In 1957, an engineer named Al Fielding and a Swiss inventor named Marc Chavannes ran two layers of plastic shower curtain through a heat-sealing machine. The sheet that came out was full of trapped air bubbles. They thought they had invented a new kind of textured wallpaper, something modern for the homes of the late 1950s.

Nobody wanted it. So they tried again. The same plastic, they reasoned, could insulate greenhouses. It did hold in some warmth, but not enough to matter, and growers didn’t buy it either. Two products, two markets, two failures. By most standards, the invention was done.

Fielding and Chavannes didn’t give up on the material. In 1960 they founded a company called Sealed Air to keep working on it, and they kept a running list of possible uses that eventually stretched to hundreds of ideas. But the breakthrough didn’t come from the list. It came from Frederick W. Bowers, a marketer at the company whose job was talking to buyers.

In October 1959, IBM had announced the 1401, one of the first computers sold in real volume to ordinary businesses. That meant IBM suddenly had to ship expensive, fragile machines to customers all over the country. Bowers saw that the bubbled plastic that had failed on walls and greenhouses was exactly what a shipping department needed: light, cheap, and good at absorbing a hit. He pitched it to IBM as packaging. IBM bought it to protect the 1401 and other delicate equipment, and other companies with breakable products followed.

Sealed Air grew into a global packaging company with annual sales in the billions of dollars. The product never changed in any meaningful way. What changed was who was being asked to buy it, and who was doing the asking.