Maybelline was known as "THE WONDER COMPANY" in the Cosmetic Industry

Harris A. Neil Jr with Harris A. Neil lll

5. PEOPLE, CULTURE AND STYLE
by Harris A. Neil Jr.

Nothing in my work experience, before or since, came close to matching the work environment of the Maybelline Company. The people, from my mentors Tom Lyle Williams Jr. and John Cole on down, were outstanding. Rags Ragland, was the father figure for all of us, the glue that held the place together, no disrespect to Tom Jr.. The management style was professional, but very simple and workable.

COMMUNICATION:

Communication is probably the best indicator of how the company operated. I can’t remember writing or receiving more than a dozen or so internal memos in all my years with Maybelline. If there was an “Employee Handbook,” I can’t remember it. We all knew where we stood, and treated one another with respect and good will. Life was simpler then, with almost no Federal or State personnel oversight except for minimum wage and overtime provisions. There was no OSHA, no ADA, and very few other “alphabet soup” agencies. There was some presence at the City government level. For example, the company had to operate the “Chicago way,” such as the annual courtesy call at Christmas-time from the Chicago Fire Department. Several fire officials would call on Tom Jr., and leave with whatever tribute was prevailing for that year.

ACCOUNTABILITY:

While that streamlined system of communication kept things going internally, things were much more conventional in external affairs. In my case, I had heavy daily contact with our supplier group, and I did almost everything in writing, to put a form of importance and accountability into our relationship. It worked for the most part, and it beat trying to remember what it was that we discussed when so many contacts were buzzing around.

TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT:

As declared by  (Tom Lyle Williallms,) T. L. (as explained in The Maybelline Story), there was no pattern of nepotism within the company. Of course, there was the arms-length relationship, company to vendor, with Deluxe Mascara. Also, Ches Haines was the Maybelline Traffic Manager, responsible for all material and order movement, in and out of our loading dock. The company was 100% dependent on truck movement, so this was a vital function. It could get quite exciting if the Teamsters decided to walk out, or if Chicago had one of its trademarked blizzards.

SPACE MANAGEMENT:

Just as the management group was small in number, so were the personal office needs. In my early days, I worked in the general office area, and there were four private offices on “executive row.” In later years, Mary Ann Anderson came into the company as Vice President of Advertising, and the company converted some apartment space adjacent to the general office and created offices for that function. As mentioned earlier, this expansion also moved further to provide space for the new Computer Department, Credit Department, and for Rag’s now two assistants. Bob Medlin had joined Carle Rollins to assist Rags.

Teamwork:

In addition, Ches and his assistant, Herb Zimmerman, had an office near the Receiving/Shipping areas downstairs. Also, Julius Wagman was a “vagabond,” spending much of his time across town with the action at Munk Chemical Company, but visiting the Maybelline building frequently.

After the management group loosely outlined above, there were many more wonderful employees involved in clerical, production, warehousing, material handling, accounting, you name the function and there were people covering that square. Most of the employees were long-time veterans, although we had newer hires that came aboard with the growth that moved us all.

LEADERSHIP:

The employment profile was a reflection of the neighborhood surrounding the company. We sat in a North Side neighborhood called “Edgewater.” Chicago, like all large cities, was a city of neighborhoods, and Edgewater was a mixed area of single and multiple residences, retail and commercial, but no industrial. There was also a large public high school across Ridge Avenue from Maybelline..

Overarching this idyllic pattern of operation was the mostly invisible hand of our founder and leader, Mr. Tom Lyle Williams. He and his California staff communicated mainly with Rags and Tom Jr., but also from time to time with Dorothy Molander, of course, and John Cole and Julius Wagman. I personally never talked with the gentleman, but one time John recorded a detailed guideline for us and I heard his pleasant, deliberate voice.

EXECUTIVE CONFIDENCE:

The telephone was the conduit for all of T. L.’s daily contact, and it was constant. Rags, of course, traveled in his national contacts, and told me one time, humorously, that T. L. would find him at his hotel and go on and on, whether or not Rags could talk right then. When that happened, Rags would just set the handset on the bed and go about what he needed to do. When he got back, T. L. would still be talking and Rags would rejoin the conversation. Rags said he never got caught!

PERSEVERANCE:

This was the pleasant and very active work environment that we enjoyed with one another over the years. It was pleasant and functional without being stuffy. The only cloud on the horizon was that nagging question of how we’d dodge the bullet on the space crunch we were facing by 1967. The answer came one morning in October.    

               Stay tuned next  Monday as part 6 unfolds.
                                      "The Plough  Inc. Merger."

ULTRA LASH MASCARA was Maybelline's prime money maker in the 1960s

4. GAME ON!
By Harris A. Neil Jr.

Harris A Neil Jr with his son
 Harris Neil Jr . lll

Thus, the Maybelline environment, both internal and external, became the stage of activity as I joined the company in early 1959.

Very quickly John Cole introduced me around and toured the entire facility with me, from stem to stern. One of the first things I recall in looking back is Dorothy Molander asking me how often I wanted to be paid. How often? Yes, she said, some of us like a weekly check, some twice monthly, whatever you’d like. I had never heard of anything like that before or since, and I quickly opted for a weekly check. After all, I was broke.

Right after I started our Assembly Supervisor, Hazel Peterson, retired. It was just a coincidence but it put that part of the operation in a new and untested direction. Even though I was new, John asked me to “be the eyes and ears” of what would become the Production Department.

All of this moved along while the brand-new “Magic Mascara” was giving all facets of the company plenty of challenges. The several suppliers of packaging and product components were on maximum output, and the private label contractor came on line very quickly after the aborted start on Maybelline premises. Juluis Wagman, Chief Chemist, had set this up across town, and a small private-label outfit called Munk Chemical Company. This arrangement not only worked for the moment, the relationship between Munk and Maybelline grew over the years to encompass many new products. You name it, if it was a liquid product Munk was in the picture. As Maybelline grew, so did Munk.

New products began to roll out in rapid succession. It seemed that we’d just about catch up to volume from one blockbuster and another one, even bigger, was coming down

 the pipeline.

 If we could single one over the others, it would have to be Ultra-Lash Mascara, with a newer applicator brush and formulation. We chased after that one for months before volume leveled out, at a very high volume that never went down. It had to be the prime money-maker for the company from roll-out to the Plough merger and beyond.

(NOTE: The “money-maker” reference above is speculation only. I was not privy to the company’s finances except to track direct labor production costs.)

As this volume grew and new products came along, Tom Lyle Williams Jr., John and Harold “Rags” Ragland, Sales Vice President, worked together in their respective roles to improve the appearance and form of product packaging into a new, uniform appearance. Simplified, the whole product line (except for most Introductory sizes) soon went to market blister-packed on bright-white product cards, either in direct shipments or shipments coupled with carousel display stands that Rags had developed.

 They were called “Eye Fashion Centers” and they included a full array of the Maybelline line, insuring that retailers had a complete, balanced line of products.

This growth also required changes in the internal operation. Where packages had been mostly hand-assembled in all history, now blister packaging quickly became the dominant method. The equipment available for this new packaging setup was quite new, because the concept itself was just moving into the marketplace. It applied to many, many product lines, not merely cosmetics. Such other lines as writing instruments, batteries, shaving products, electronics, on and on, it was the way to go on all retail fronts.

Eventually, in order to get maximum production out of our square footage, we ended up after several generations of machinery, with a small, one-man company who was starting with a new and interesting machine. The company became Alloyd, Incorporated, and the machine produced 60 packages a minute. When we worked into this new machine we found in some cases that we could make “two-up” dies, thus increasing production to over 100 packages per minute. This advancement bought time for the company in the limited and unchanging space that production occupied in the building.

Even with these changes and improvements, time and space were both running out for the company. By 1966 it became painfully obvious that we had come close to outgrowing the “cracker box.” In early 1967 as I recall, Tom located and purchased a plot of suitable land on Algonquin Road outside Chicago, beyond O’Hare Field. He also engaged an architectural firm, Rabig and Ramp, to begin design work and develop preliminary plans for a new facility. Also, John Cole made contact with selected commercial realty companies to scour the existing inventory of properties for a possible facility.

I remember going with John and a real estate agent to a building in Chicago that had been vacated by Kitchens of Sara Lee when they moved to their own new facility in suburban Deerfield. It was obvious that Sara Lee had left that building in the same predicament that was facing Maybelline. It had been subdivided, repurposed, overworked, and just plain worn out. When John and I left that place we never talked about it again. There wasn't anything to talk about, really.

As this period of growth moved along, all of our jobs moved with it. Even without formal guidelines, it was the natural position of the company to keep staffing “thin,” with no bureaucratic build-up. A good example was with Rags, who managed the national sales and marketing function with only one assistant, Carle Rollins, and an executive secretary, Gladys Johnson. John’s staff consisted of myself, and an excellent administrative and inventory person named Joan Lundell. In turn, Joan had one clerical helper.

In my case, my job began to “transition” to accommodate both the company’s growth and also new tasks that became necessary with that growth. I remember on day, back in 1961, when I got a carbon copy of a letter John had written to a supplier. In it he referred to me as our “Production Manager.” That was new to me but I liked it, and that became my title from then on.

Stay tuned tomorrow for part 5, as the plot thickens. 

The Maybelline Company was indeed much bigger than it appeared.

3. THE INVISIBLE MAYBELLINE COMPANY - By Harris A. Neil Jr.

Anyone who visited the facility we looked at in the previous section would question how a dominant company in the cosmetics industry could possibly operate out of such a “cracker box.” Well, the secret had to be in the sprawling, nationwide network of suppliers and private-label companies that supported the company’s packaging and distribution activity. By careful vendor selection, scheduling and follow-up, Maybelline could indeed make itself bigger by far than it looked. It’s beyond my recollection to go through all of the suppliers that made up this extension of the company. It is, however, possible to look at a few examples and companies that stand out:

Deluxe Mascara, as described by Sharrie Williams in The Maybelline Story, had been a part of Maybelline back in history, but was now a separate company, located a few miles from the Maybelline building. Tom Hewes and Jim Hughes, brothers-in-law, operated the company and supplied all cake mascara to Maybelline. The market was not kind to cake mascara, probably because liquid mascara dominated, so in a sense Maybelline was not doing Deluxe any favors. There was no changing the movements of the market, although cake mascara must have had its loyal users, as it stayed in the line and sold in modest but diminishing volume.

Avon Products (yes, that Avon) supplied Maybelline with Sable Brown cream mascara in all sizes, as well as all shades of cream eye shadow. This was an historic relationship, probably going all the way back to T. L. and Noel Williams. At first Avon filled these products in their facility in Middletown, N. Y., but soon after I started John was able to get them to move this production to their local plant in suburban Chicago. The two companies had a close relationship, and had a totally different approach to the marketplace.

Plastofilm, Inc. provided all thermoformed blisters for our packaging operation. The blisters were formed of butyrate plastic, although that’s not how it started. Originally Plastofilm wasn’t even in the thermoforming business. The founder was in the medical x-ray game, chemically “washing” the photographic

surface from the acetate film for the value of the silver it contained, and only later went into thermoforming to reclaim the clear film. That explained why we’d get a picture of a broken bone once in a while in their inbound shipments. Nearly all packaging was blister-packed as time went on, so our volume with Plastofilm was huge. Also, the blisters were a high-cube commodity and strained our limited storage, so we ended up with daily shipments from them as our volume grew.

Anchor Brush Company, another supplier that went back to T. L.’s day, was a brush company as the name implies. However, over time it also went into plastic molding, and ended up doing a wide variety of packaging and product components for Maybelline. Think of the Magic Mascara and Ultra-Lash caps and “barrels,” and that’s the kind of thing they did.

Edwards and Deutsch, a Chicago printer, printed the classic white Maybelline cards with the familiar “eye” in the upper left corner. We ordered large quantities at a time, and they would send proof sheets as each run started, for our inspection and approval. They’d cover my office floor like so much linoleum, and we’d scan and measure them for corrections or approval.

Those are just a handful of examples of our national supply network. In their cases and all others we’d place major annual requirements orders, then “release” periodic smaller orders against the annual order for ongoing production. The frequency of these orders varied, from quarterly in low-volume packaging parts down to twice-weekly or even daily for high volume, high-cube supplies.

Throughout my tenure with the company, there was very little turnover among the many suppliers. This in no small part was to John Cole’s credit, who maintained good communications across the board and kept misunderstandings to a minimum.  

Thus we see both the internal and the external side of the Maybelline Company as I came into the picture in early 1959. Both of them would keep me busy for the next nine-plus years.

Stay tuned tomorrow for part 4 of Harris A. Neil Jr.'s

 "Chicago's Maybelline Story."

50 years of Maybelline-Magic took place in a simple nondescript building in Chicago

2. THE VISIBLE MAYBELLINE COMPANY

By Harris A. Niel Jr.

The beige brick building that housed the Maybelline Company in the 1960s was handsome, but nothing unusual. It took on the shape of an arrowhead pointing northward, between two major Chicago streets, Clark and Ridge. The rear, or base, of the arrowhead was bound by a couple of alleyways, forming an irregular base line

.

Entering at the company entrance at 5900 North Ridge Avenue, there was a main-floor foyer with a terrazzo floor and paneled walls. A semi-circular stair with curved brass rail rose out of sight to a second-floor office and reception area. Behind the receptionist window was a general office area where about a dozen people worked. Opposite the receptionist was a door leading to a group of four executive offices. That was it.

Back to the lower-level foyer, another door led to the main-floor operating areas. First, the Traffic and Shipping Departments were in adjoining spaces, convenient to a “dumb-waiter” device that dropped orders from the general office above to the lower area. Further into the plant, the “Assembly Room” came along, where maybe 50 ladies at individual work desks assembled thousands of packages of Maybelline products by hand daily. The room was set up with a supervisor’s desk in front, with assemblers in rows across the room, similar to a school classroom or study hall. Hazel Peterson, the supervisor, stopped any chit-chat if it got anywhere near disruptive.

An arrowhead pointing North

In addition to the Assembly Room, machine packaging was beginning to emerge. There were two smaller rooms, former retail store spaces, that were set up to produce this new packaging. One room packaged the medium-sized cake and cream mascaras and pencils onto gold cards, putting them first into blisters or “bubbles,” then stapling them to the card.

The second store-front room contained a machine that sealed products in blisters to cards by a dielectric sealing process. Several newer products went to market from this room, including the “Brush ‘N Comb,” automatic self-sharpening pencil and refill, and the brand new liquid “Magic Mascara” and refill. The latter was proving to be a smash hit in the marketplace, and we were still running behind to keep pace with demand when I started.

To the rear of these operating areas, there was a small warehouse and staging area for materials in and out of the shipping and assembly operations, and the sole truck dock. This dock was the connecting point for all in-and-out movement, all of it by truck.

Moving into the building from the dock, a freight elevator led to the basement warehouse and storage area. Most of the basement was Maybelline territory, except for the building utilities and storage cubicles for the apartment tenants. To call this space a “warehouse” gives the wrong picture, because it was a low-ceiling basement throughout. This limited storage on pallets to about six-foot height. Even at that, the space was randomly cut into smaller spaces by walls that may have made sense in some earlier time, but no longer did.

And that was the Maybelline “footprint,” part of three levels of the building. Also, there was a line of active retail store space along the Clark Street frontage. Starting with the “arrowhead,” a Rexall drug store occupied the point of the building, wrapping around to the Ridge Avenue frontage. Also, in no order, there was a barber shop, a short-order restaurant, an ice cream store, a hardware store and finally a “currency exchange,” a sort of check-cashing service.

Elsewhere, there were several dozen apartments on the upper two floors of the building. Many of the residents were also Maybelline employees, so they only had to go downstairs to go to work!

Over the years leading up to the merger with Plough in 1967, Maybelline edged into more of both the retail and residential space in the building as growth dictated. Finally, there were no retail spaces, Maybelline had moved into the whole main level of the building. In addition, Maybelline had expanded the office space to create a new Advertising Department, and expanded the Sales Department to provide offices for two Assistant Sales Managers. In the final years it also expanded to include the Computer Department, an IBM main frame computer with input punch-card equipment and a staff of three.

As Magic Mascara came along early in this period, the company hired a cosmetic chemist named Julius Wagman to formulate and refine the new product, with the plan to set up manufacturing and filling facilities on site. In fact, Julius did exactly that, with a specialized facility carved out of one of the old retail store spaces. That is, until the City of Chicago fire inspector paid a visit one day. They determined that, while the liquid product was harmless in a small package, it was volatile and taboo in manufacturing and storage quantities. 

Magic Mascara

We were operating against city code in that location. That was the end of that, and immediately Julius and John had to line up an outside source to supply us on a “private label” basis. This was a setback, but it only put Magic Mascara into the same orbit as every other Maybelline formulated product: An outside source would supply us, leaving Maybelline as a packager and distributor of its own products, but not a manufacturer. 

Harris A. Neil Jr. with a friend, in Maui

This little exercise has been both a joy and a challenge, but in any event it wouldn't couldn't--have happened without your book as a compass. The Maybelline book gave me a perspective that I’d lived without for all these 50-plus years, and that helped me immensely as I gathered both the thoughts and the materials that sit ready to head your way. Thanks, your book is the unseen hand guiding mine in whatever you see written here.

"What made Maybelline a Giant in it's Field" Interview with Maybelline Executive Harris A Neil Jr. Explaining growth and production strategies

 My name is Harris A. Neil Jr.  I worked at Maybelline  in Chicago from January, 1959 to August, 1968, a period of great growth and excitement in the history of the company. Among the wonderful people I had the privilege of working with were your cousin, Tom Lyle Williams Junior,  and Harold “Rags” Ragland. I was very much their junior, 28 years old when I started in 1959. The math tells you that I’m now 82. 

 As Production Manager, in a highly marketing-oriented company, I would like to explain the packaging program, as it came down during those years of growth and new product rollouts. The changes and improvements you mentioned in your book, finally resulted in a whole new look and methodology, and kept our production floor plenty busy.

 I would also like to explain the outside vendor program, which people nowadays call “supply chain management” or simply “logistics.” That involved both packaging and product components, which became more of a tightrope act as volume and product increases pushed us forward. It was even more exciting because we only had a finite amount of floor space for warehousing and production.

     I want to comment on the Maybelline management style and interactions as I saw them from my “worm’s-eye” view. I still remember it well, and learned as I moved on in life that it was unique, but it was I think bewildering to the Plough group who did things very differently.

     And yes, I want to give my thoughts on the Plough merger, as it was announced and as I lived through it for the ten months I remained with Maybelline afterward. It became a different company immediately without Tom Jr., Rags and Dorothy Molander. That topic alone is one that maybe will make this story worthwhile all by itself. Also, and only in this subject area, we’ll have to discuss some negative events, but they happened and we’ll face them head on.

     Then there’s T. L.’s gift to his long-time employees. I couldn't find the letter outlining the details of the gift, but I clearly remember the basics, and can give you a pretty fair idea of the scope and impact of this wonderful gesture on his part. 

1. A SHAKY START

It all began in one day in January, 1959, when I received a phone call from an employment agency on the north side of Chicago, where I lived in a bachelor pad with three other friends. I had registered with that agency earlier, part of a job search that I’d been on for weeks, going back to late 1958.

The nameless voice on the phone asked if I was available to talk to a local company about an opening they had in “inventory control.”

I said yes, and he set me up for an interview at the Maybelline Company, a mile up the street from our apartment. I got there at the scheduled time, to meet a Mr. John Cole. The street address was 5900 North Ridge Avenue, and as I entered the building I saw a large sign proclaiming

MAYBELLINE

World’s Largest-Selling Eye Beauty Aids

It wasn’t too late to chicken out, but I swallowed hard and opened the swinging door and walked in. After all, I was so broke I couldn’t even afford gas for my ’53 Ford, among other things.

John Cole couldn’t have been more gracious. He was older than me by ten years or so, a trim and friendly man. He gave me a brief rundown on the company and the job in question, and politely asked me about my background and experience. After that exchange I guess he thought we could go to the next step, and made a call to a Mr. Tom Williams.

That cleared us to walk down the hall to another, larger office. I met Mr. Williams and we continued the interview, the upshot of which was a job offer. John offered a starting salary of $5,500 per year, with annual raises to be discussed on each anniversary. The company would also reimburse my employment agency fee, about $300, after 90 days on the job. I accepted, and we agreed that I would start on January 19. (Tom Lyle Williams Sr. Birthday.)

As I learned very quickly, John would be my boss and trainer. He functioned across all operating areas of the company, with heavy involvement in purchasing and supplier relations. Also, I learned that Mr. Williams was the son of the company founder, T. L. Williams. At that time and for years afterward, I heard the elder Mr. Williams referred to only as “T. L.”

John needed me to help him with the heavy detail in keeping the inventory balanced. In turn, this function required heavy contact with the wide range of packaging and product suppliers, located literally across the country at that time. This would relieve John to concentrate on his many other responsibilities, both external and internal.

That was the thinking and high hopes as we began. No luck. Things began to unravel almost immediately because I had no direct experience in that kind of work and couldn’t avoid making an almost immediate mess of things. Of all things, Tom Williams saw the disaster shaping up, and stepped in personally. The main tool in daily inventory actions was a hand-posted weekly inventory report listing all Maybelline items, starting with the finished-goods quantity, followed by the quantities of all component parts that related to that item. Well, those numbers were supposed to shout for action if they were out of position, particularly if they were dangerously low. Shout? Those numbers just sat there on the report, and they all looked the same to me.

Okay, Tom and John could have fired me right then, but I guess they figured I was the bird in hand, and they’d be farther ahead if they could salvage me rather than starting over again. So Tom would get that weekly inventory report ahead of me, and leave me with an “action list,” hand written, with detailed instructions to call such-and-so and order this much material. While this burdened Tom with what I should be doing, it was something he had done in his earlier years with the company, and he was good at it.

Slowly, slowly, two things began to happen. The inventory began to resemble the profile that Tom wanted to see, and I began to understand what needed to be done without Tom’s time and attention. In my case I was like a newborn bear cub, coming into the world unable to see for the first part of his life, then slowly gaining vision and focus.

If Tom hadn't spent the time he did in this early phase of my Maybelline experience, this would be the end of the story. Both he and John had salvaged my job, and now I was out there in solo mode, thanks to them. In sum, that was a close one!

Stay tuned tomorrow.  I will be posting more of Harris A. Neil Jr.'s story everyday for the next four weeks.  If you are interested in business, marketing and production, you won't want to miss the inside workings of a Mega-Company from the man who was there and saw it all unfold everyday.