Soft Sell
How two brothers with an idea for a better tissue got in the game with the big boys--and didn't get flushed.
Everywhere we went, people told us it couldn't be done-- and
that if it could be done, it would've been done by now,"
says Willy Paterson-Brown, 33. But Paterson-Brown and his brother,
Tim, 38, weren't discouraged by the naysayers. The
Scottish-born entrepreneurs attacked the task ahead of them with
the underdog fervor of David challenging Goliath--carving out a
place for their upstart company among the tissue industry's
biggest players.
Seattle-based Linters Inc., the company the brothers founded in
1994, is the maker of Purely Cotton, the world's first and only
100 percent cotton tissue products. The bottom line? Last
year's limited regional distribution of Purely Cotton products
brought in sales of $14 million, and the brothers estimate that the
deployment of national distribution later this year will triple
their company's annual sales.
Willy and Tim could sense from the beginning that they had a
winner. After all, America is crazy about cotton, from wearing it
to sleeping on it. And why wouldn't health-conscious and
environmentally aware consumers take just as keenly to the use of a
less-abrasive renewable resource in their facial tissues and toilet
paper? And here's the kicker--it's not toilet paper
at all. Goodbye, wood pulp: Says Willy, "The beauty of the raw
material of cotton is it's just so much better for the
skin."
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