Ask for It by Name!

It’s a good thing that Marcel Bich wasn’t fixated on his own name — otherwise one of the most famous advertising slogans of the 1970s would have been “Flick Your Bich.”

In 1945 Bich, having been production manager for a French ink manufacturer, bought a factory near Paris and began making parts for fountain pens and mechanical pencils. As a pen professional, Bich recognized that the ballpoint pen, then a novelty in postwar Europe, was the wave of the writing future, and by 1950, Bich and his partner Edouard Buffard were marketing their own ballpoints in Europe. But Bich realized that his own name might be hard for non-French buyers to pronounce correctly, so he shortened it to simply “BIC,” and within a few short years the world was inundated with inexpensive, stylish and wildly popular BIC pens. In 1973 BIC branched out into plastic butane lighters (making the slogan “Flick your BIC” a worldwide double entendre), and a few years later BIC pioneered the disposable plastic shaving razor. Today BIC markets a wide range of writing, shaving and office products as well as plastic sailboards.

The BIC logo, incidentally, features a character known as the BIC Boy, a schoolboy with the head of a ballpoint, designed in 1961 by legendary French graphic designer Raymond Savignac.

BIC isn’t the only family name associated with ballpoint pens. In the UK, ballpoints are commonly known as “Biros,” after Ladislas and Georg Biro, the Hungarian brothers who developed and marketed the first practical ballpoint pens during World War II.