From the Editor's Desk

The secretary who turned Liquid Paper into a multimillion-dollar business

Bette Nesmith Graham invented one of the most popular office supplies of the 20th century. Today, she's largely been forgotten.

On a warm Texas night in 1956, Bette Nesmith - later known as Bette Nesmith Graham - sat in a garage surrounded by buckets of white tempera paint, empty nail polish bottles, and handmade labels.

She didn't know it then, but she was on the brink of something magical.

The product she would eventually create - Liquid Paper, a white correction fluid used to conceal handwritten or printed typos - would become one of the world's most popular and enduring office supplies.

Graham wasn't a chemist or an engineer. She was a single mom from Texas who had a brilliant idea while working a 9-to-5 job as a secretary.

But she was also a budding product marketing genius: Over several decades, she identified a need in the market, organically grew her business, staved off competition, and bootstrapped her way to a $47.5m exit - $173m in today's money.

And she did it all during a time when women were discouraged from pursuing business ventures.

Continued here

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