Way back in my "salad days," my partner and I owned and operated a small medical-chemical laboratory dedicated to in-vitro (benchtop) nuclear medical testing. We also marketed various types of nuclear medical test kits used by other testing laboratories both in and out of hospitals.

At first, virtually all of the test kits we sold were manufactured by other companies, and the prices to us for those products were very heavy. It was our desire to develop our own test methods and to become licensed to package and market them so that we might actually begin to make at least a small profit from our labors.

One problem that we encountered in that development work was that some of the ingredients we intended for use were insoluble solids. They were to be suspended in the liquids used in the testing so as to be able to remain in contact with things dissolved in the solutions. When that was done with, the test tubes holding the solutions with those solid particles floating around in them were to be centrifuged, that is, spun around at high speed, so that the solids would all sink to the tube bottoms and be separated from the solutions.

Our problem with keeping the solid particles floating around in the liquid solutions was that they sank to the test tube bottoms just about as soon as they went into the tubes.

One of the many chemicals we had on the shelf was some sort of a plastic-like powder that was supposed to be water-soluble. We thought that maybe a bit of plastic stuff in the solutions might thicken them up somewhat, thus helping us to keep our particles in suspension. We put some of the plastic-like stuff into a tube with some pure water. Sure enough, it thickened things up immediately. That was exciting. Problem solved, right?

Then we went back to do some more serious testing of our, thus far, sinking particle tests.

Into the tubes went the ingredients, solutions, solid particles and all. Then we put a few drops of our thick stuff, and mixed everything together. Did it ever work wonderfully?

No!

Down sank the solid particles, probably 100 times faster than ever before. In fact, they sank so fast that they glued themselves to the bottoms of the test tubes without us ever having to centrifuge the stuff.

Failure!

Time went on. Our little business sputtered from time to time, but it really got going nicely when our own test kits were approved by the feds and went on sale. Our salespeople were happy. We were happy. Our customers were almost all happy. Many of those customers were having problems, not with our products, but with test kits from other companies that used activated charcoal as the solid particles needed to separate target biochemicals from the test liquids being used.

What was happening was that the test materials in their smooth glass test tubes required centrifuging for really long times so as to get the very fine charcoal particles to the tube bottoms. Then, when the technicians carefully poured the separated liquids out of the tubes,  the little charcoal buttons at tube bottom would all too often break loose and flow out with the discarded liquids. Oops! Test after test that needed repeating, and who knows, maybe the mishaps would again recur.

Our salespeople reported that this was a common problem. In fact, they told us about it time and time again. We were glad that we did not use activated charcoal in any of our own test kits. Oh, yes. We were most happy with that.

Whenever we went to meetings where other manufacturers and medical laboratory workers congregated, we heard about this charcoal problem again and again. Being the kind of entrepreneurs that we were, our sympathies for our fellow medical technology workers got less and less, while our thoughts toward ourselves being able to come up with some sort of product to solve the problem grew and grew.

Then we remembered that plastic stuff on the shelf that couldn’t help us keep our solid particles up in the test tube.

Let’s make a long story into a short one.

We learned that if we took a really tiny amount of our plastic stuff and dissolved it in a huge amount of pure water, we could add a minute drop of the resulting solution to a test tube full of whatever plus some activated charcoal so as to dump that charcoal to the bottom of the tube and keep it there.

After testing our new miracle solution to our own satisfaction, we sent some bottles of the stuff around to friends working in other laboratories so as to see if they could use it. They loved it. So we made a product of it with the intention of selling it to anyone who wanted some.

We designed a label for the product and prepared bottles of it for a trial sales run. We named the product "Grab-It" because that’s what it did – it grabbed particles and held onto them. Every time it did that and kept a test from having to be repeated, it saved lots of time, effort, and the typically high cost (usually between $1 and $5 per repeat) of having to do the test over and over again.

Our star sales guy went out the door with a big case of Grab-It bottles. His idea, as well as our idea, was that a fair price for a bottle of Grab-It, enough for about 5,000 tests, would be $5 or $6, give or take a little. My goodness, the stuff was almost all water. Our calculations showed that the active ingredient in Grab-It cost us about 1/10,000 of one cent. The distilled water cost far more than that, even though we made our own distilled water. Even the bottle cap cost more, as did the label on the bottle, to say nothing of the cost of the plastic bottle.

Out went our sales guy. He was only able to sell three bottles of Grab-It in three days time. Should we lower the price?

Stretching for an answer to that question, we thought that it was probably not in our interest to cut the price, for why sell things at what would then be break-even or below? No, we decided to raise the price and to make our new product worth even more than it really might have been worth. "Perception," we thought.

Well, we learned some good lessons. When the price per bottle of Grab-It went to $12.95, our sales began to perk up. With that in mind, we increased the price to $22.95, then to $27.95, and, when we reached a price of $37.95 a bottle we quit monkeying with pricing and got serious about trying to keep enough of the stuff in our warehouse ready for shipment.

The demand for Grab-It was not just local, but all over the United States and in various other countries around the world. In fact, the biggest sale of Grab-It we ever made was to a customer in Italy. They bought over $2,500 worth of Grab-It in one single shipment.

As I remarked to my partner upon that sale, "It makes me feel funny to ship $2,500 plus of mostly water over the water."

A large internationally-known pharmaceutical company had sent us some of their own test kits for testing in our laboratory. We tested the kits and, in that testing used our own Grab-It to better handle the activated charcoal used in their methods. Our results were far superior to anything they had achieved themselves, so they asked us what we did differently. We explained our use of Grab-It. They were impressed and purchased about a dozen bottles of it.

Then we heard that they were packing little bottles of something like our Grab-It in with all of the test kits they were selling. That caused us a wee bit of anger, but when you are a pee-ant in size and up against an army of aardvarks, what can you do?

The next thing we knew, that company was on the phone to us, asking if we might consider shipping Grab-It to their customers if they supplied the names and shipping addresses – and the orders.

We found out what had happened. They had tried to copy our Grab-It, but had used too much of the plastic stuff we used. Their "copy" did not work because it was really not a very good copy. Maybe they had used 1/100^th of a penny's worth in each bottle instead of 1/10,000^th.

As I write this little article of some scientific, historic marketing, and customer-perception note, behind me on my "junk" shelf is a small bottle of that plastic stuff, a pretty white powder that will dissolve in some clean water quicker than a cat can lick its tail. It cost me about a dollar some time ago. There is enough plastic stuff inside that little bottle to use in the manufacture of at least 100,000 bottles of Grab-It, That’s enough Grab-It to treat 500-million test-tubes-worth of tests.

It boggles the mind when you think of it. But I try to not think of it, being presently nicely retired from all of those laboratory wars and now into writing up to my eyeballs.

Hmmmm. Maybe we should price Grab-It at $39.95 instead of $37.95. There has been some inflation over the last 30 years or so!