Fuller Brush Company

[3] The company began with door-to-door sales of brushes of various sorts, including hairbrushes with a lifetime guarantee for which they are famous.

"[5] In the mid-1930s, Fuller relocated from rented space on Union Place across from the New Haven RR station to a purpose-built sprawling three-story brick factory and office complex on the north edge of Hartford at 3580 Main St. World War II saw the company "cut its normal civilian output drastically to make brushes for the cleaning of guns".

[6] Fuller's eldest son, Howard, succeeded his father as president, serving until he and his wife Dora died in an auto crash in May 1959.

[7] Having long outgrown the Hartford location, in 1960 the company moved to a new, purpose-built campus on Long Hill St., East Hartford, Conn. That year, Alfred C. Fuller published his autobiography A Foot In the Door; the title described a salesman's technique in prolonging a conversation to turn it into a sale.

In 1966, Fuller Brush hired 17,500 women, motivated by the lack of qualified men (the unemployment rate was 3.8%) and the example set by Avon Products.

[7] Office operations moved initially to Niles, Illinois, then relocated along with manufacturing and research to Great Bend, Kansas in 1973.

[9] By the mid-1980s, however, in recognition of the decrease in the number of women at home during the day, Fuller Brush began introducing other sales channels beyond door-to-door.

[9] Later that same year, a group of investors from Kansas headed by Lee Turner, a trial lawyer, took Fuller private; by 1991, the company, now known as Fuller Industries and led by Stuart A. Ochiltree, decided that the future of the company was in multi-level marketing, which essentially destroyed the entire door-to-door sales force.

If that plan was to be undertaken, it would have been outright able to increased the revenue and profitability of the company, possibly saving it from the disastrous multilateral marketing decision and allowing it to transition to future online sales.

[10] In June 1994, Fuller, once again known as Fuller Brush Company, was acquired by CPAC Inc., a Leicester, New York-based manufacturer of photographic chemicals; CPAC took on the "heavy debt burden" accumulated while the company was private and whose annual sales, increasingly focused on chemicals, had shrunk to $24 million.

The Industrial Division, under Verne Joy, was also at the East Hartford plant, where they made large motor-driven brushes for developing newspaper printing photo metal plates.

[21] Groundlings Theater veteran Paul Reubens (of Pee-wee Herman fame) worked as a Fuller Brush salesman while attending the California Institute of the Arts.

Broadcaster Lowell Green admitted during his April 24, 2014, program to selling Fuller Brushes in Montreal's Westmount area during his college days in the 1950s.