The Secret Grimy History of Play-Doh

Okay, I want you to close your eyes and imagine a smell for me. A sweet, slightly musky, vanilla-like fragrance, with slight overtones of cherry, and... salty wheat dough.

Okay, you had me at vanilla and lost me at salty wheat. Am I in a bakery?

You're in a preschool in 1995. It's Play-Doh.

Oh my god! Yes! Wow, the brain is weird, I instantly smelled it just from that description. It's like—

Like a time machine, right? Christopher Bensch from the Strong National Museum of Play said that adults get this furtive look in their eyes when they smell it, like they revert back to being seven years old.

Absolutely. I used to smash the red and yellow together until it just made that horrible baby-poop brown color. Good times.

Right, well, hold onto that nostalgia, because what if I told you that the toy you were mashing into the carpet was actually invented to scrub toxic coal soot off living room walls in the 1930s?

Wait. What? Scrubbing soot?

Yeah. Play-Doh wasn't a toy. It was heavy-duty industrial wallpaper cleaner.

No way. Like, the exact same stuff?

Pretty much! Okay, so, picture the 1920s. People heated their homes with coal, right? And burning coal indoors leaves this massive, disgusting layer of dark soot on literally everything. Especially wallpaper.

Ugh. That sounds like an absolute nightmare. Couldn't they just wipe it down?

Well, no, because if you hit paper wallpaper with soap and water—

Oh right, it dissolves.

Exactly, it just makes this smeary, gray mud on your wall. So, enter a guy named Cleo McVicker. Twenty-one years old, former boxer, turned salesman.

A boxer selling wallpaper cleaner?

Actually, he was supposed to be liquidating a failing soap company in Cincinnati called Kutol Products. But he just decides to buy it instead. Fast forward to 1933, the height of the Great Depression, and Kutol is basically dead. Cleo is desperate. So he goes into a Kroger grocery store meeting and blindly promises them fifteen thousand cases of wallpaper cleaner.

Okay, love the hustle.

Yeah, except he agreed to a five thousand dollar penalty if he misses the deadline. A penalty he absolutely cannot afford. And Kutol didn't even make wallpaper cleaner.

Oh no. He just entirely made that up?

Completely bluffed. He goes back to his brother Noah, who's a product developer, and is basically like, mate, you need to invent something immediately.

I love when people do this. The sell it first, build it later tech bro mentality, but in 1933.

Exactly! So Noah scrambles, and he comes up with this non-toxic, squishy dough. Flour, water, salt, boric acid, and mineral oil. You'd rip off a chunk, roll it down the wall like a rolling pin, and it just absorbed all the coal grime without ruining the paper.

That is so incredibly satisfying to picture.

Right? And it worked. Kutol became the largest wallpaper cleaner manufacturer in the world. They crushed it for twenty years.

Wait, so if it was such a massive hit, why did it become a toy? Did they just get bored?

No, they got obsolete. World War II ends, and suddenly everyone is switching from dirty coal to clean gas, oil, and electric heat. Plus, washable vinyl wallpaper hits the market.

Ahhh. Nobody needs the dough anymore. The soot is gone.

Poof. Business evaporates overnight. And to make things worse, Cleo McVicker actually dies in a plane crash in 1949.

Oh my god! That took a turn.

I know, it's super dark! So his young nephew, Joe McVicker, suddenly inherits this completely sinking ship. The product is useless.

Okay, so how do we get from a dying cleaning product to, you know, the Fun Factory?

Enter Kay Zufall. She was Joe's sister-in-law, and she was a nursery school teacher in New Jersey. She was reading a newspaper article about cheap craft ideas and saw someone suggest using wallpaper dough.

Oh, I love Kay. She's the real hero here.

Oh she absolutely is. She takes a can of this industrial Kutol cleaner into her classroom, gives it to the kids, and tells them to make Christmas ornaments. And they go wild for it. They're obsessed with the squishy, salty texture.

Kids always know. Also, they probably tried to eat it. I definitely ate it.

Oh, hundred percent. Which is why it's good it was non-toxic! So Kay goes to Joe and is like, you need to pivot. Stop selling this to hardware stores, sell it to schools.

So smart. But wait, was it still called Kutol's Wallpaper Cleaner?

Well, Joe wanted to call it Kutol’s Rainbow Modeling Compound.

Wow. Just rolls right off the tongue. So catchy.

Yeah, Kay vetoed that immediately. She's the one who coined the name Play-Doh. They took out the cleaning detergents, added that iconic almond scent, dyed it red, yellow, and blue, and in 1956, they relaunched.

I'm still stuck on the fact that Hasbro trademarked that smell you mentioned at the top of the show. Like, how do you even enforce that?

Honestly, I don't know, but they did it in 2018! The legal description is literally that musky, vanilla, cherry, salted wheat dough thing I read to you. People are so obsessed with it that in 2006, Demeter Fragrance actually bottled it as a perfume.

You can buy Play-Doh perfume?

You could! For the 50th anniversary. People literally walking around wanting to smell like a preschool crafts table.

Honestly? I wouldn't hate it. It's comforting! Better than smelling like coal soot.

True! So they have the name, they have the smell, but Joe has zero advertising budget. So he sneaks his way into a meeting with Bob Keeshan.

Who is Bob Keeshan?

You might know him better as TV's Captain Kangaroo.

Shut up! Really?

Yes! Joe offers the Captain two percent of all Play-Doh sales if he features it on his show once a week. It's a handshake deal. And the Captain loves it so much he uses it three times a week. Sales just explode.

A two percent royalty on Play-Doh for Captain Kangaroo? He must have made an absolute fortune. Think about how much of that stuff we went through.

It's astronomical. Since 1956, they've sold over three billion cans.

Billion with a B?

Yeah. Basically 700 million pounds of it. If you took all that Play-Doh and ran it through a Fun Factory, the spaghetti strand would wrap around the Earth 300 times.

That is... genuinely upsetting to visualize. A giant, salty dough noodle strangling the globe.

Oh, it's a terrifying mental image. But it really is the ultimate business survival story, right? Like, if technology makes your life's work completely useless... just hand your product to a bunch of 5-year-olds.

Exactly. Just let the toddlers figure out what it's actually good for. And then trademark the smell.

Naturally. Happy National Play-Doh Day, Sarah.

Wait, is that today?

No, it's September 16th. But in our hearts, it's every day.