"When the WD-40 company switched banks in 2018, it had to move a particularly valuable piece of corporate property from one vault to another.
A security firm was duly hired and the company’s president and CEO Garry Ridge put the precious item into a briefcase, handcuffed it to his wrist and then, escorted by two security guards, got into an armoured vehicle to make the short trip to a nearby branch of Bank of America in the Californian city of San Diego.
You could be forgiven for thinking he was transporting some expensive piece of corporate artwork, or a diamond-encrusted company heirloom, but it was in fact a notepad that contained something infinitely more valuable: the formula to the firm’s bestselling WD-40 ‘penetrating oil’.
That ‘multi-use product’ — as it says on the blue and yellow aerosol canister, with its distinctive red top — which habitually finds a place in understairs cupboards, garden sheds and tool boxes up and down the land.
For fear that its ingredients could be made public, the formula has never been patented. Indeed, apart from its trip from vault to vault four years ago, it has only seen the light of day on one other occasion: the time Ridge celebrated the company’s 50th anniversary by riding through New York’s Times Square on a horse, wearing a suit of armour, the formula in hand.
Now Ridge, 66, is standing down as CEO, after 25 years in the hot seat. He will be replaced by Steve Brass, an Englishman from Yorkshire, who until a few years ago worked out of the company’s Milton Keynes office.
Last year, WD-40’s revenues worldwide amounted to £400 million in nearly 200 countries, with sales in Europe of more than £200 million.
This contrasts with its early days in 1953, when a fledgling outfit called the Rocket Chemical Company comprised three people who set out to create a line of rust-prevention solvents and degreasers for the aerospace industry.
Working out of a tiny lab in San Diego, it took Rocket’s three pioneers 40 attempts to perfect what is known as ‘a water-displacement formula’; hence the not exactly catchy name of WD-40.
Over the years, various attempts have been made to work out exactly what WD-40 is. In 2009, Wired magazine sent samples of the lubricant to a laboratory for analysis.
Fish oil, Vaseline and ‘the goop inside homemade lava lamps’ was the verdict — hardly forensic.
‘The concentrate remains, and will always remain, a secret,’ says a spokeswoman in San Diego. ‘It’s the concentrate that we ship out across the world and then various solutions and solvents are blended into it.’
Nothing much has changed about WD-40 in the past 70 years, which makes it a marketing dream, except there is now the option of buying a can with a straw, or what the company calls a ‘smart straw’.
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