Laszlo Bíró solved the ball-point pen by thickening the ink instead of redesigning the barrel. Marcel Bich bought the patent, switched to plastic, and dropped the price from $190 to $2. Over 100 billion Bic Cristal pens have sold worldwide.
This Bic pen is the most successful product ever. The design hasn't changed in over 70 years, but why? It all starts with the origin of the pen. It was a quill dipped in ink. It's so difficult to use that only artists know how. For centuries, experiment to make it better, but they're working on an issue that doesn't exist. It's the core design. Until this guy, Laszlo Biro, realizes that the problem isn't the design, it's the ink. It's too wet, it flows too fast, and takes too long to dry. It's a huge mess. So he makes one tiny tweak: slightly thicker ink. It sticks to the walls of the tube inside the pen and creates the a perfect controlled stream of ink. The problem? Biro's design cost $190 a pen. So along comes this guy, Marcel Bic. He buys the patent, switches metal casings to plastic, and makes the ballpoint pen at scale and drives the cost down to just $2. Sometimes all it takes is making the price affordable to make a business take off. And today, over 100 billion of these pens have been sold.
