Lubricant maker WD-40 seeks customer help for new ideas

THE Australian CEO of the lubricant WD-40 is turning to his customers worldwide to ask them for ideas for a new product.

Domestic bliss: The makers of WD-40 are hoping to get ideas for new product from their loyal customers. Picture: David Crosling

IT'S blue and yellow can with the red top is recognisable the world over.

For the past half-century, WD-40, the maker of the lubricant that can silence squeaky doors and remove tough stains from your jeans, has been building the kind of brand recognition that most companies would die for.

Now the San Diego-based outfit wants to expand into other products and has asked for help from the people who have got it to where it is today -- its customers.

Nine years ago, the company invited customers to tell them how they used WD-40. It received 400,000 responses and the top 2000 -- which range from cleaning piano keys to getting stickers off guitars -- now feature on its website.

WD-40 is turning to its customers again.

This time, it is asking them for ideas for a new product or an innovation for the original one. WD-40 itself was created in the 1950s by rocket scientists (yes, really) for use in the aerospace industry. It took them 40 attempts to work out the water displacing formula, hence the name.

Customers whose ideas are chosen will receive a $US2500 ($2968) minimum advance payment, an opportunity to see the product sold through retail or industrial channels and a percentage of sales for up to 20 years, Garry Ridge, the Australian president and chief executive, said.

"When people told us they kept losing the little red straws off their WD-40 cans, we created the WD-40 Smart Straw can, which has the straw permanently attached," he said.

"We are looking for product ideas like these that offer unique value and innovative solutions to help our end-users continue to get the job done. "

Until now, WD-40 has limited its expansion to related product lines, such as cleaning goods, but it is open to new products.

"We want to see if we can use the WD-40 brand like Richard Branson used the Virgin name, looking for areas where the customer is not being well served and seeing if we can do better," he said.

The decision to look outside the company, to customers or to third parties, mirrors developments in other industries. Text messaging, now an integral part of modern life, started as a throwaway byproduct of mobile telephony when phone companies found that they could send 160 characters of data as well as voice, but were not entirely sure how useful this might be.

Teenage consumers then popularised texting.

Apple has taken third-party product creation to a new level with its App Store, which sells or gives away iPhone and iTouch applications produced by outside developers.

Mr Ridge is hoping to tap into similar strands of creativity to help it to weather the recession. Although sales were up 3 per cent in 2008, they have fallen back, amid a decline in the market for homecare and cleaning products.

In the third quarter of the 2009 fiscal year, sales fell by 16 per cent to $US68.8 million. Raw material costs are rising and the company faces currency losses on overseas operations -- 44 per cent of its business.

Rita Clifton, of Interbrand, the brand consultancy, believes that WD-40 is perfectly placed to tap into its customers' ideas. "It does help very much that it's almost a sort of cult brand. It's one of those slightly dirty, sleeves-rolled-up brands that's got a bit of machismo and a bit of magic about it,” she said.