Nattily dressed, a junior accountant named Robert Philip Adler reported to his new job at the ailing Waterman Pen Co. one August day in 1955. He was no sooner in the office than he found him self in hip boots, helping to shovel up the muddy debris of a flood that had immersed the plant. Adler, now 33, has since cleaned up at pen making in an even bigger way. As president of the renamed and revivified Waterman-Bic Pen Corp., he has expanded the Milford, Conn., firm into the nation's leading manufacturer of ballpoint pens, with 20% of the industry's estimated $120 million-a-year sales and 40% of its 1.2 billion-pens-a-year output.
Last week Adler spread out with a new subsidiary, Bic Pen of Canada, Ltd., which has built a $400,000 plant in Toronto. His aim: to win nearly half of the 200-million-ballpoint-pen Canadian market within three years. Brash though that seems, it only matches the hustle by which Adler last year sold U.S. buyers 480 million ballpoint pens, almost all of them use-and-discard models priced from 19¢ to 49¢ retail. Adler keeps a quarter of his 300 plant employees busy checking the quality of parts coming off automated production lines, personally scrutinizes the daily writing-test samples before each shipment leaves the temperature, dust-and humidity-controlled plant. "People are going to remember you if you're good," says Adler, "but they'll remember you better if you're bad."
New Haven-born Adler joined Waterman soon after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance, moved up quickly, became company controller at 24, treasurer at 26. He caught the eye of Chairman Marcel Bich, Europe's foremost ballpoint-pen maker, when Bich bought Waterman in 1958. "I told him, 'You've cut expenses as much as you can,' " says Adler. " 'What you need is sales.' " Bich immediately made Adler executive vice president, and after sales pushed the company into the black, Adler became president at 31. Today Waterman-Bic is the biggest link in the French manufacturer's worldwide network of 18 plants producing 3,000,000 pens a day for 96 countries.
Though Waterman's founder, L. E. Waterman, developed the first practical fountain pen in 1884, the company no longer makes them. U.S. ballpoint-pen sales, however, today nearly match those of lead pencils. By 1970, Adler insists, the ballpoint pen will be mightier than the pencil.
