PLAN No. 392. SOLD ANOTHER MAN’S SOAP
An agent who had been very successful as a house-to-house canvasser, but was temporarily without a line of goods to handle, decided to try a new plan with soap, and found it so profitable that he adopted it permanently.
Visiting a large factory in his city, where special brands of soap were made to order, he arranged to have made for him a first-class toilet soap of the usual size, each cake to be neatly wrapped in a fancy printed wrapper bearing the name of the soap and a company name he had adopted for his own use. Three of these cakes he had packed in a neat pasteboard box, upon which his own label also appeared.
The price to him of this soap, thus wrapped and packed, was $7.20 per gross, or 5 cents per cake, and this price also included one gross of “sample” cakes of one ounce each, but unwrapped, for free distribution.
Placing the 144 sample cakes in a handbag, with circulars detailing the merits of the soap, he started to canvass the residence districts. At each house he left a sample cake of the soap and one of the circulars, with a request for the housekeeper to use it, and he would call the next day with a supply of the full-sized cakes in boxes. When he called the next day and showed the lady the beautifully wrapped cakes, which he assured her sold regularly for 15 cents each, but upon which he had placed an introductory price of 25 cents for a box containing three cakes, he made a sale at almost every house he visited. He usually sold seventy-two boxes in a day’s canvass, and his profit of 10 cents a box netted him $7.20 for one day’s work. He often did better than this, so that his first year’s business showed a clear profit of $3,500, as he also sold through agents and to dealers.