Spencer's next challenge was to find the market for Glide Floss. With few resources at his command, he launched a grassroots campaign. He started in his own neighborhood, persuading Happy Harry's, a chain of Delaware drugstores, to stock Glide Floss in 26 stores around Gore's headquarters in Newark, Delaware. He gave free samples to area dentists and told them that if their customers liked it, they could buy more of the floss at Happy Harry's.
Spencer's target was to sell 600 units in the first three months. No one was ready for what actually happened -- including Spencer. Customers snapped up 12,000 units and clamored for more. Then the product took on a life of its own.
Tipped off by a Long Island dentist, New York magazine published a brief item extolling the virtues of the new dental floss. The mother of a producer of the hit TV show Seinfeld read the article and gave some floss to her son, who passed it on to Jerry Seinfeld -- and Glide Floss became part of a Seinfeld episode.
Suddenly, Gore's switchboard was deluged by thousands of callers who wanted Glide Floss -- and Gore had its next example of adaptive radiation. A short 18 months after Spencer dropped off the first boxes at Happy Harry's, Glide Floss was the best-selling dental floss in the United States -- a position that it still holds today. And John Spencer? He's still in the adaptive-radiation business -- producing guitar strings coated with PTFE and developing a line of PTFE-based clothing for cyclists.
It may be the single most familiar principle of natural selection: A species' coloration plays a critical role in its survival. Most biologists can recite the story of moths in England in the early days of industrialization. As factory smoke changed the color of the skies and filtered onto trees and leaves, gray moths gained a distinct advantage over the more numerous white ones. Predators could easily spot the white moths against the dark background. Natural selection favored the darker uniform.
In Darwinian terms, it's a short hop from moths to Marty Evans, a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy and the 16th executive director of the Girl Scouts of the USA. When she assumed her post in 1998, Evans took over an 86-year-old organization that was large and growing -- it grew to 3.7 million members in 2001. But the big picture obscured a real problem. A snapshot of any 10 Girl Scouts would reveal 7 white faces. Image problem number one: How could Evans make scouting appealing to all girls?
That same snapshot would also reveal a more subtle problem. Few if any of the girls in the photo would be wearing the kelly-green outfit that was the Scouts' identifying uniform. To young girls who were accustomed to the styles of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, the "geeky green" uniform was a turnoff. Uniforms aren't mandatory for Girl Scouts -- but they are a critical marketing tool for the organization. Evans needed to come up with a look that girls would want to wear.
The notion of updating the Girl Scouts' uniform was hardly a new one. In the past, the organization's executive counsel had periodically turned to a big-name designer to fix the look, usually with disastrous results. In the late 1970s, for example, Halston gave troop leaders a uniform that made them look like airline stewardesses.
This time, Evans realized, the Girl Scouts needed something more radical than a stylish makeover. "We made a decision that we would start with a blank sheet of paper and not just tinker with the design," Evans says. "We would be open to any and all ideas. To get the look we were after, we couldn't think about it simply as a continuation of past generations of Girl Scouts uniforms."
The Scouts, Evans believed, needed to look outside for a partner. They needed to find a design-and-marketing firm that could inject some new DNA into the organization to refresh its image. At the same time, the new look would have to be true to the Scouts' historic values and sensibility -- if it was too hip or too sexy, it would lose touch with the best qualities that the Scouts had to offer.
The expanded gene pool came in the form of Siegelgale, a cutting-edge brand-management firm headquartered in New York. The firm had a long line of design successes to its credit and a list of clients such as Coca-Cola, Dell, ESPN, and MasterCard. In her first week on the job, Evans attended a Siegelgale presentation and liked what she saw. Alan Siegel, the firm's founder, suggested that the features of the Girl Scouts' new identity were to be found in the organization's roots. "He wasn't going to put a group of people in a room and say, 'Come up with a new look,' " Evans says. "He felt that the seeds for evolving the Girl Scouts' brand image had to come from within the Girl Scouts."
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