pears soap and french coins

Posted on | May 21, 2008 | No Comments

when i started selling soap, as opposed to simply making the stuff, i soon heard about thomas j. barratt.
barratt married into the pears soap family and single-handedly took it from being a genteel little soap company to the gentry and turned pears into the household name it is today.
barratt is often referred to as the father of modern advertising.
you can look him up on wikipedia, your fingers aren’t broken, and i am not recycling all that info here.

he did say: any fool can make soap…it takes a wise man to sell it.
and i keep that quote close to me at all times.

one of his brilliant promotional exploits was to import a whole heap (i keep reading 250,000) of french centimes and have PEARS SOAP stamped onto them.
these mingled with the british coins and were accepted in lieu of a penny….everyone had PEARS in their purse quite quickly.
there was no law about defacing french coins in britain, so the publicity was enormous, right up until parliament was hastily convened and an act thrown together, declaring all foreign currencies illegal tender.
the coins were withdrawn and melted down.

but not quite all of them….
i have been quietly gathering a tiny little collection of the extant coins and have even managed to obtain a slightly scarcer example of a coin stamped on the obverse side.

check out my pirate treasure: