The Trapper Keeper was a well-organized loose-leaf binder, market research by a Harvard MBA serving at the paper business titan Mead. It instantly filled the space that was recognized, and its brand became identical with its class; the company told The Oregonian in 1989 that half of the students in grades six through 12 owned one. But ultimately, school officials concluded the Trapper Keeper was too big.

Not too powerful, just, like, too physically huge. And at the same time, shelf range in big-box stores and the back-to-school shopping season both started to narrow.

Spot On: Here is a trapper keeper game you will love

“It was the most scientific and pragmatically planned product ever in that industry,” Trapper Keeper creator E. Bryant Crutchfield told Mental Floss in 2013. Crutchfield was the leader of new ventures at Mead and part of a new generation at the company that in the 1960s was transitioning from an “informal family management style” to an “executive corps dominated by men trained at the Harvard Business School.“

Trend Analysis

As director of New Ventures at Mead, part of Crutchfield’s job was to recognize trends in the marketplace. In 1972, Crutchfield’s study, conducted with someone at Harvard, showed there would be more students per classroom in the coming years. Those students were taking more classes and had smaller lockers.

When Crutchfield’s analysis uncovered that purchases of portfolios, or folders, were growing at 30 percent a year, Fast forward a few years. Thinking back to that Harvard report, a lightbulb went off. “You can’t take six 150-page notebooks around with you, and you can’t interchange them,” Crutchfield says. “People were using more portfolios, so I wanted to make a notebook that would hold portfolios, and they could take that to six classes.”

Top Pick: Mead Trapper Keeper 2-Pocket 

Crutchfield spoke with his West Coast sales spokesperson about what he intended to do when another piece fell into place. Portfolios in notebooks were a fabulous idea, the rep said, but why not make the pockets vertical rather than horizontal?

Folders with vertical pockets, described as PeeChees (as in, peachy keen), had been around since the 1940s and were sold on the West Coast, but they had never made the leap across the Rockies—so Crutchfield was uncertain. “I said, ‘They only sell on the West Coast, and what’s the real benefit of a vertical pocket?‘” Crutchfield remembers. “When you close it up, the papers are trapped inside—they can’t fall out. If you’ve got a horizontal pocket portfolio, you turn it upside down, and zap! [The papers] fall out,” The rep said.

Crutchfield was satisfied and got to work. First, he used sketches of the portfolios and notebooks to a group of teachers to determine if there was really a demand for that kind of thing. The group said that student organization was a significant problem, and the teachers would welcome any product that would support that regard.

Next, Crutchfield built a physical mock-up. Unlike the PeeChee—which had straight up-and-down vertical pockets—Crutchfield’s portfolios had angled pockets, with multiplication tables, weight conversions, and rulers on them. “It was like a textbook inside,” he said. Then he created a three-ring binder that held those portfolios and closed with a flap. Students could drop the notebook, and the materials would stay securely in place.

Name of the Product

So Crutchfield had a mock-up of his product, but he still did not have a title. That came from his analysis and development manager, Jon Wyant. “I said, ‘I need a name for this damn thing. Have you got any ideas?‘” Crutchfield remembers. The following day, they were sipping a martini with lunch when Wyant said, “Let’s call the portfolio the Trapper.”

“What are we going to call the notebook?” Crutchfield asked. “The Trapper Keeper,“ Wyant replied.

“Bang!” Crutchfield says. “It made sense!” And that was that.

With his product called, and a prototype created (the “Trapper Keeper” logo attached on in press-on-type, and the design—soccer players—held on with tape), Crutchfield went to the next step: more focus group experiment. He and other Mead representatives went to schools with the Trappers and Trapper Keeper, asking for students and teachers to give feedback. He also looked for input a little closer to home, from his 13-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son: “I had access to what they were doing in school,” he says, “and I saw their lockers and talked to their teachers.“

For about a year, Crutchfield conducted interviews and focus groups, tweaking the design of the Trapper Keeper along the way. “There were probably five or six iterations,” he says. And once he was pleased with the result—a PVC binder with plastic, pinch less rings (they slid open to the side instead of snapping open), a clip that held a pad and a pencil, and flap held firmly closed by a snap—it was time to go a test market, which would help them discover if the product was genuinely viable.

The preferred test market was Wichita, Kansas. In August 1978, Mead aired the commercial there and rolled out its Trapper portfolios and Trapper Keepers. What happened next was unexpected: “It sold out completely,” Crutchfield says.

Inside each Trapper Keeper (which came with a few Trapper folders) was a feedback paper; if kids sent it in, Mead would give them a complimentary notebook. Approximately 1500 cards were recovered, and they explained that it was not just kids getting the Trapper Keepers: Grown-ups were also purchasing it for record and receipt keeping.

After analyzing the test market outcomes, it was evident that Mead had success on its hands. Crutchfield told Bob Crandall, the regional sales manager, “This might be the most fantastic product we’ve ever launched. I think it’s going to shake up the school supplies market.“

Improving and Developing

In its third year on store shelves, Trapper Keeper sales were still going strong. It was at that point that Mead made a design change, substituting the metal snap with Velcro. Crutchfield designed a model for that, too, and pulled it out of his attic for his conversation with Mental Floss. “The only difference is that it’s got Velcro stuck on there, and it’s dusty!” he says. The cover design was a waterfall—a photo Crutchfield had snapped himself in the mountains of North Carolina.

Even though Velcro was a hot material at the time, substituting the snap with it made sense for many reasons beyond that, Crutchfield remembers. One was the fact that “people had trouble finding the center of the snap to snap it,” he says. The other had to do with manufacturing. “Snaps were a lot harder—you have to put [the binder] through a machine twice to put the snap in there. Velcro was a lot easier to apply.”

Though the Trapper folders remained virtually constant through the years, the Trapper Keeper developed as student needs evolved. That development included new designs—everything from cool cars to unicorns—which were introduced annually.

In 1988, Mead introduced the Trapper Keeper designer series—fashionable, funky, and sometimes psychedelic designs on the binders and folders until 1995. “Mead employed a large amount of local illustrators to provide early artwork,” Peter Bartlett, former director of product innovation at ACCO Brands and now a professor of design management at Savannah College of Art and Design, tells Mental Floss. The company also got a contract with Lisa Frank and put her ideas on Trappers and Trapper Keepers and licensed iconic characters like Garfield and Sonic the Hedgehog for the binders. Even Lamborghini got in on the action, granting its blessing to put some of its cars on the Trapper Keeper.

Anything as successful as the Trapper Keeper will almost certainly face a reaction—but in this case, the backlash did not come from students. Crutchfield recognizes that some teachers made an objection about the multiplication and conversion tables, which they said could encourage students to cheat. “It was a controversy at one time,” he says. “One teacher said, ‘Hell, we can take the portfolios away from them while they’re doing their tests.’ Most of the teachers were very honest and said, ‘Anything that helps me pound it in their head is good.‘”

Mention Trapper Keepers to your friends, and you will inevitably hear from someone who desperately needed one, but couldn’t have it because their school banned it. “The Trapper Keeper started to show up on some class lists as a ‘do not purchase’ because [teachers] didn’t like the noise of that Velcro,” Bartlett says. “[So] we switched from Velcro back to a snap.“

But in some cases, the binders that schools were calling Trapper Keepers and banning weren’t Trapper Keepers. “Our research has shown that what they’re calling Trapper Keepers, [are actually] these big sewn binders that are three to four inches thick and can’t fit into a small school desk,” Bartlett says. “That’s the reason they’re on the list. When you show [the teachers] a real Trapper Keeper, with a very slim, one-inch ring fixture, it’s like, ‘Oh no, that’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t have any problem with that!‘”

Though it became less successful after the mid-1990s, the Trapper Keeper has survived an essential part of Mead’s back-to-school line of products—though it has experienced some changes. “The main change is that we went away from PVC, as most health-conscious companies are trying to do,” Bartlett says. “So it looks slightly different because it’s made out of polypropylene and sewn fabric, but the function is essentially the same.” One line, which was introduced in 2007 and ready for a year, was even customizable. “They had a clear piece of plastic in the front,” says Richard Harris, former program manager of industrial design at ACCO. “There was a printed pattern behind it, but then you could put whatever you wanted in that clear sleeve in the front.“

But the modern, mind-blowing designs of the early 1990s are not as big a focus in the Trapper Keeper line these days. “Trapper has evolved a little bit to relying strongly on a color-coding system of organization for students,” Bartlett says. But it’s not all work and no play: After a product relaunch in 2014, the company added new Trapper Keeper designs, including Star Wars and Hello Kitty, in 2015.

The Legacy Of Trapper Keeper

Why do people still love the Trapper Keeper, many decades after they last had one? For Bartlett, it all boils down to what the Trapper Keeper let kids do—and he is not talking about keeping organized. “It was fun to be able to show your personality through the binder that you had,” Bartlett says. “You don’t really remember a notebook or the pens and pencils you used. But maybe you remember your [Trapper Keeper].” Harris says that the binder “wasn’t a regular school product. When you got it, it was almost like a Christmas present. You were excited to have it.“

It’s also a famous pop-culture touchstone: Trapper Keepers have been featured on Family Guy, South Park, Full House, Stranger Things, and Napoleon Dynamite. They were changed into a Trivial Pursuit game piece. John Mayer called Trapper Keepers “the genesis of OCD for my generation.“

These organizational tools would describe childhoods across North America and adults who had them recognize their Trapper Keepers fondly. (And those who did not have them often remember exactly which one they wanted.) Joshua Fruhlinger at Engadget called it “the greatest three-ring binder ever created … Trapper Keepers—the way they combined all of one’s desktop tools—were an early incarnation of the smartphone.” There is a strong business in vintage Trapper Keepers on eBay, where new binders with tags start at $150 (those in good condition are priced at $75).

But even the man who invented it all can only guess why his product became more than just a school supply to a generation of kids. “When I first went to work, all school products were drab and boring,” Crutchfield says. “[Trapper Keepers were] more functional and more attractive, with oodles of choices—therefore fun to have. And I had a lot of fun making them fun!“