SMALL BUSINESS: Circling the Square

Harry Moll, a retired Denver businessman, liked to rub his face with an ice cube after shaving. One morning several years ago the ice cube slipped and its square edge jabbed his eye. “Why can’t these things be round?” he muttered thoughtfully, his other eye on a huge market of after-shave ice-rubbers.

Before long Moll had designed a rubber mold to make ice-balls instead of cubes (the nine-ball mold had ½-in. holes through which the frozen balls could be squeezed out). But the wartime rubber shortage held up manufacture of the molds. Last year the Williams-Bowman Rubber Co. in Cicero, 111. finally began producing them. In the first two months, Harry Moll sold $1,500 worth of his “Ice Cubos,” soon found his gross topping $6,000 a month through some 350 outlets including Manhattan’s Hammacher Schlemmer, San Francisco’s Macy’s, Chicago’s Marshall Field.

Last week, Harry Moll was doing so well that he decided to step up production from 8,000 to 13,000 trays monthly. The trays retail, two to a box, at $3.95. Explaining his success, Moll says: “People just naturally like round ice ‘cubes’ better. They’re sort of like shmoos, so round and pleasant.”