While its business is known for wiping and tossing, Rebel Converting has made its mission to collect and now display the history of the wipes from the past 75 years. From rare one-of-a-kind wipes to products most people have in their house today, every kind of wipe imaginable makes up the wipes museum inside the corporate offices.
Owner and “Rebel Rouser” Mike Kryshak has been in the wipes business for more than 30 years and has been archiving wipe products since the beginning. Rather than storing this history, he’s now put it on display for anyone to see. While it might sound like a strange subject matter for a museum, it’s surprising how wipes have infiltrated consumer lives from all different angles.
There are various sections of wipes dedicated by their end use: auto, facial, medical, disinfectant, baby, household, commercial and industrial cleaning, as well as sections dedicated to the prototypes to present of products like Wet Ones, Clorox and Lysol disinfecting wipes, Method Home, Purell shopping cart wipes and many others. The most exciting wipes are behind glass and identified as rare wipes – this is where you’ll find the wipes that traveled with Eileen Collins, the first female commander of a space shuttle (Columbia STS-93) into outer space, the first wipes used in hospitals to bath patients as well as the first “Windex Wipe.” Kryshak not only knows the products inside and out, but he has endless tales of personal anecdotes from working with various people and companies in the industry.
For example, the first-ever makeup remover wipes called What A Face are in a bright yellow package describing themselves as “cosmetic/facial wipes” with the silhouette of a woman on the label. Kryshak goes into the story about how he worked with the woman who came to him with this idea and told the story of how she missed the opportunity to patent. Today, that patent would be worth an incredible amount of money and now store shelves are lined with many different brands and options. As a result, Kryshak keeps provisional patent applications in his desk drawer and regularly emails PDFs of the documents to individuals with novel ideas.
When visiting Milwaukee, walking through a wipes museum may not be the first item on the agenda, but it’s totally worth the stop. Anyone reading this trade magazine naturally has knowledge of the wipes industry, but this museum can surely remind or reveal many hidden gems thoughtfully displayed on its shelves. The museum has more than 10,000 items on display including canisters, peal and reseal packages, tubs and single packs in the collection, all on rows of 40 4×6.5 foot panels. If you’re lucky enough to catch Kryshak while he’s there, be sure to go around with him to hear those wipe anecdotes – it’s surely worth the trip. And he’ll likely dole out some Rebel swag on the way out.
If you’re not in the Milwaukee area and able to come visit Rebel in person, you can visit the Rebel wipes museum at www.rebelconverting.com for a virtual tour.
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