Alan McGuiness tells the story of Bette Nesmith, a single parent with a nine-year old son, who worked in a Dallas Bank. She seemed rather average with no particular promise for big things. She was glad to have the secretarial job – $300 a month was very good for 1951 – but she did have a problem: how to correct the errors she made with her new electric typewriter. Nesmith has been a freelance artist, and artists never correct by erasing, they simply paint over the error. So she concocted a fluid that she could use to paint over her typing errors.

Before long all the secretaries in the building were using what she then called “Mistake Out.” An office supply dealer encouraged her to manufacture the paint, but marketing agencies weren’t impressed, and companies (among them IBM) turned her down cold. But the secretaries continued to like the product, so Nesmith’s kitchen became her first manufacturing facility. Orders began to trickle in, and she hired a college student to help her sell the product. But it was not easy for two inexperienced saleswomen. “People will never paint out their mistakes,” a dealer would say. Records show that from August 1959 to April 1960, the company’s total income was $1,142.71, and its expenses were $1,217.35. “I don’t know how I made it,” Bette said. She worked part-time as a secretary, managing to buy groceries and save $200 to pay a chemist to develop a fast-drying formula.

With the improved product, Nesmith began taking her little white bottles around the country. She stopped in small towns and big cities. Upon arriving in a city, she wrote, “I’d get the phone book and write down the names of dealers and then call them. We’d go to each office supply store and leave 12 bottles.” Eventually orders began to pour in and the Liquid Paper Corporation began to fly. When she sold the company in 1979, the tiny white bottles were earning $3.5 million annually on sales of $38 million, and Gillette paid $47.5 million for the firm.

Source: Alan Loy McGuiness, 1985, Bringing Out The Best In People, Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, p.102-103