History of Work - Post-It Notes

Most of the office tools we’ve covered in this series were the result of years of focus, and a singular dedication to solving a foundational problem. The sticky note stands alone as the only one that was created by accident. It took over ten years to make it from invention to launch, but went on to become an office staple, an established art resource, and a way to dodge government record-keeping. 

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The foundational mistake was made by Spence Silver, a research chemist at US megacorp 3M (short for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, which is what the business was originally created as at the start of the 20th century). The brief was to “develop new adhesives, and at that time we wanted to develop bigger, stronger, tougher adhesives,” he explained to CNN in 2013. “This was none of those.” 

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Instead, in 1968, he came up with an adhesive based on “microspheres”, which weren’t very sticky but were reusable. It was a failure for the project he was working on, but Silver was convinced it was useful. He couldn’t think of a winning product - his best guess was reusable posters - but he continued to evangelize the adhesive within 3M, despite a largely indifferent audience. “I got to be known as ‘Mr Persistent,’ because I wouldn’t give up,” he recalled.

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Six years later, a 3M colleague named Art Fry finally hit on a problem that Silver’s adhesive solved: the bookmarks kept falling out of the hymn book he used when singing in the church choir. “I thought, what I need is a bookmark that would stick to the paper without falling off and but not damage the sheets,” he said. He later recalled the “adrenaline rush” when he connected this to one of Silver’s many internal presentations on his microsphere glue.

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He approached Silver and the two came up with a set of reusable sticky notes, which ended up being canary yellow because there was a surplus of that paper in a neighbouring lab. They quickly became a hit with co-workers for sharing short messages in the lab itself, and Fry and Silver realised that their creation was far more flexible than they’d anticipated. “I thought what we have here isn’t just a bookmark,” Fry told CNN. “It’s a whole new way to communicate.” 

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It took several more years to persuade 3M that it had a useful product on its hands. Eventually it risked a trial launch of “Press n’ Peel” in 1977 in four US cities, which didn’t take off. The notes were rebranded as Post-It and relaunched in 1980 with heavy focus on free samples, in the belief that once companies found out how useful they were they’d reorder. The tactic paid off, and was spectacularly successful to a degree that left 3M’s sales and marketing people “gasping a little bit,” according to Silver. 

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Fry attributed the product’s spread to that of a virus, because customers ended up promoting it by leaving Post-It notes on documents shared with other businesses. “They would look at it, peel it off and play with it and then go out and buy a pad for themselves,” he said. 

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The Post-It conquered the office and still reigns supreme today, under a variety of different brand names. 3M’s patent ran out in 1997 but it’s still the leader in a market worth in the region of $2 billion a year - and the formula for Silver’s adhesive was never patented, and thus remains a closely guarded secret. It also spread beyond the office faster than any of the other office tools, because it was immediately useful in almost every location. 

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Sticky notes are attached to hymn books and school homework, lunches and product returns, recipes and front doors. The impermanence of sticky notes makes them uniquely suited to temporary art installations. Visit Google UK’s offices in London and you’ll see the glass walls of the atrium filled with sticky-note art all the way to the roof; elsewhere they’ve been used for impromptu civic messageboards. 

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Less wholesomely, it’s alleged that they’ve been heavily used in government because they aren’t permanent enough to be archived and won’t appear in any Freedom Of Information requests - that is disputed, but they’re definitely a preferred tool of the returning US president. In the office, they’re used for notes and comments, but they’re also a great tool for everything from running effective brainstorming sessions to claiming the best hot-desk. 

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Like the filing cabinet, the Post-It will live forever because it’s been integrated into the digital platforms that power the modern office, with “sticky notes” now built into both Microsoft and Apple platforms as well as built-in to management tools like Miro. The challenge - or perhaps benefit, if you’re one of the aforementioned people in government - becomes keeping track of each note, and not letting valuable feedback or data be lost as projects develop.

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This is a problem that Workiro was created to solve, with its cloud-based document management enabling all comments, amendments and agreements to be automatically collated in a single interface. Rather than sticky notes on print contracts, you can leave comments using the integrated PDF markup tool and have associated emails automatically captured in Microsoft Outlook thanks to Office365 integration, it’s easy to monitor individual projects and ensure compliance. 

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We don’t think you can use Workiro to create public artwork - that’s an advantage that sticky notes will retain, we suspect - but we’re very confident it will help you to take control of the data in your organisation, and communicate effectively with your staff and your customers. Find out more by joining a group or personal demo of what we modestly consider to be the best integrated accounting software.