Bette Nesmith Graham’s idea for Mistake Out (later renamed Liquid Paper) came from watching window painters at the bank she worked at. She noticed that when they messed up, instead of erasing the whole picture they would just cover their mistake with more paint (“Bette Nesmith Graham: Liquid Paper Inventor,” n.d.). When she first started using her idea, she found some tempura paint that matched her stationary, put it in a bottle, and grabbed a paint brush. Initially Graham tried to keep the paint a secret, not wanting her boss to find out about her shortcuts but her boss never noticed.
Eventually Graham figured out that she could make money on Mistake Out. She gathered a team consisting of her son and some of his friends to help her perfect her paint recipe and eventually started selling it in 1956. In the beginning they were mixing the mistake out in her kitchen using an electric mixer while her son and his friends were bottling the product. When other secretaries started finding out about Graham’s invention they sent her many requests for some of their own. A year later she was working full time to produce Mistake Out, selling about 100 bottle a month and making 5 times more money than it costed her to make the product. The popularity of her product skyrocketed and she applied for a patent and trademark in 1958 under the new name Liquid Paper. Eventually, 17 years after it’s invention Liquid Paper became big enough for it’s own 35,000 square feet headquarters and factory in 1968 (“Bette Nesmith Graham: Liquid Paper Inventor,” n.d.). At the time that Liquid Paper got it’s own headquarters and production plant it was producing over a million bottles a year. About four years later Graham sold Liquid Paper to Gillette for $47.5 million.
