MADE IN LONG BEACH: “SIGN HERE”
By Brittany Hart Scholten | Photo submitted by Nancy Thomas
In offices everywhere, brightly colored tabs stick out from documents, telling you exactly where to sign. But where did this commonplace object come from? The “Sign Here” tab traces back to a Long Beach woman working to solve an everyday problem.
In the 1960s, Barbara Thomas worked in hospital medical records at Los Alamitos Medical Center, where clerks were responsible for making sure doctors signed every required line in a patient’s chart. That meant physically standing alongside doctors, flipping page after page, showing them each line that required a signature. “That took a lot of time, as you can imagine," Thomas' daughter Nancy recalled.
The fix arrived by accident. While decorating for a hospital holiday party, Barbara dropped a piece of colored tape onto a medical chart. Worried it would damage the paper, she carefully peeled it away. “It didn’t tear the paper, and a lightbulb went off for my mom,” Nancy said.
That small moment became a big idea: a removable strip of colored tape, stuck to the edge of a page, flagging exactly where a signature was needed.
Barbara began making colorful tabs herself in 1968 and taking them to doctor’s offices. Word spread fast. When the demand grew, Barbara found a manufacturer, borrowed $5,000 from her parents, and launched her own company–with high schoolers helping her package the tabs. Barbara went on to quit her hospital job and pursue selling the tabs full-time, eventually seeing them become a regular fixture in hospitals across the United States, Canada, Japan and Germany.
What began as a solution to a tedious hospital task grew into a family business whose products would eventually be shipped worldwide. “When I took over the business, we enlarged the tags and started printing things on them, like ‘Sign Here,’” Nancy said.
And when people asked Barbara what it was like to start a business as a woman, she had a characteristically quick response: “I don't know, I’ve never started a business as a man.”
Do you know any inventions or products that were “Made in Long Beach?” Let us know by emailing office@lb908.com
Comments