The cushioning, stress-busting material changed shipping and packaging across the globe Watch video
David Weiss found himself in a bit of conundrum this past summer.
A Wall Street Journal article about his company's new product reported something alarming to anyone who read it -- the pop was gone.
And that's a problem when your brand is firmly secured in Bubble Wrap, the plastic cushioning invented in New Jersey in 1957, prized as much for its role in shipping valuables as the sound and feel it generates when idle hands get to pop-pop-popping.
This fondness for bursting the wrap's transparent bubbles is the very reason there's something called Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day, celebrated for 15 years now on the last Monday of January -- most recently with paeans to the pop on social media and a Pop-A-Palooza Bubble Wrap mobile app that allows the user to "say goodbye to productivity" by swiping at light-up bubbles.
But the real deal will continue to populate boxes and moving vans -- Weiss hastened to tell worried parties that no, the traditional Bubble Wrap would not be leaving the company's roster anytime soon.
The company's new product, called iBubble Wrap, is shipped as a flat sheet and inflated with a pump. Because its air chambers are connected, its bubbles do not lend themselves to popping, says Weiss, business manager of air cellular packaging at Sealed Air Corporation, the company that makes the wrap, which has a plant in Bergen County.
"The real reason for developing the inflatable iBubble Wrap comes out of a demand for our cushioning product in other parts of the world," Weiss says. It would be much more expensive to open Sealed Air plants in those countries, he explains.
"Bubble Wrap, by its nature, has a very high freight content," he says. "Freight plays very heavily into how you price the product."
Still, a certain sentimental attachment to the original item -- and its signature pop -- is not lost on Sealed Air, whose stable of products have grown to include food packaging and medical supplies.
"Our traditional Bubble Wrap will not go away in North America and Europe," Weiss says.
Alfred Fielding, co-inventor of Bubble Wrap, with the original machinery used to make the protective material. (Sealed Air Corp.)From wallpaper to computers
Bubble Wrap is the brainchild of Swiss engineer Marc Chavannes and Hackensack native Alfred Fielding, an engineer and alumnus of Stevens Institute of Technology. The pair, working out of a Hawthorne garage, fused two plastic shower curtains together, trapping air bubbles inside -- the aim was to create a textured wallpaper (this was the late '50s, after all -- home to pink bathrooms and atomic design). No one was buying.
Sealed Air legend has it that Chavannes had his eureka moment seated in a plane landing at Newark Airport. The airy clouds surrounding the craft looked as if they were cushioning the plane.
He and Fielding tried another application for the bubble material -- greenhouse insulation. Yet it was Frederick Bowers, an employee of the engineers' fledgling company, who pitched the material, originally called Air Cap, to IBM in 1960 as packaging protection for its 1401 Data Processing System.
Rohn Shellenberger, Sealed Air business manager for air cellular products, at the company's plant in Saddle Brook in 2010, the 50th anniversary of Bubble Wrap, which hit the market in 1960. (Christopher Barth/AP)"IBM was one of the first large users of the product," Weiss says. From there, Sealed Air took off, supplanting scrunched-up paper as a cushion for valuables. Until 2014, when Sealed Air announced a move to Charlotte, N.C., the company was headquartered in Elmwood Park, where Sealed Air still has an office. More than half of about 180 jobs there moved to the Charlotte office. Nearby, in Saddle Brook, there's also a manufacturing facility.
Weiss, who is based in Danbury, Conn., says the company has no plans to move out of Saddle Brook.
"It's a very important part of our business, the New York metro area market," he says. "That plant services that area."
Stress-busting technology, playtime staple
The Jersey-made invention changed the way people looked at getting boxes in the mail, and, because of its reliable pop, became an everyday therapeutic tool. Stress was no match for its indefatigable whimsy. In 1997, Farrah Fawcett covered Playboy wrapped in the stuff.
"We're sorry that Sealed Air left," says Richard Goldberg, mayor of Hawthorne (a patent for "laminated cellular material" filed in 1963 lists the company as being based in the Passaic County borough). "We wish they were still here but we take the legacy. It worked as both a great cushion and a great play toy when we were young."
Just like eating or watching TV, popping the wrap acts as a form of distraction, says Joseph Luciani, a psychologist in Cresskill. Defying the notion that something has to be in a box besides the packaging, Sealed Air actually sells "anti-stress boxes" of Bubble Wrap on Amazon for that very purpose.
Some after-school Bubble Wrap popping in Hawthorne, where the material was invented. (Amy Kuperinsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)"I think that when we're feeling somewhat out of control, it is a tension reliever," he says. "It's constricted air, kind of like how our head feels when we're filled with worry or tension." But there's also an unruly appeal to the pop -- "The child in all of us was told, 'Don't break that, don't step on this!' When given the opportunity to let that naughty side come forward, there's something very pleasurable," Luciani says.
Eileen Kennedy-Moore, a Princeton psychologist, says the use of Bubble Wrap for stress relief applies to all ages.
"When kids get upset, one of the strategies is to come up with a whole bunch of sensory activities," she says, the idea being to pull them out of the "swirl" of bad thoughts.
Allen Weg, a psychologist with Stress and Anxiety Services of New Jersey in East Brunswick and Springfield, uses Bubble Wrap as one prop in his toolkit for treating trichotillomania (compulsive hair-pulling) and excoriation disorder (compulsive skin picking). "We keep a small collection in the office," he says. "They just have an urge to fiddle with something. It's a grounding technique."
Roberto Ramos, Sealed Air production manager, surveyed giant rolls of Bubble Wrap at the company's plant in Saddle Brook in 2010. (Christopher Barth/AP)Keeping the Bubble inflated
Of course, it helps if there is actually something to pop. The patent for the original Air Cap material has long since expired, meaning there are plenty of rival wraps and cushions. But Bubble Wrap, made from polyethylene resin -- layers of film are sucked into bubbles -- also uses nylon to ensure the constitution of the "barrier" bubbles. Other products, Weiss says, are "non-barrier bubble."
"We try to protect the brand and Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day is part of that," he says.
Helping the company in its pursuit are people like Eric Buss, a "comedy magician" based in Burbank, Calif., whose 2013 Bubble Wrap video went viral within a week. Then a sleep-deprived new father, Buss would build props when he had a spare hour. He affixed a large roll of the wrap -- 375 feet long -- to the front of his bicycle, and as he pedaled, the wrap unraveled to the street in a plastic trail. "Jealous much?" he asks in the video, as the bike's wheels create a rapid series of pops that sound more like a weed wacker.
Buss consequently became the first inductee to the Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day Hall of Fame. What do honorees get? More Bubble Wrap, of course.
"It's just satisfying," Buss says. "If you were told to pop a room full of balloons and you were given a needle, that would be pretty exciting. I think Bubble Wrap is a small version of that."
For their role in creating the cushioning that would transcend the shipping industry, the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame inducted Chavannes and Fielding in 1993. The hall currently has no physical home, but Eric Bleich, a member of the board of trustees, says he can dream.
"I would think Bubble Wrap would certainly be a great exhibit if we did."
Read more Bubble Wrap facts and ideas here.
Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup. Find NJ.com Entertainment on Facebook.