System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Baron Marcel Bich, Inventor - Bic Pen
July 29, 1914 - May 30, 1994
Born on July 29, 1914, in Turin, Italy, to French parents (his father was a civil engineer), Bich began his career at eighteen selling flashlights door-to-door in Paris. A few years later he went to work as the Production Manager for a large ink manufacturer and was eventually made production manager, before he was called up by the French air force at the outbreak of World War II.
In 1945, Marcel Bich and his friend, Edouard Buffard, raised $1,000 and bought an empty factory shell in the rundown Paris suburb of Clichy, acquired near Paris, France, and soon developed a thriving business, producing parts for fountain pens and mechanical lead pencils. Following that, they began manufacturing ink refills for the ball-point pens that were just beginning to appear in France. At the time, the French pen market was dominated by the traditional "inkwell" models. Ball-point pens (mostly American imports) were regarded as novelties, their popularity limited by their relatively high price tags and unreliable performance. Marcel Bich was very familiar with the ball-point's shortcomings through his ink business, but he became convinced that the new pen could claim a bigger share of the market if its price were brought down and its quality improved.
Working in his small factory-shed, the ink maker began to experiment with different ball-point designs in 1949. Unlike the ball-points then on the market, virtually all of which were refillable, the prototypes that Bich developed were intended to be used only until their ink ran out and then thrown away. The farsighted businessman believed that this disposable feature would increase his pen's appeal to the convenience. After obtaining the patents rights to a ball pen created by Hungarian inventor, Ladislao BIRO, and after four years of research and development, Bich finally came up with a pen that met all his requirements. The simple stick-shaped writing instrument was rugged and dependable; and because it consisted only of a thin plastic ink tube, a tiny metal ball-point, and a rigid plastic outer tube, it could be made and sold very inexpensively. Bich christened his new disposable pen by slashing a letter of his name to create the catchy "Bic."
Marcel BICH introduced his pen in December 1950. Touting his product as a reliable pen at an affordable price, he called it « BIC », a shortened, easy-to-remember version of his own name. The famous BIC® CRISTAL® ballpoint pen was born! He supported its launch with memorable, effective advertising and its sales surpassed even his own expectations. As its inventor had expected, the Bic pen was an immediate hit with the French public. Three years after introducing the pen in 1953, Marcel Bich was selling a quarter of a million disposable ball-points a day in his native land and was beginning to market his product in other European countries. The spectacular success of the unpretentious Bic (it sometimes sold for less than 5¢) startled the entire pen industry, which had traditionally been controlled by high-priced, high-status products.
In December 1958 the stocky, balding pen maker entered the U.S. market by acquiring the Waterman Pen Company. Disposable ballpoints were all but unheard of here at the time, but the handy Bic fit comfortably into the American life-style, and within a decade of it's introduction the French product was accounting for half of all retail pen sales in the nation. To measure this achievement another way, Bich was selling 330 million ball-points a year, more than one and a half pens for every American.
Encouraged by the success of his pen, Bich test-marketed a disposable cigarette lighter in Sweden in 1972. A year later, he introduced the lighter to America, where it challenged the already established leader, Cricket Lighter, made by Gillette. The two companies had done battle once before when the surprising Bic ball-point had catapulted past Gillette's line of Papermate pens to become the king of the U.S. retail pen market.
This time, however, Gillette was determined to put up a better fight. Both companies invested heavily in television advertising, Gillette depending on its singing Cricket cartoon character to counter Bic's "Flick My Bic" slogan. They also engaged in some fierce price competition, shaving 60¢ or more off lighters that originally were supposed to retail for $1.49. When the dust finally settled, Bic emerged the winner once again. Its lighter passed Cricket in 1977 and has remained well ahead of the Gillette entry in sales ever since.
History seemed about to repeat itself in 1976, when Bich brought another of his throwaways to America - the Bic razor. Gillette responded to this assault on the very product the company had started with by introducing its own disposable razor Good News. Backed by Gillette's reputation and expertise in shavers, Good News outsold its French competitor from the beginning, relegating Bic to a less than 20 percent share of the U.S. disposable razor market by 1981.
Bich's failure to top Gillette in the razor market was one of the rare setbacks that he experienced in his success-studded career of more than three decades. The competitive Frenchman (who was once described by Time magazine as a "stubborn, opinionated entrepreneur") hasn't been as lucky in his favorite avocation, however. A dedicated yachtsman, Bich tried and failed on several occasions to win the America's Cup race. In 1970 he spent $3 million and worked fourteen hours a day preparing for the event, only to lose ignominiously when his sloop France got lost in the fog off Newport.
Bich's yachting activities provided the public with its few chances to see the pen millionaire. A very private person, he shunned interviews and forbade photographs in a manner reminiscent of the late Howard Hughes. Besides yachting, Bich's leisure time was usually spent with his family, his wife and ten children. He died May 30, 1994, at the age of 79.
BIC manufactures and sells 21 million stationery products every day around the world. BIC is the world’s number one manufacturer of ballpoint pens and a leader in stationery products.
