Hirsch had been the developer and marketer of the company. "I felt I had to hold the company together," she told the Chicago Tribune in 1993. His daughter Sondra, a graduate of the Goodman School of Drama, left her job teaching drama in the Wilmette schools and joined the company as vice-president of public relations. As was the case with many fledgling family companies, there was no plan for succession, and Hirsch's widow took over control of the firm.
Its brand-name products, for auto care and household cleaning, had established a foothold in the market, and the firm had just opened a factory in England. The company even produced a line of dessert toppings called Party Day.īy 1966, the company boasted huge factory facilities. In the mid-1950s Hirsch branched out, developing shoe polish, rug shampoo, and floor wax. To appeal to a larger group of customers, he saw the need to sell products through grocery stores, not just to gas stations and hardware stores. Some of those employees, or their children, relatives, and friends, still worked for Turtle Wax in the mid-1990s.Īs the popularity of the wax grew, Hirsch wanted to diversify. I can remember we, my brother and I, slept on the countertop of this storefront on Clark Street." Her father kept the company going by borrowing money from his employees and giving them stock in repayment. "We moved around a lot in the Chicago area. "It was an arduous period," remembered Turtle Wax chairman Sondra Hirsch Healy in a 1993 Chicago Tribune article. In the early years, Hirsch nearly went bankrupt several times. Thus was born a new name for the company and for the wax, Turtle Wax Super Hard Shell. The name of the town clicked in his mind with the hard shell of a turtle and the protection his wax offered. Plastone was a couple of years old when, according to company lore, Hirsch made a sales call in Turtle Creek, Wisconsin. He then waited for the owners to arrive and hope to convince them to buy his wax to finish the job. To promote his wax, Hirsch would go into a parking lot and shine one fender of each car.
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In 1941, he invested $500 and opened the Plastone Co., which operated out of a series of storefronts. During the day, Hirsch traveled by street car to gas stations around Chicago, selling the wax he named Plastone. His wife, Marie, filled the bottles by hand. In the late 1930s he developed a car wax and mixed up batches at night in the bathtub. But he never lost his interest in chemistry nor his fascination with cars. Instead, he became a magician, supporting his family with his silks and wand. The family-owned business had estimated revenues of $145 million in 1994, according to Crain's Chicago Business.īenjamin Hirsch, the founder of Turtle Wax, wanted to be a chemist, but had to drop out of college during the Great Depression. It also markets chemicals for commercial car washes, owns and operates the largest chain of full-service car washes in the Chicago market, and manufactures shoe polishes and household cleaners. car wax market and sells its products in Europe, the Pacific Basin, and Central and South America. The Chicago-based company controls over 60 percent of the U.S. is the world's largest manufacturer of car-care products.
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