Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Cat lover market

Here's a story I bet you haven't heard (unless you've already read Money, Greed, and God by Jay Richards).

Ed Lowe had a $45/week job delivering sand and sawdust for his dad in 1947.  The company added a new absorbent clay called fuller's earth, so Ed offered it to chicken farmers as nesting material, calling it chicken litter.  They didn't like it.

Looked like a failed idea, but then a friend asked him for something to allow her cat to relieve itself inside the house. He gave her a bag of what he called that chicken litter and she came back for more. He offered it to the owner of the Davenport Pet Shop, who thought it was just dirt in a bag but agreed to give free samples away.  He changed his mind - and Kitty Litter was eventually sold all over the U.S. in pet stores.

Cat litter became a billion-dollar industry.  Nobody saw that coming, not even Ed.  What did he actually do?  He used his imagination.  When his first attempts didn't produce anything, he made more attempts.

Author Jay Richards says, "At the base of the capitalist system is not greed or consumption, but intuition, imagination, and creation."

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