Blow Your Own

Early this year, a man walked into the Detroit offices of the Kresge Co.'s variety chain. He introduced himself to the merchandising manager, then took out a small pipe no bigger than a soda straw and quickly blew a glasslike bubble as big as a watermelon. Then he detached it and handed it to the merchandising manager. Bubble in hand, the manager hastily called a meeting of Kresge's entire sales department to consider this wonderful toy.

By last week, not only Kresge's but Woolworth's and scores of other dime and department stores were selling thousands of 29-c- and 49-c- packets, consisting of a pipe and a collapsible tube filled with a plastic called "Bub-O-Loon." In thousands of homes, offices and nightclubs, Americans were huffing & puffing into their hollow sticks.

The Match Game. The man who had blown up this merchandising phenomenon was Matthew Fox, 36, the bubble-shaped executive vice president of Universal-International Pictures. Matty Fox, whose pudgy fingers dabble in many side investments that have little to do with movies, got into balloon-blowing by way of the "everlasting match." The match, which could be struck 600 times, had been invented in 1931 by Dr. Ferdinand Ringer, a Viennese chemist. It was bought up for $400,000--and filed away--by the late match king, Ivar Kreuger. Subsequently, Dr. Ringer came to the U.S., and when a federal court broke up the remnants of Kreuger's old cartel in 1946, the match was again available.

Promoter Fox and associates underwrote Dr. Ringer and set him up in an elaborate, air-conditioned laboratory on Manhattan's East Side to perfect a marketable version of his match. While experimenting, Dr. Ringer dissolved some vinyl-resin plastic in acetone. In working with the solution, he noticed it forming thin-skinned, elastic bubbles. He called Matty. Cried Matty: "A gold mine, pure and simple."

Ballooning Profits. Fox & friends gambled $175,000 and borrowed more from banks to manufacture and market Bub-O-Loon. He took in two partners, who got together a company to work out the tricky process of putting the plastic into the tubes, and lined up nine plants in seven cities to turn out the tubes.

From an initial production of 14,000 tubes a day, Bub-O-Loon production last week had expanded to 400,000 tubes daily. The company was already grossing $100,000 a day. As the Vinylite plastic (purchased in bulk from Bakelite Corp.) cost only 14-c- per 49-c- tube, a large part of the gross was profit. There was only one hole in the bubble. The formula for turning vinyl plastic into Bub-O-Loon was so simple that Fox did not think it could be patented. Already competitors were turning out more than 100,000 tubes a day. When the Bub-O-Loon finally bursts, Matty Fox hopes to be ready with his everlasting match.

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