‘He doesn’t know how to fail’, how did the idea come about?
Rafael Ramírez, who is in charge of around 964 workers, shared the anecdote that gave rise to the bic slogan.
According to legend, when the French company arrived in Mexico, in the 1970s, there was a law that did not allow proper names to be used as company names, that is, the brand could not be called Marcel Bich before the country’s commercial and tax authorities. .
Marcel Bich was co-founder of this global company and whose surname, without the letter ‘h’, gives the brand its name.
The problem then lay in finding a name, a business name, that contained BiC’s values, while at the same time having the power to stay in the minds of Mexican consumers.
On the day of the meeting to discuss this dilemma and with time running out, according to the Mexican engineer, there was someone who got up from the table and exclaimed: “We cannot fail!” “There it is”, another of those responsible for BiC’s arrival in Mexico told him, that’s the name and slogan they needed and that finally ended up in the ‘BiC, it doesn’t know how to fail’ that everyone knows.
The ‘BiC boy’ has a lot to say
The logo of the boy who seems to carry a pen with his hands behind his back also has some curiosities to tell. What do the BiC child parts mean?
Head. As you can see, BiC is written like this, with a lowercase ‘i’, and this is for a reason. The dot that crowns the ‘i’ is, in fact, the raw material of the company logo. This is so because the pens that Marchel Bich devised and that became popular in the world are the midpoint ones. The industrial innovation of the ‘Baron BiC’ consisted in placing a sphere of one millimeter, round and capable of turning freely and without spilling the ink on the paper.
Thus, the child’s head symbolizes the midpoint of the BiC crystal pens.
And what pen does the child carry? According to the engineer Rafael Ramírez, it is the M10 model of the brand, one of the most commercialized in France.