Millions from Small Packages

What company spends $100 million a year urging Americans to savor Brach candy, Gulden's Mustard and Chef Boy-ar-Dee foods, to rub on Meet and Aero Shave, to wash their clothes with Woolite, to battle their bugs with Black Flag, to treat their ills with Dristan, Anacin and Bi-So-Dol, to keep their cool with Equanil? Even the most ardent shoppers might be hard put to answer because for all the effort it puts into making household names of its more than 90 brands, American Home Products Corp. cares little about plugging its own corporate identity.

Few companies enjoy such affluent anonymity. Last year, American Home increased its sales by 8% and edged for the first time into the ranks of $1 billion-annual-sales corporations (with $55 million to spare). More important, earnings jumped by 11% to $104 million, winning American Home a 25 1/2% ratio of profit to invested capital.

Last quarter, sales surged yet another 8% and profits another 11%. And last week stockholders at American Home's annual meeting in Wilmington, Del., heard even more good news. With final Food and Drug Administration approval at last in hand, American Home will soon be entering the burgeoning (now $100 million-a-year) birth-control market with an oral contraceptive called Ovral. Under development for nine years, Ovral, says the company, is the first completely synthetic steroid birth-control pill; American Home expects it to win sales from the 19 other versions of the pill now on the market, by helping to eliminate unwanted side-effects.

Cold Cash. Ovral will be only the latest addition to American Home's highly diverse collection of scores of bottled, boxed, wrapped and canned products. Founded 42 years ago in a merger of a group of drug companies, American Home soon moved beyond the medicine cabinet. Though ethical drugs, ranging from antibiotics to Equanil to Sabin polio vaccine, account for 35% of sales, and proprietary drugs supply another 17%, American Home now reaches into such diverse lines as kitchenware and candy.

The company's key assets have been a keen sense of new markets and the cold cash to advertise for them. The aggressive salesmanship started in the 1930s when American Home hired on as president a hard-selling toothpowder (Dr. Lyons) executive, Alvin Brush. Brush soon horrified traditionalists by ordering Anacin, which had been marketed as an ethical drug, to be put on sale at drugstore counters. The $50 million current yearly sales of Anacin are more than double American Home's total sales in 1938.

Penchant for Pennies. American Home has grown faster than ever under William F. Laporte, 54, a somewhat shy and self-effacing salesman who succeeded Brush as board chairman in 1965. Son of a Passaic, N.J., banker who was a longtime friend of Brush, Laporte became an American Home sales trainee in 1938, after graduating from Princeton and Harvard Business School. Under his leadership, American Home has stepped up diversification. In 1965, the company bought Chicago-based Ekco Products Inc. for $145 million, thus became the world's biggest maker of pots, pans and other kitchen utensils. Then it outmaneuvered Consolidated Foods in a race to acquire candymaking E. J. Brach & Co. It was a sweet victory: Brach's sales jumped 14% last year to $10 million.

Well aware that its millions come from sales of many small packages, American Home has a housewife's penchant for counting pennies. American Home has no company planes, not even company cars. In the office, Laporte likes to pad down the plain tile hallways, buttonholing executives with questions like "What have you done for us today?" Nobody ever need ask Laporte that question. At American Home board meetings, the man running the movie projector is likely to be the company's $172,000-a-year boss.

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