(FORTUNE Magazine) – EIGHT LONG YEARS a bridesmaid, Rubbermaid, in 1993, finally caught the vulcanized bouquet. Since 1985 she has sat among the ten most admired in FORTUNE's survey. For five of the past six, she hugged second place. Now at last: the altar. She got there in a year that left many industry rivals in the lurch: Bandag, Standard Products, Premark International, and Cooper Tire -- all lost points. But Rubbermaid prevailed, and did so after weathering the sort of management transition that might have given vapors to a flimsier competitor. Management could scarcely have been steadier than it was during the decade in which Stanley Gault and Rubbermaid were synonymous (1980-91). Even earlier, Gault's father had helped found Wooster Rubber Co. of Wooster, Ohio, maker of toy balloons and dustpans -- the company that became Rubbermaid. After a career at General Electric, in which he lost out to Jack Welch for the top job, Stanley Gault became CEO of Rubbermaid in 1980, establishing a record that will forever challenge all successors: profit increases of 14% and share price increases of more than 25% annually, on average. He retired in 1991 and within several weeks became CEO of Goodyear. His first successor, Walter Williams, resigned unexpectedly after only 18 months, following examination by outside directors of cost overruns by consultants and suppliers. Though Williams and the company say he left for personal reasons, few in Wooster buy it. ''Nobody believes that,'' says a local resident who serves with Gault on several Wooster boards. Rumors as to what really happened abound, including: Williams was bounced for business improprieties; he wasn't delivering results quickly enough to suit Gault (who still chairs Rubbermaid's executive committee); he got himself in trouble by building a house bigger than Gault's. Don't laugh. No homes in Wooster are big by Trump standards, but Williams's, at almost 10,000 square feet (bigger than two basketball courts), is twice the size of Gault's -- this in a community whose credo might as well be Thou Shalt Not Flaunt. Williams now has no relationship with Rubbermaid and receives no company payments other than his pension. Wolfgang Schmitt replaced him in November 1992. Gault returned temporarily to ride shotgun with Schmitt as co-chairman. His return reassured security analysts, and Rubbermaid stock expressed nary a hiccup. Gault's shoes may be big (10 1/2 C), but Schmitt (11 D) is filling them quite nicely. Sales and earnings last year, $1.8 billion and $184.2 million, respectively, set records. German-born but Ohio-raised since age 10, when his family immigrated, Schmitt betrays a slight German accent. Company nicknames for him include Submarine Commander. His computer's screen-saver depicts a U- boat whose hull reads Sea Wolf. His only criticism of the software, he says, is that he can't make it fire torpedoes. One can still see in him, fit at 49, the local high schooler who set a record for the 180-yard low hurdles that still stands. Hurdles he has set for Rubbermaid include entering a new product category % every 12 to 18 months (hardware cabinets and garden sheds, most recently), getting 33% of sales from products introduced in the past five years, and by the year 2000 getting 25% of total revenues from markets outside the U.S. (18% currently). As with everyone at Rubbermaid, Schmitt's wholesomeness is tangible. Get into his car, and you smell gingersnaps. Gault's presence lingers. He resides in Wooster, commuting 45 minutes to Akron and his Goodyear office. Woosterians wonder, with Gault still on the board, who's really running Rubbermaid. The answer isn't important. Rubbermaid depends on no one person, no one product. That's its strength. Says Richard Gates, head of Rubbermaid business development: ''We don't have to depend on next year's Cabbage Patch doll.'' Instead they depend on making small improvements to some 5,000 unspectacular products: mailboxes, window boxes, storage boxes, toys, mops, dust mitts, spatulas, snap-together furniture, desk organizers, stepstools, wall coverings, playhouses, drink coasters, lint brushes, ice cube trays, stadium seats, garbage pails, bathmats, sporting goods, dinnerware, playground equipment, laundry hampers, dish drainers (pause to inhale), and more. Recently, for example, they took a mop bucket, added an antimicrobial agent to its plastic, and -- voila! -- the only antimicrobial mop bucket on the market. Famous for fecundity, Rubbermaid is known as a new-product machine. Last year it churned out new (not just improved) products at the rate of one a day. No one would admire that, of course, if the products bombed. Few do. Nine out of ten, says Schmitt, hit their commercial targets. The company habitually pumps 14% of profits into R&D. Admits a competitor in the cookware business: ''They're in a class by themselves.'' How they got there can best be understood by visiting their home turf of Wooster. NOT FASCINATING, but nice,'' is how a resident describes the town (pop. 22,000). There are no gangs, few drugs, and lots of Republicans. At the plant, the dedication of Rubbermaid workers comes across in the way they sweat the smallest details of products others might not take seriously. In the design studio at the company's Home Products division, young engineers pore over blueprints of beverage coolers and sandwich keepers with the same intensity General Dynamics might bring to an F-111. Scott Miller, 26, a friendly, pudgy, can-do guy with a crew cut, is working on a bath duck. ''It's a tub for children, shaped like a duck. I'm working on ! the squirter unit -- a little ducklike figurine that, when you squeeze it, sucks water up from the bath and creates a spray.'' Next to him, trash-can engineers are hunkered down over blueprints of -- what else? -- trash cans, making sure every detail is correct before new models are shipped to the International Housewares Show. All told, Rubbermaid will send about 100 new products to this one show. Most ideas for products flow from a single source: teams. Twenty teams, each made up of five to seven people (one each from marketing, manufacturing, R&D, finance, and other departments), focus on specific product lines, such as bathroom accessories. So successful has been the team approach to innovation that Dick Gates fears to contemplate a world without it. ''If we weren't organized that way,'' he says, a look of concern spreading over his face, ''who would be thinking about ice cube trays? Who would be thinking about johnny mops?'' Hey, you little trays and johnny mops -- rest easy. Rubbermaid has got you covered. Covered, too, are birdhouses (the company makes 25 models, one with a Spanish tile roof) and dustpans. The company's original rubber dustpan is protected, behind glass, at headquarters. Asked if he doesn't find these products sort of, well, embarrassing, Schmitt says flatly: no. Rubbermaid is a company that has met mundanity head-on. It profits by taking seriously the prosaic products others dismiss as trivial. Case in point: mailboxes -- the kind that sit atop a post. What could be done to improve them? Who would think about improving them? A team at Rubbermaid. The company's model has a double-wide floor that lets magazines lie flat and a little flag that pops up, automatically, to show homeowners their mail has arrived. Even Rubbermaid top management has acquired the habit of seeing new product ideas everywhere. When Schmitt and Gates visited London recently, they found themselves forced to disagree with Fred Astaire: The British Museum had not lost its charm. From an exhibit of Egyptian antiquities they came away with 11 product ideas. Gates says admiringly of the ancients, ''They used a lot of kitchen utensils, some of which were very nice. Nice designs.'' So impressive is Rubbermaid's torrent of new products that it obscures the company's other strengths. Like salesmanship. Rubbermaid is slicker than you think: The company promoted a new line of makeup organizers for teenage girls last year by giving away a free CD with every one. Rubbermaid can play environmental heartstrings like a zither: The product line includes Litterless Lunchboxes (whose many containers make further wrapping of food in plastic redundant) and Sip 'n Saver drink bottles that do permanently what disposable drink boxes do so transiently. Inside the 30-acre Home Products Division factory in Wooster, Big Bertha, a 3,000-ton Cincinnati Milacron press, is spitting out powder-blue laundry baskets (ergonomically engineered to fit against the waist for easy carrying). Every 45 seconds . . . phwat! another basket drops to a conveyor belt. And then there's the Old Rubber Line. Blue and pink bricks of rubber are being turned into, respectively, drain-board trays and bathmats -- among the few rubber products Rubbermaid still makes. ''They like that rubber,'' says President and COO Chuck Carroll, referring to a bunch of ladies turning out bathmats. ''The people back here never move out. They love it.'' I asked if he meant this literally. ''Well, maybe not love.'' The air smells sulfurous. A fine white dust, found nowhere else in the plant, coats the floor and all machinery. What little entertainment there is comes from the machine pooping out the rubber bricks, which repeats, over and over, a sequence of noises that would have given Mel Blanc a reason to live: farts, tweets, hisses of live steam, sighs. The United Rubber Workers Union uses the phrase ''no picnic'' to describe its dealings with Rubbermaid; Wooster's is the only one of the company's U.S. plants to employ unionized workers. Life is more congenial in the Customer Center, which hosts some 110 major retail customers each year, including the biggest -- Wal-Mart -- which accounts for 14% of Rubbermaid's sales. Each gets the same basic pitch: Let us help you sell more; we've got what consumers want. At the end of the presentation, drapes whisk open, revealing: samples of what Rubbermaid makes! (No dancing girls.) Every visitor, no matter how sophisticated, says the same thing at the same time: I had no idea you made so much stuff. Then it's on to the War Room, where Rubbermaid keeps samples of competing products, the better to point out their deficiencies. For example, other food- storage boxes often lack a little protrusion on the lid that makes opening them easier. Next, the Best Practices Room, where retailers can see various product mixes and displays. By showing retailers how they can increase sales up to 40% by giving Rubbermaid a little Lebensraum, many retail chains, ! including Venture and Wal-Mart, have let the company establish what amounts to stores within their stores. Rubbermaid's success rate in introducing more than 365 new products a year seems more incredible when you consider that the company does no market testing. None. Focus groups, yes. Twelve bass fishermen critiqued a new tacklebox. But actual market testing, no. Schmitt doesn't believe in it. ''We don't want to be copied. It's not that much riskier to just roll it out. Plus, it puts pressure on us to do it right the first time.'' IT'S NOT THAT Rubbermaid hasn't put out some duds. Schmitt, when a product manager, was responsible for one: a plastic dinghy that sank when it hit the market. But the fact that few competitors can list many such flops suggests that winning the admiration of one's peers may require something more than putting one's best foot forward. It may require keeping one's deformed feet, if any, decorously shod. Leaving town late on a winter's afternoon, I asked my Rubbermaid company driver to take me past the homes of the three men who had led Rubbermaid to admiration's altar. The Gault, Williams, and Schmitt homes all face the same street, separated by only a few lots. Gault's is sunny, dignified -- a colonial in straw-colored brick. At the end of its crescent driveway: a Rubbermaid mailbox. Schmitt's, with a small pond guaranteed to delight 8-year-old Clay, youngest of Schmitt's three sons, is ranch-style, its wooden siding dyed the blue of a Rubbermaid dish drainer. And, at the end of its driveway: a Rubbermaid mailbox. Enroute to Williams's house, I made my driver a small bet: ''Twenty-five cents says Williams doesn't have the same mailbox.'' He shrugged. The Williams home hove slowly into view -- huge, hulking, dark -- its peaked roofs surmounted by thick chimney pots. ''She's a big 'un, all right,'' my driver said. ''Don't know how many square feet. Thousands and thousands of 'em, though.'' The sun was setting, yet no light shone from within. In the gloaming, I could barely see the mailbox. Let's just say that, if you're ever in Wooster, it's a mistake to bet against Rubbermaid.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: FORTUNE CHART CAPTION: RUBBERMAID CLEANS UP Only two other companies have ranked No. 1 since the survey began; Rubbermaid has been No. 2 for five of the past six years. A complete ranking of all 404 companies in the Most Admired survey, plus their standings within their industries, follows this article.