Robert Taylor, a serial Twin Cities entrepreneur who popularized hand soap from a pump and later teamed with Calvin Klein to create fragrances such as “Obsession” and “Eternity,” died Aug. 29 in Newport Beach, Calif. He was 77.

Taylor built and sold 14 consumer products businesses during a long career, starting in 1964 with Village Bath Products, a company he founded with $3,000 to sell scented, hand-rolled soap balls through gift shops. Working initially out of his west-metro garage, his Minnetonka Corp., based in Chaska, soon was selling more than 100 products through department stores.

The entrepreneur’s life is precarious, and Taylor had to stay ahead of consumer products giants such as Procter & Gamble and Lever Bros., which could move into the market with overpowering force.

In 1978, Minnetonka Corp. introduced SoftSoap, inspired by Taylor’s pondering the mess that bar soap makes in a dish. He launched it with a $7 million ad campaign, and took another precaution to forestall competition from the giants: He ordered 100 million of the little pumps from the only American manufacturers — a year’s worth of inventory — paying 12 cents apiece, according to the Harvard Business Review. The $12 million purchase was a bet-the-company strategy, but it paid off. It was more than a year before other large companies could match his product.

Through the decades, Taylor was constantly introducing products and trying new businesses, and using hard-won expertise in marketing to create demand for products.

“He had a genius mind at creating amazing things,” said Sue Zelickson, an old family friend from Minneapolis. “He would take things that other people wouldn’t even think about and see the joy or the fun — then make them better.”

In 1985, Taylor’s company introduced Obsession by Calvin Klein, a fragrance for women, with artfully erotic ads. They were mini-movies, a kind of existentialist noir, all shadow and strings and word salad. In one, actors spoke such lines as, “When she devoured my very soul, when I had nothing left to surrender, she abandoned me to the wreckage of myself — and smiled.” Print ads showed waifish model Kate Moss topless or nude.

The campaign was lampooned on “Saturday Night Live,” which showed a woman obsessively scrubbing her home. It ended with the lines, “Somewhere between cleanliness and godliness lies Compulsion, the world’s most indulgent disinfectant. From Calvin Kleen.”

“He loved it,” Taylor’s daughter Lori Lawrence said of her father. She recalled him saying, “That’s called free advertising!”

She remembered the financial ups and downs of her childhood.

“He’d buy a Rolls-Royce, and we’d be living large,” she said. “Next thing you know, I was going to be going to private school, and then I’m going to public school — and you roll with it.”

In 1987, Minnetonka Corp. sold its Village Bath, SoftSoap and Sesame Street Bath Products brands to Colgate-Palmolive. Unilever bought the rest of the company two years later for $376 million. In the early 1990s, Taylor moved to California, where he founded Graham Webb International, which sells beauty products to salons. He sold it in 2001 to Wella.

Taylor was as hard-charging on vacations as he was in business. During family vacations, a printed itinerary would be placed on each person’s bed.

His attempts at retirement “lasted two minutes,” Taylor once said, and the lifelong entrepreneur continued working in the catalog and clothing business until he grew sick from the cancer that claimed his life.

Robert Ridgely Taylor was born Sept. 1, 1935, in Baltimore and grew up in Cincinnati. He graduated from Miami University and earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Before starting his own companies, he worked for Johnson & Johnson.

In 1980, he married the former Mary Kay Meneough, who survives him. Besides Lawrence, he also is survived by another daughter, Karen Brandvold, and six grandchildren. A son, David, was killed in an avalanche near Alta, Utah, in 1984. An earlier marriage, to Alice Bovard-Taylor, ended in divorce.

Pioneer Press writer Tom Webb contributed to this report.