How great brands appeared
Speaking now about world-famous companies and brands, it is sometimes difficult to imagine that their founders were once inexperienced start-up entrepreneurs, global trading networks started from a single small shop, and large-scale production – from small “home” factories. However, the great businessmen of our time were once also young startups that nobody knew.
The history of the emergence of the currently famous brands is mostly interesting and instructive, and in some cases even inspiring to accomplish their own business.
Roy Raymond, being a loving husband, decided to pamper his wife with a gift – a new set of women’s underwear. Alone, having gone to the store, Roy was just confused among the huge number of options that the sellers offered him. Not many of them knew how to work with male buyers, and Roy felt very uncomfortable in all this “female realm” of underwear. He did not manage to pick up a gift, however, an idea was born in his head that became fateful for Raymond. It was the idea of opening your own lingerie store, in which both women and men would feel equally comfortable.
On the implementation of the idea needed 80 thousand dollars. Roy borrowed half of this amount from his friends, half in the bank at interest. Victoria’s Secret’s first store opened at a Stanford shopping center. Women in similar stores feel like fish in water, but sellers were trained separately to work with male buyers. This allowed all the representatives of the stronger sex to feel themselves in such a shop as comfortable as possible. And yes, the idea shot in the first year of work. After a while, Victoria’s Secret began selling through catalogs, which brought Raymond huge profits, and the brand gained worldwide fame.
KFC
Harland Sanders, the founder of KFC’s worldwide fast food chain, began his great business journey rather late. Until his forty years, he had practically no ambitions in terms of entrepreneurship. Having no education (except for six classes of school), Harland worked as a fireman, a conductor, a farm laborer, and a tire seller. He did not stay long in any of these professions. Harland and his wife lived quite poorly.
When he was forty years old, Sanders decided to open a small auto repair shop. The business went well, and after a while the entrepreneur added to the main service a small cafe on the territory of the auto repair shop. Sanders cooked food for clients on his own, and he was especially good at making fried chicken in batter. Very quickly, the fame of the delicious dish in the cafe of a car repair shop spread to the entire town, and even beyond. Sanders cooked chicken according to his own recipe, adding eleven different spices in a certain proportion to it.
The business began to develop not in the way that Sanders expected, nevertheless, very well: most of the clients visited the workshop not to use the auto services, but to try Harlow Sanders’s Kentucky Fried Chicken. A few years later, Sanders opened the Sanders Court & Cafe hotel, in whose territory he housed a restaurant. There he continued to serve his already famous fried chicken in batter, constantly improving the recipe. With the development of the business, Colonel Sanders (this honorary title was given to him by Governor Lafon) began opening his restaurants all over America, calling them KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken).
Victor Mills, a specialist chemist at Procter & Gamble, the daughter has already made three grandchildren happy. A caring grandfather often looked after the babies and looked after them, but, like any other person, he tried in many ways to simplify his chores. When he got tired of changing diapers to his grandchildren several times a day, washing dirty and changing them to clean ones, Mills got the idea: “Why wash, if you can throw it away? However, you won’t get enough diapers like that … ”.
A solution was found – to create a kind of gasket from a material with a good ability to absorb liquid and attach it to the child’s underpants. Having created several options for his salvation from dirty diapers, Victor Mills first tested them on his own grandchildren. After several experiments, the most optimal and convenient variant of the realization of this idea was found. By the way, Mills experimented not only on his grandchildren, but also on his wife and daughter. They helped him test the effectiveness of another of his inventions, toothpaste.
Victor Mills gave the world a product that was able to make life easier for many young parents, and his brand name has long become a household name.
