A Historical Look at Grace-Lee Products

Grace-Lee Products was founded by necessity during the Great Depression. Max Graceman (Barry Graceman’s grandfather) was a 56-year-old sales manager for an Iowa chemical company that went bankrupt. The company manufactured an all-purpose paste cleanser, blended from soaps and silica sand, that was used in institutional accounts and buildings for all types of cleaning.

In lieu of past commissions he was due, Graceman was given the formula to manufacture the paste cleanser. On March 1, 1932, Max Graceman formed a corporation with C W Lee, who owned a chemical business in Minneapolis, from which they could make the product. Graceman immediately started calling on the distributors he had been selling to previously. Within six months, Lee had an opportunity to buy another chemical business in Chicago but needed his money in Grace-Lee in order to complete the purchase.

Max Graceman was a great salesman, but with only an eighth-grade education, he knew very little about running a company. He turned to his son Don Graceman (Barry’s father), who dropped out of college to run the business.

Business grew at a comfortable pace for the next nine years. Don Graceman changed the distribution model to add direct salespeople. However, throughout the rigors and demands of World War II, the fats and oils used to make soaps were scarce and on allocation.

After the war, business once again began to grow and Graceman hired a full-time chemist to develop new products. In the late ’40s, detergents were invented which spurred Grace-Lee into a period of product innovation. The company began manufacturing products for automobile dealers, service stations, restaurants, office buildings and hotels.

In 1948, Grace-Lee sold the first conveyor carwash built in Minneapolis. The primary product sold to carwashes, however, was the original Grace- Lee paste cleanser. Cars in those days had a lot of chrome that would rust, and Paste Cleanser was the answer. Adding water to the top of the barrel (which weighed more than 700 pounds) and armed with a brush, carwash employees would hand scrub the chrome.

Next came the advent of steam cleaners and the development of steam-cleaning compounds which were very high in caustic soda. A “high-sudsing,” blownbead powdered detergent was used to hand wash the vehicles.

1961: Equipment Automation

Barry Graceman grew up in the business, but when he got out of the Army, he joined Grace-Lee full time in a sales role. In the early ’60s, it wasn’t unusual to have four service stations at a four-way intersection. These made up Graceman’s main accounts, as he sold them garage floor cleaners, carwash detergents, hand soaps and window cleaners. He also sold numerous automobile dealers the same cleaning products, in addition to products for cleaning and waxing the showroom floors.

Graceman also had several restaurant accounts where he learned a lot about chemistry and using dispensing equipment from a local company named Economics Laboratory, known today as Ecolab. Graceman liked the conveyor carwash industry and discovered no companies were using dispensing equipment. He learned how to service steam cleaners and offered free labor to customers that would buy from Grace-Lee.

In those days, steam cleaners were like dishwashing machines, and a mitt tank was like a pot-and-pan sink, so Graceman designed automatic-dispensing equipment to control the use of products. By then, Grace-Lee had hired an inventor who, along with Graceman, invented and patented a dispenser that turned a 55-gallon drum of powder into a liquid. The chemistry for this product also was unusual for the day because all of the raw materials had to dissolve at the same rate.

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