If you told Frank Reick something was impossible, he would set out to prove you’re wrong. As a scientist, inventor, engineer, entrepreneur, businessman, he founded Fluoramics, Inc., now in Winona, MN, a company that is a leader in high technology research and in the oil additive business.
Reick always thought of Fluoramics as a “little” guy in the business world, but he had no qualms about the company taking on the giants. It’s his opinion that it will be the little guys who will lead us into the future. The big guys, Reick thought, will trip over themselves. Too much chain of command, paperwork, red tape and complicated procedural requirements bog down the creative process in giant corporations, he declared.
“A creative ‘little’ guy, working on his own, without having to contend with the endless directives and restrictions of the big business, can move right past the giants,” he said. “We’re like a ballerina in a herd of elephants,” is the way he put it in a CNN interview.
He’s proved his point more than once. The most notable case involves his laboratory work in the field of lubrication. Although Fluoramics started in 1967 with the engineering of thread sealants and greases, it was Reick’s work with the suspension of PTFE particles that rocketed the company into being a major player in the oil additive world.
The idea which led to the creation of Tufoil Engine Treatment came to Reick, a private pilot, when he was flying over the Hudson River past Manhattan. He looked down and saw an ugly cloud of exhaust pollution rising toward him. He made up his mind to develop an oil additive which would cut that pollution.
The giants in the lubrication industry were aware of the potential of such a product and they set their scientists to work on developing an effective additive.
Tufoil was named The World’s Most Efficient Lubricant by the Guinness Book of World Records
The solution was not a simple one. It was as complicated as the name of the substance, polytetrafluoroethylene, better known, for obvious reasons, as PTFE, which was paramount to the solution. PTFE was the most slippery substance known and researchers all seemed to agree that it would be the key ingredient in an effective additive.
But PTFE did not prove to be a cooperative substance. If it was not suspended in the additive, it became an enemy rather than a friend, and it stubbornly resisted efforts to suspend it. It would settle out and consequently it couldn’t do the job the scientists were attempting to make it do. Further, when it settled out, it would clog filters. The problem of achieving suspension resisted an easy solution. One by one, the scientists working for the giant lubrication companies gave up. When the smoke cleared, Reick was still working in his basement laboratory on the problem the giants considered impossible to solve.
When he heard that the big guys, with unlimited resources had declared a solution to the problem impossible, it was like touching a raw nerve. It fired him up; he had to prove they were wrong.
Reick knew that the impossible takes a little longer. He was patient. As it turned out, however, it took a lot longer. He worked for ten years before he solved the problem. But he did solve it and achieved suspension of PTFE. The United States patent office granted him six patents on the technology he developed. That was followed by patents from five foreign nations. Reick wrote several published scientific papers on PTFE. His work established him as the leading authority on additives.
After all those years in the laboratory, most scientists would have hung up their lab coats and started a search for someone to buy their technology. It would be likely to bring a handsome price.
That wasn’t Reick’s way. He went on to develop an additive using his patented technology. The first production of his product, which he named and trademarked Tufoil, started to flow from his basement.
Reick knew Tufoil was a winner. It did everything he said it should do, but he felt he needed to be able to prove it to potential customers.
He sent samples to highly respected, independent testing laboratories all over the world. He wanted the effectiveness of Tufoil to be authenticated and documented. The tests did even better that that. Results from the U.S. government’s National Bureau of Standards laboratories proved that Tufoil was more slippery than Teflon, which had been the most slippery substance known. A Canadian laboratory’s results showed that Tufoil produced faster cold weather starts than all the specially developed artic oils they had tested.
Armed with these indisputable facts from internationally recognized research institutions, he set out to face the challenge presented by marketing a new product from an unknown company. Tufoil’s first customers were industrial users operating heavy machinery, national fleet operators, taxi fleets and police cars. A sales, marketing and advertising campaign was launched to reach out to motorists. Salesmen were sent out to establish retail outlets. At the same time a direct mail campaign was established.
True to his iconoclast ways, Reick did not use an advertising agency to create and place his ads. He formed an in-house agency, Necaria (of necessity) Advertising. And true to form, Reick chose an unorthodox approach to Fluoramics’ direct mail campaign. He made his household animals the spokesmen for Tufoil. Using folksy, homespun copy, he told a heart-rending story about his aging, arthritic dog, Klutzie. The odds were heavily stacked against Klutzie when he was born. He couldn’t keep up with his siblings. He was clumsy and slow to learn. But with help and understanding from Reick, he overcame his shortcomings. People responded to the heart-warming story. They filled in the coupon at the bottom of the story to order Tufoil.
Reick carried on the theme with a touching story about the close relationship which developed between himself and a raccoon he adopted. There were stories about his son Gregg’s Cockatoo, Sweetpea; and Raunchy, the dirty, injured stray cat he found scrounging in a dumpster on New Year’s Eve.
Meanwhile, Fluoramics’ sales manager was building acceptance in retail stores. Tufoil began to appear on the shelves of national hardware chains, automotive retailers and major drug and food stores across the country. Sales grew at a rate exceeding projections.
It seemed like a classic American success story. But it didn’t end there. There were a lot of bumps in the road ahead.
Opportunistic marketers, sensing the potential for oil additives, began flooding the market with advertisements containing wildly exaggerated claims. Most of the competing companies had no scientists on their staff, no technology, no scientific evidence to support their claims. The companies were run by slick marketers. In many cases they sold a wide variety of products. They were not lubrication companies at all. But their high-pressure campaigns for products that could not accomplish what they claimed, hurt Tufoil. In Canada, several companies which followed practices similar to those in the United States, were found guilty of misleading advertising under that country’s Competition Act because they did not provide evidence to support their advertised claims as required by the Act.
Tufoil, on the other hand, met every challenge from both federal and state government agencies. Data submitted by Fluoramics substantiated every claim the company made.
This posed a new challenge to Fluoramics. Reick undertook a campaign to educate distributors and motorists. They designed new exhibits for both tradeshows and in-store displays. They created videos to present the facts in tradeshow booths. Videos directed at the consumer were made available to stores carrying Tufoil.
To counteract the proliferation of unsubstantiated claims in advertisements and trade journal additive stories, Fluoramics stepped up its efforts to get the word out that every claim made by Tufoil has been substantiated. Fluoramics also stressed the fact that Tufoil was formulated according to a patented process.
Sales growth resumed its old pace. Letters from users poured in to Fluoramics’ offices. One customer wrote that the transmission was shifting like a hot knife through butter. Others reported a substantial increase in miles per gallon. One letter said, “. . . idle speed rose 200 rpm,” and “I have never exceeded 30 mpg on a consistent basis in my 1980 (Saab) 900. Within one tankful after treating the engine with Tufoil, my mileage improved to 33-34 mpg!” Several motorists wrote that their engines treated with Tufoil were running smoothly after more than 200,000 miles.
One letter came from the owner of a fleet of diesel-powered tugboats. The engines were running very rough, he wrote, and the noise was deafening. He tried Tufoil. The engines quieted down and ran smoothly.
In 1996 & 1997, Tufoil was named The World’s Most Efficient Lubricant by the Guinness Book of World Record, a further testament to the lubrication properties of Tufoil.
Reick’s patience and fortitude paid off in the marketplace, but there were other rewards as well. He was inducted into the New Jersey “Inventors Hall of Fame” and in 1990 he was selected as one of the state’s five “Inventors of the Year.” That same year, his entrepreneurial enterprise won him a place as a semi-finalist in the competition for Inc. magazine’s “Entrepreneur of the Year” award.
Portions of this article were taken from Fluoramics, Inc. . . . and it’s innovative founder and president, Frank Reick, scientist, inventor, engineer and entrepreneur, Commerce magazine, April 1992.
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