In 1962, the Arnold Constable Department Store in New York City was going out of business.The store had a long and proud history - Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the many rich and famous who bought her clothes there.
The store sold men's shirts with an interesting label in the collar area: if the shirt wore out before the date stamped on the label, a customer could return it and receive a full refund. The store referred to the label as its "wear-dated" guarantee.
Bob Born, from Chemstrand [Monsanto's/Solutia's first wholly owned subsidiary], liked the label idea, and bought the rights to it for $18,000. Monsanto's Wear-Dated program was born.
Chemstrand asked the advertising agency Doyle, Dane and Burnbach to develop the concept. The agency designed a logo of three basic shapes - a square, a rectangle and a triangle - with the three basic colors of red, black and yellow. The original Wear-Dated tags were so large that customers complained that they couldn't see the children's clothing the tags were on. The tags were then made considerably smaller, and further restyled over the years.
Thus began the Wear-Dated franchise. Over the years, the label became better known than Monsanto - consumers may not have heard of Monsanto, but they were clearly familiar with that guarantee.
In the early 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission got interested in the guaranttee. The FTC told Monsanto it couldn't say the guarantee was free because people had to pay postage to mail the tag, clothing and receipt. Monsanto replied that if the customer wanted to return the item to the department store, the store didn't pay for parking. The FTC took the argument under consideration, and a week later told Monsanto that they had no objections after all.