SHE CAME UP WITH THE NAME IN THE BATHTUB. "I knew that the name needed to be colorful if it was to appeal to my target audience-teens," Mateer writes in Blueprint, and she wanted it to be a C word. "I was sitting in my bathtub reading a huge Oxford English Dictionary," she recalled. "I came across 'Caboodles,' which had a definition of 'a collection or clutter of things.' How perfect, I thought, for an organizer box." 5. Just as the name had to be colorful, so did the boxes themselves. To come up with just the right ones, Mateer and the manufacturer visited "a local discount store where I chose four brightly colored plastic hair dryers in peach, yellow, pink, and purple," she writes. THEY HIT THE MARKET WITH THE TAGLINE "THE WHOLE KIT 'N' CABOODLE GOES INTO A CABOODLE!" As she was checking out, she told a clerk who was curious about why they were buying so many hair dryers that they were for her new product, Caboodles-it was the first time she had named her idea out loud. The first boxes, called "on-the-go organizers," hit the market in 1987. They were a runaway hit, selling 2 million units in the first two years. In 1992, The New York Times reported that an official at Plano said the company "now sells far more makeup boxes than it does tackle boxes," and that "nearly 80 percent of the teen-age girls in the country are aware of Caboodles." Eventually the line grew to 70 products, which retailed between $5 and $40. THE ORGANIZER'S FIRST COMMERCIAL WASN'T EXACTLY PROGRESSIVE.
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