As attendees wilted in the heat and sweat through their clothing, interest in Odorono rose. Luckily, the exposition lasted all summer. “The exhibition demonstrator could not sell any Odorono at first and wired back cold cream to cover expenses,” notes a company history of Odorono. The transformation from niche invention to a blockbuster product was in part kick-started by Murphey, whose nascent business was nearly a failure.Īccording to Odorono company files at Duke University, Edna Murphey’s Odorono booth at the 1912 Atlantic City exposition initially appeared to be another bust for the product. Yet 100 years later, the deodorant and antiperspirant industry is worth $18 billion. Those concerned about sweat percolating through clothing wore dress shields, cotton or rubber pads placed in armpit areas which protected fabric from the floods of perspiration on a hot day.
Instead, most people’s solution to body odor was to wash regularly and then to overwhelm any emerging stink with perfume. “Nobody talked about perspiration, or any other bodily functions in public.” “This was still very much a Victorian society,” explains Juliann Silvulka, a 20th-century historian of American advertising at Waseda Univesity in Tokyo, Japan. The first deodorant, which kills odor-producing bacteria, was called Mum and had been trademarked in 1888, while the first antiperspirant, which thwarts both sweat-production and bacterial growth, was called Everdry and launched in 1903.īut many people-if they had even heard of the anti-sweat toiletries-thought they were unnecessary, unhealthy or both. In the 1910s deodorants and antiperspirants were relatively new inventions. Murphey approached drugstore retailers who either refused to stock the product or who returned the bottles of Odorono back, unsold. Borrowing $150 from her grandfather, she rented an office workshop but then had to move the operation to her parents’ basement because her team of door-to-door saleswomen didn’t pull in enough revenue. Murphey had tried her dad’s liquid antiperspirant in her armpits, discovered that it thwarted wetness and smell, named the antiperspirant Odorono (Odor? Oh No!) and decided to start a company.īut business didn’t go well-initially-for this young entrepreneur. Lucky for Edna Murphey, people attending an exposition in Atlantic City during the summer of 1912 got hot and sweaty.įor two years, the high school student from Cincinnati had been trying unsuccessfully to promote an antiperspirant that her father, a surgeon, had invented to keep his hands sweat-free in the operating room.
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