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The five-year-old Indian Refining Company already had a refinery in Lawrenceville, Illinois, where it could begin producing Havoline® lubricants. To support product sales, Indian advertised Havoline Motor Oil as the “most highly filtered oil made in this country” and boasted: “Most of the owners of high class cars will use nothing else.”
By the following year, the Havoline® brand gained additional publicity when it was chosen as the lubricant to be used in the first coast-to-coast flight across the United States. The pilot, Calbraith Perry Rodgers was a former football player whose grandfather, Commodore Oliver Perry, had been a naval hero in the War of 1812. After limited flying experience, which included 90 minutes of lessons from inventor Orville Wright, Rodgers acquired a long-wing Wright EX plane and induced the Armour Company to be his sponsor on the cross-country journey. Flying without instruments, he set off from Sheepshead Bay, N.Y., dressed in a business suit and tie. When he finally landed seven weeks later in Pasadena, Calif., 20,000 people were on hand to watch him set down. Rodgers’ adventure proved to be grist for Havoline’s advertising mill.
As Indian Refining Company expanded the range of its oils for special uses, from Havoline® Aeroline Oil to two kinds of tractor oils, it also revamped its look, adopting blue and red Havoline brand signs, while retaining the bull’s-eye in the center of the “O” in “HAVOLINE.” The new products and design were part of an overall growth strategy, as the company widened its U.S. markets and moved into Europe, promoting the reputation of its Havoline lubricants. Ads in publications such as the Saturday Evening Post and Literary Digest boasted that “each grade is made ‘from the cream of the crude’” and that “275 automobile manufacturers out of 300 endorse Havoline Oil for greater mileage, less carbon and better lubrication.”
However, by 1915, it was clear that Indian had tried to do too much, too soon, and the overextended company was forced to reorganize and streamline its operations. It sold inefficient refineries, centralized operations and abandoned its European gasoline and kerosene markets, though it retained its international marketing of Havoline products. The core of its sales region remained in about 150 cities, concentrated in the large and profitable Havoline lubricant sales, chiefly east of the Mississippi River.
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