Invented by : Ed Lowe
Invented in year : 1947
Ed Lowe was born July 10, 1920 in St. Paul, Minnesota to Lulu and Henry E. Lowe. His family later moved near Cassopolis, Michigan, where Ed spent his youth before serving in the U.S. Navy from 1941 to 1945.After his Navy duty, Ed joined his father's company in Cassopolis, which sold industrial absorbents, including sawdust and an absorbent clay called Fuller's Earth. One day in 1947, Ed was approached by a neighbor who was tired of using ashes in her cat's box and dealing with sooty paw prints.
Kitty Litter Display She asked for some sand, and Ed suggested clay instead. Soon the neighbor would use nothing else, noting that the clay was much more absorbent than sand and didn't track all over the house. Ed had a hunch that other cat owners would love his new cat box filler, too, so he filled 10 brown bags with clay, wrote the name "Kitty Litter" on them, and called on the local pet store. With sand available for next-to-nothing, the shop owner doubted anyone would pay 65 cents for a five-pound bag of Kitty Litter Brand. "So give it away," Ed told him. Soon customers were asking for more–and were quite willing to pay for it. The rest, as they say, is history.
Ed started visiting cat shows, where he cleaned hundreds of cat boxes each day in exchange for a booth to display his new product. Crossing the country and visiting local pet shops, Ed continued to sell Kitty Litter Brand from the back of his 1943 Chevy Coupe. Cat owners all over America soon fell in love with this product's odor control and absorbency.
Tidy Cat Box In 1964, Lowe created Tidy Cat® brand and it was sold in grocery stores. Ed's devotion to customer service and satisfaction has never changed since that day in 1947, when he offered help to a neighbor. Every bag of Ed's cat box filler contained a personal money-back promise of satisfaction. He firmly believed that's the only way to do business.
In 1990, prior to the divestiture of its clay mining and consumer product businesses, Edward Lowe Industries, Inc. was the nation's largest producer of cat box filler with retail sales of more than $210 million annually. His product, once sold in simple brown paper bags, had improved too–thanks to Ed's innovative approach to business. Kitty Litter Brand, which was 99 percent dust free, was sanitized with Healthguard and provided a better environment for cats and their owners by controlling growth of odor-causing bacteria.
