Bic Cristal pen manufacturd by Societe PPA, 1950, pp.126 - 129 Polypropylene Chair designed by Robin Day, 1960-1963. pp. 130-131

These two chapters explore the development of two products and the reasons why they have acquired iconic status.

The Bic Cristal pen has been with us for more than sixty years. When launched, an average of 10,000 were sold daily in France. Now many millions are sold daily in more than 160 countries. Few brands share such logevity or geographical penetration, and no other pen has sold in such abundance. Its iconicity is further evidenced by its addition to leading museum collections,including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2001, and the Pompidou Centre, Paris,in 2006, and its inclusion in such design compendiums as 'Phaidon Design Classics', 2006. Significcant also is its use as inspiration for the design of other artefacts, as in the lamp illustrated.

The Polypropylene chair was immeditately recogised as something special. Within weeks of its launch in April 1963 the 'Architects' Journal' reported: 'This excellent solution to the multipurpose side chair will certainly prove to be the most significant development in British mass produced design since the war'. The same year it won the Duke of Edinburgh's Award for elegant design, a first for a plastic product, and was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the UK's national museum of art and design. Nonetheless, no one could have foreseen its prolific future: that it would come to be manufactured globally in mulitiple millions, that it would be used in such diverse locations as Mexico's Olympic stadium and in Botswana in dug-out tree trunk canoes; that it would be widely copied and that it would still be in production and seen as 'of today', fifty years later. Its literal stamp of approval was its appearance on a Royal Mail first class stamp in a 2009 series, British Design Classics.