Graham continued to market the product herself. Graham also was granted royalties on future sales of the product, thus ensuring that she would continue to earn profits from her efforts. After Gillette took over the manufacture and distribution of the Liquid Paper, the line was developed to include a range of colors including shades of blue, yellow, red, and green. This allowed the product to be used for correcting errors on colored paper that was often used for cover sheets to reports, flyers, and other applications.
When Graham passed away in , her considerable estate was divided between her favorite charities and a substantial bequest to her only child, Robert Michael Nesmith. Today, the product is widely available at office supply stores as well as in the school supplies section of most discount retail stores.
A placement in a national supply magazine led to her first big score: orders all over the US, including a bottle sale to The General Electric Company. Over the next few years, she sought help from a number of industry professionals, including a polymer chemist named Bill Mallow , and further refined her product for a mass market.
As the product spread in popularity, Graham relocated the operation from her garage to a trailer to an office building. She hired a staff of employees to help out with marketing, production, and logistics. You have to face fears and doubts constantly. You keep doing it over and over. Graham spent heavily on advertising, showcasing her product during prime-time TV programs like The Tonight Show and in Glamour and Fortune magazine spreads. Sales grew in tandem with exposure. In , they divorced and he tried to cut Graham out of the company by changing the formula and booting her off the board.
He continued to receive Liquid Paper royalties from the deal his mother had worked out and used them to launch the music video company PopClips — a predecessor to MTV.
As chronicled by Forbes contributor Tanya Tarr, Graham left behind much more than a fortune. Among its offerings:. During her successful run, Graham also established two philanthropic foundations — one that supported women in the arts, and another that offered assistance to disadvantaged women.
Shortly before her death, Graham sat down for an oral history interview at the University of North Texas and ruminated on her success. Have an idea of someone we should cover? Shoot us a note here.
Privacy policy. Generic filters Hidden label. Hidden label. The secretary who turned Liquid Paper into a multimillion-dollar business Bette Nesmith Graham invented one of the most popular office supplies of the 20th century.
By: Zachary Crockett zzcrockett. And she did it all during a time when women were discouraged from pursuing business ventures. Making ends meet Born Bette Clair Murphy near Dallas, Texas, in , Graham was raised to be imaginative, strong-willed, and independent.
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If the value of a home stays flat, home equity rises slowly — one mortgage payment …. In the 12 months ended Sept. Divorced and with a small child to support, Bette took several odd jobs, eventually learning shorthand and typing.
A technological advancement in typewriters from fabric to carbon ribbons and a more sensitive keypad made errors more common and more difficult to correct: erasers that had worked before now smeared the carbon across the paper. Graham sought a better way to correct typing errors, and she remembered that artists painted over their mistakes on canvas, so why couldn't typists simply paint over their mistakes? Bette Nesmith put some tempera water-based paint, colored to match the stationery she used, into a bottle and took her watercolor brush to the office.
She used this to surreptitiously correct her typing mistakes, which her boss never noticed. Soon another secretary saw the new invention and asked for some of the correcting fluid. Graham found a green bottle at home, wrote "Mistake Out" on a label, and gave it to her friend.
Soon, all the secretaries in the building were asking for some, too. She continued to refine her recipe in her kitchen laboratory, which was based on a formula for tempura paint she found at the local library, with assistance from a paint company employee and a chemistry teacher at a local school.
In , Bette Nesmith started the Mistake Out Company: her son Michael and his friends filled bottles for her customers. Nevertheless, she made little money despite working nights and weekends to fill orders. Bette Nesmith left her typing job at the bank in when Mistake Out finally began to succeed: her product was featured in office supply magazines, she had a meeting with IBM , and General Electric placed an order for bottles.
Although some stories say she was fired from the bank for signing her name with the "Mistake Out Company," her own Gihon Foundation biography reports she simply started working part-time then left as the company succeeded. She became a full-time small business owner, applied for a patent, and changed the name to the Liquid Paper Company. She now had time to devote to selling Liquid Paper, and business boomed.
At each step along the way, she expanded the business, moving her production out of her kitchen into her backyard, then into a four-room house. In , she married Robert Graham, a frozen-food salesman who then took an increasingly active role in the organization. By , Liquid Paper had grown into a million-dollar business. In , she moved into her own plant and corporate headquarters in Dallas with automated operations and 19 employees.
That year, Bette Nesmith Graham sold one million bottles. In , Liquid Paper moved into a 35,square-foot international headquarters building in Dallas. The plant had equipment that could produce bottles a minute. That same year, she divorced Robert Graham. She had the lion's share of a multi-million dollar industry and Bette, now a wealthy woman, established two charitable foundations, the Gihon Foundation in , to collect paintings and other artworks by women, and the Bette Clair McMurray Foundation to support women in need, in
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