A century ago, such a journey for Ansell would have been not only unthinkable but impossible under Dunlop's then company rules. Even 20 years ago, when Ansell began making its mark, it would have been considered highly unlikely. Eric Ansell, who started the company in 1905, might today be contemplating from his grave the delicious irony of his name replacing the once-great Dunlop brand: Ansell was the company Dunlop initially rejected and now it has its ultimate revenge. Soon after jumping ship in Melbourne in 1902, Eric Ansell was working at Dunlop's rubber factory in South Melbourne. It was a huge factory making tyres, hoses, clothing and condoms.



Dunlop's chairman, Nicholas Fitzgerald, was a strict Catholic with a papal knighthood. It was Fitzgerald who decided he did not want to be associated with a company that made condoms. He went so far as to include an edict to that effect in the company minutes - a dictum that would have to be removed more than 60 years later when Dunlop bought back Ansell. In 1905, Eric Ansell watched as the condom-making machines were removed from the Dunlop factory and dumped in a vacant lot next door. Sensing an opportunity, he made the company an offer, immediately accepted, to buy the machinery. Ansell installed the machinery in his rented Richmond house and resigned from Dunlop to begin his entrepreneurial career.

A few years later, he rented a small factory and began making other rubber goods, including gloves. By the 1930s the company had moved twice into bigger premises but stayed in Richmond - Ansell's home base until the end of the 1980s. A book on Ansell's history produced by the company more than a decade ago illustrates what a tough taskmaster Eric Ansell was. "It was very tough working for him. He was, by nature, suspicious and aware of money to the last penny. He could be quite ruthless, quite capable of sacking anyone who did not come up to his mark. This uncompromising approach was handed down to Eric's sons (Lloyd and Harvey)." The other memory that former employees have of the company's patriarch is how well-dressed he always was in his tailored three-piece suits.

Both of Eric's sons were quickly introduced into the business and had decades of experience in the rubber goods market by the time Eric died in 1952. It was Lloyd who got the company exporting and fully automated, and Harvey who perfected the manufacture of high-quality, long-lasting rubber gloves for use in the home or factory. By the late 1960s the brothers were ageing and it was then that Dunlop became interested again in the company. By 1969 they had accepted Dunlop's takeover offer. Lloyd retired soon after, but Harvey stayed on as chairman for a few years, working with the then newly appointed managing director Ian Dicker.

These days, Dicker is well known as president of Hawthorn Football Club, but for 15 years he ran Ansell and expanded it from a company that turned over $12 million when he started into a global empire. Having taken over from the family, Dicker as a young man in his 30s sought to impress on the family that their company was in safe hands. He sought outside help from a group of eminent business leaders and together they formed a strategic committee to help chart Ansell's fortunes. The decision was made early by Dicker & Co that they had to turn Ansell from a company name into a brand. Back then, the company controlled 90 per cent of the household rubber-glove market, but the product was known as the "Silverlined" washing-up glove rather than anything Ansell produced. Dicker decided to put the Ansell name on the gloves, and when the company started making surgical gloves a few years later, the name went prominently on the glove's back sleeve so it would become well known in medical circles.

Dicker also researched and embraced the move for Ansell to set up factories in Malaysia in 1976, the company's first foray into offshore production. But before the board approved it, Dicker took Lloyd Ansell on a tour of the country to convince him of the merits of the move. In 1981, Dicker engineered the company's major overseas expansion when it took over Akwell, the world's largest condom maker, based in Alabama.

The American company was losing $US500,000 a year, but Dicker turned it around by charging slightly higher prices for the condoms and negotiating with the US Government for it to use Akwell's products in its overseas welfare bureaus, which promoted family planning in disadvantaged countries. Within a few years the technology used in the Alabama factory had been exported back to Asia as Dicker opened more factories in Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Harvey Ansell survived long enough to see the expansion in his father's old company, passing away in 1984 at the age of 79 - a luxury that Lloyd largely missed out on, dying in 1978. Today, Ansell turns over $1.4 billion and is such a cash converter it has become the sole operating asset in the restructured Pacific Dunlop.

"The transformation of the Ansell name has been remarkable. When it was a private company, the family didn't want a high profile, so they kept the name low-key," says Dicker, who retired as the MD of Ansell International in 1989. "Today everyone knows the Ansell name, yet almost no one knew it when I took over. So the decision to lift the Ansell name has been a key part of its success in becoming a brand." In 1976, Dicker and a group of his management team sat down and wrote a strategy paper to chart a course for the company through the 1980s. The document makes fascinating reading because many of its hopes and ambitions for international growth eventuated.

But on the front cover, Dicker wrote a simple message that Pacific Dunlop will be hoping to emulate under its new name: "Strategy: The art of moving resources so as to dictate to the enemy the time and conditions for fighting that we prefer."