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At 24, Luckman was manager of Colgate's Wisconsin district. There he converted an $80,000 deficit into an $80,000 profit, kept climbing. A typical stunt: he bought two carloads of scrub pails, sold them to grocers at cost, then staged a spring-housecleaning sale in which the pails, filled with scrub brushes, clothespins and Colgate soap, were retailed as a "package" for 89¢. Results were so spectacular that they caught the eye of Chicago's famed advertising millionaire, Albert Lasker (Lord & Thomas), who owned the Pepsodent Co., and a gloomy balance sheet. From a distance, Luckman looked like the man to fix this. Closeup, he looked entirely too young. Calmly Luckman lied to Lasker about his age: he said he was 30, instead of 26. Lasker hired him as salesmanager, at $10,000 a year.
Down With Pepsodent. At Pepsodent, Luckman found himself in hot, deep water. Reason: cut-rate druggists and department stores were selling the 29¢ tube of Pepsodent as a loss leader for anywhere from 21¢ to 2¢ just to get customers through their doors. Other druggists boycotted the toothpaste.
Chuck Luckman ended this rout by plunking out $25,000 to help the druggists lobby the Miller-Tydings Fair Trade Act through Congress. He put in his own form of price control, retaining title to the tubes until they were actually retailed. Then Luckman went on the road to make friends with individual druggists all over the U.S. (he traveled in 51 of his first 52 weeks), learned to call 35,000 druggists by their first names. Result: sales started up. By 1942 Pepsodent was leading the field for the first time. It has never been headed since.
By the time he was made president of Pepsodent in 1943 (at $100,000 a year plus bonuses), Luckman had boosted the company's annual gross profit before taxes from $600,000 to nearly $3,000,000. He plugged one thing, Irium (patented name for sodium alkyl sulphate, a cleaning agent), picked the right man to help do it. The man: Bob Hope. Luckman spotted him in a Broadway musical, offered to sponsor him on the air if he would tone down his smart-alecky manner. Hope refused. But after he had flopped with another sponsor, he meekly went back to see Luckman. Now Hope is signed to a ten-year Pepsodent contract at $20,000 a week (Hope's net after paying off the rest of the show: about $10,000).
Up With Pepsodent. Pepsodent's rise was closely watched by Lever Bros. In 1944 Lever Bros, decided to buy, paying out $15,000,000 for Pepsodent. Along with it they got Chuck Luckman. He got $1,500,000 (after taxes) for his stock.
Up till then Unilever's U.S. subsidiary had been largely the creation of President Francis A. Countway, an elegant patrician who sometimes seemed more like a Renaissance prince than what many people called him: "the greatest advertising man in the U.S." Lifebuoy soap was introduced from England in 1898, but it was Countway who, after a golf game one hot afternoon, invented B.O. to go with it. He had presided over the debuts of Lux Toilet Soap, Rinso, Swan and Spry. He had earned his huge salary (in 1939, $469,000, highest in the U.S. outside Hollywood) by boosting Lever sales from less than $1,000,000 in 1913 to $250,000,000 last year. But now Countway, old (69) and ill, was ready to let Chuck Luckman play the tune.