Inside the house of Zippo, Mary Mealy proudly calls herself the Lead Lady of the Repair Department. This means that the diminutive, 27-year veteran of the firm is responsible for enforcing the Zippo guarantee, the one promising that the company will fix its lighters at no cost regardless of what caused them to break. In almost all instances, however, the 55-year-old Zippo Manufacturing Co. simply slips a new inside unit into the old case. Replacement, after all, is cheaper than repair.
”Yesterday we had 930 lighters sent in,” Mealy is saying as she scans a handwritten list. ”The day before that, it was 551. The day before that, it was 1,736. The day before that. . . .”
Actually, company executives point out that fewer people are sending in their Zippos for repair these days. Where once the company had six women opening packages of sick and mutilated lighters, it now employs two. This is apparently not a sign of hard times at the privately held, nonunion company, where president Michael Schuler contends that sales of the enduring lighters- about $24 million annually-are showing slow but steady growth. Nor does it appear to suggest an improved product, since the Zippo has changed little over five-plus decades, unless you`re talking about a sturdier flint wheel or advances in finishing.
”Frankly, I don`t think it`s even as good a lighter as it used to be,”
says Dale Hutton, who runs the company`s engraving department and has been working at Zippo for 44 years. ”You have automation now, not craftsmanship.” DISPOSABLE ASSET?
No, many people are apparently choosing not to return their damaged Zippos for another reason: They`re throwing them out. ”People are more careless now,” says vice president and advertising manager William Jones.
”They aren`t as prudent. We live in a disposable society.”
Somewhere, George Blaisdell weeps.
It was back in 1932-”on a muggy summer night,” as the company likes to romanticize-that Blaisdell, a northern Pennsylvania oil dealer, used some rectangular brass tubing to re-fashion an oval-shaped Austrian lighter into the rectangular little American tool that would withstand wind, light reliably and eventually become such a symbol of masculinity that it would serve to separate the wimps from the boys.
”It works!” was Blaisdell`s motto, which, coming at a time when little else in America did, was good news. And if it didn`t work, George Blaisdell would take it back and make things right.
Shoot, no wonder the Zippo-if you believe all the stories-practically won World War II single-handedly, lighting up foxholes, illuminating aircraft instrument panels and generally making the world safe for democracy.
And now-now people are tossing them out when Blaisdell`s lighters, say, lose a little skirmish with the family lawnmower.
Can you imagine? As if they were 79-cent Bics or something. Don`t these folks know what a Zippo is, what it represents?
”To a certain degree, yes,” answers Rudolph Bickel, the company`s assistant advertising manager. ”But not like they used to. Those people are dying off.”
Yet Zippo is still here in this city of 11,000 people, 80 miles south of Buffalo and 105 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, being produced in two facilities covering nearly six acres of floor space.
20,000 A DAY
According to Bickel, between 20,000 and 30,000 flint-type lighters are turned out daily. (The company`s smaller butane lighter line, introduced in 1985, is manufactured under contract in Japan.)
”We really don`t have any competition,” the 37-year-old Schuler says of America`s only manufacturer of flint-type lighters. ”I guess a lot of people look at our lighters as old-fashioned, what with all the butane lighters out there.”
Okay, so it`s true that the declining population of smokers in the U.S.-Schuler himself is a nonsmoker-has contributed to the fact that about half the Zippos made here are now sold in foreign markets. And yes, it`s true that Zippo has for many years been branching out into the marketing of such products as pen-and-pencil sets, tape measures and pocket knives, working hard to overcome the otherwise happy truth that its name is synonymous with lighters.
Yet 70 percent of the company`s sales revenues still come from those lighters, Schuler says. He also contends that Zippo has not been hurt by the Bic disposable, which was first marketed in 1973 and which he claims has simply replaced matches, not Zippos, in the hearts and pocketbooks of smokers. And so, despite a number of knockoffs-most notably, Schuler recalls with a smile, a Korean lighter that its manufacturer called a ”Zippu” and claimed was made in ”Radford, Kan.”-the enduring Zippo remains a 20th-Century American artifact.
Besides, the thing still goes ka-clunk when you close it.
AN 18-FOOT REPLICA
Today, Zippo is owned by Sarah Dorn and Harriett Wick, the two daughters of George Blaisdell, who died in 1978. Its executive offices and finishing facilities-which feature an 18-foot replica of a Zippo lighter high over the front door-are a quarter of a mile from the garage where Blaisdell set up shop with six employees during the Great Depression. (Today, some 500 people work for the company. Nearly half of them have been employed for 15 years or more.) The salesepople who peddle Zippos to retailers and specialty advertisers are self-employed and work strictly on commission. ”We like a guy with six kids and four mortgages who`ll get out and sell,” says Bickel.
In 1982, Zippo manufactured a brass lighter to commemorate the company`s 50th anniversary. ”It did phenomenally,” says Jones, still sounding a bit surprised. ”In fact, it did so well that we`ve kept brass in the line.”
(Although all Zippos are fashioned from brass, the majority are chrome-plated.)
It also indicated to the company that there were honest-to-God Zippophiles out there.
At the same time, the company published a small ”Zippo Lighter Collectors` Guide.” Next year it plans to market a replica of George Blaisdell`s 1932 original.
Not that hardcore Zippophiles need help in rattling off the important dates in the product`s ancient history. They know, for example, that the first specialty-advertising Zippos were made in 1935; that the hinge was moved from the outside to the inside of the Zippo case in 1936; that the corners of the Zippo were rounded off in 1937, which was also the year of the first Zippo patent, No. 2,032,695; that all the lighters Zippo made during World War II were made of low-grade steel and painted black; that leather Zippos arrived in 1950; that slim Zippos first turned up in 1956; and that a coding table for Zippos was developed in 1957, allowing owners to to date their lighters by simply looking at the bottom of the case.
Blaisdell`s first Zippos cost about a dollar apiece. (Company lore has it that he named his lighter after the zipper, a word coined nine years earlier.) Today`s best-seller-the No. 200 Zippo in brush-finish chrome-retails for $8.50. Most models cost less than $25. Schuler says that about 90 percent of all Zippos are sold in retail stores.
CUSTOMIZED TO ORDER
The remainder consist of specialty-advertising lighters on which designs are usually etched-they used to be engraved-in as many as eight colors.
If a Russian weightlifter, say, wants to order a batch of Zippos with his likeness on it, Zippo stands ready to oblige him. If the fans of James Dean want a James Dean lighter made, it gets done. Customers send in their designs on paper, postcards, plastic cups, beer cans, burlap bags, whatever.
Members of military outfits, in particular, like to wield their custom-made Zippos. ”There isn`t a ship afloat that we haven`t done,” says art director Harry Schreiber.
To watch Zippos being made is to realize that this simple little device is not necessarily a simple little device. Inside the company`s green-on-green, one-story manufacturing plant, some two dozen parts are fashioned and assembled in roughly 100 operations.
The engraving department`s Hutton is right: Automation rules, particuarly at a 21-station machine that looks like Rube Goldberg had a hand in its design and that inserts many of the innards-wicks, flint wheels, cotton and so on-into rapidly passing lighters. Most of the plant`s employees have daily production goals that, if achieved, bring a 25 percent bonus in pay.
ACCEPTING NO SUBSTITUTE
Meanwhile, back in the Repair Department:
The Lead Lady has just received an angry letter from a Zippophile who recently returned his lighter for repair. In addition, Mary Mealy recalls,
”He`d used it so much that he wore the chrome right down to the brass. So I sent him a whole new lighter.”
Alas, a new Zippo isn`t what the man had in mind. Says Mealy: ”He wrote back and said, `It looks brand-new. I want my old one back.` ” Which is why Zippo saves such cases for at least six months. –
