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
  14. ↑ Associated Press. "Historic door-to-door retailer Fuller Brush files for bankruptcy protection". Washington Post. Retrieved 22 February 2012.
  15. 1 2 http://napavalleyregister.com/news/local/st-helena-man-buys-fuller-brush-gives-it-napa-home/article_4de1cff2-e693-11e2-af9d-001a4bcf887a.html. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  16. ↑ Fuller, Alfred C. as told to Hartzell Spence (1960). A Foot in the Door, p.220. McGraw-Hill, New York.
  17. ↑ "Billy Graham: A New Kind of Evangelist". Time. October 25, 1954. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
  18. ↑ Witchel, Alex (April 22, 2011). "Ellen Barkin Is No Uptown Girl". The New York Times. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
  19. ↑ "The Fabulous Hoax of Clifford Irving". Time. February 21, 1972. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
  20. ↑ Gertler, T. (February 2, 1987). "The Pee-wee perplex". Rolling Stone.
  21. ↑ http://radiosausalito.org/the-field-trip-068-fuller-brush-norman-hall/

Further reading

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