The Real People Behind Our Famous Brand Names

Stuckey's

2007-02-12T05:28:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
William Stuckey

Like so many others William Stuckey was desperately searching for a way to make a living during the Depression. In 1931 the 21-year old Stuckey borrowed $35 from his grandmother - her life savings - to peddle pecans.

Stuckey walked from house to house in his native Georgia buying nuts.
If he used up his $35 too early in the day he waited until the banks closed and wrote checks he knew he couldn’t cover. On these days he stayed out selling pecans until he could be at the bank the following morning to cover checks.

Diligently he built his pecan business this way. In 1936 he sold $150,000 worth of pecans. He opened his first candy store in Eastman, a small town in central Georgia, in 1938. Wife Ethel was the candy cook.

When World War II ended Stuckey was one of the first to recognize that Americans would become increasingly mobile. He began building distinctive pecan shops, with blue roofs and red and yellow signs, along the country’s new highways. In addition to enjoying a pecan roll weary motorists could fill up at Stuckey’s pumps as well.

In eight years Stuckey had 29 pecan shops, building his business on extensive billboard advertising. He awarded franchises to friends and employees. “A lot of people in town own interests in the stores,” he boasted at one point. “They all profited by it. There are more Cadillacs in Eastman, Georgia than in any town this size in the South, I reckon.”

Stuckey sold his business, now with 160 stores, to Pet, Inc. in 1964. He stayed with Pet as a vice-president and continued operating the highway stops until 1970 when he retired. Stuckey’s chain had grown to nearly 300 stores by then. Stuckey, a former Georgia state legislator, continued enjoying pecans until his death in 1977.

Sheraton

2007-02-12T05:27:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Thomas Sheraton

Ernest Henderson and Robert Moore took over a failing hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts called the Continental at Depression-bargain prices in 1933.
It seems more money was leaving through the storerooms than walking through the front door. A few padlocks plugged the flow of red ink.

Henderson and Moore bought the Stonehaven Hotel and began dreaming of a chain. Their third hotel was a small residential hostelry in Boston that sported an expensive roof sign with the name in large letters. The cost of changing that electric sign might have been more than the price of the entire property so the name of the fledgling hotel chain became Sheraton.

The original Sheraton hotel was purchased deep in the Depression for $160,000. When it was sold ten years later it carried a price tag of nearly $1,000,000. The Boston Sheraton derived its name from Thomas Sheraton,
the 18th century English furniture designer. But strangely the hotel was never decorated in Sheraton's furniture - it was fitted out in a Hepplewhit motif.

Nathan's

2007-02-12T05:25:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Nathan Handwerker

In 1916 a small rebellion was stirring at Coney Island, New York's fashionable seaside playground. It seems a couple of singing waiters by the name of Durante and Cantor did not like the idea of paying the inflated price of 10¢ for their frankfurters. They urged the young roll-slicer behind the counter to open his own stand and sell hot dogs for a nickel.

Nathan Handwerker was a Polish immigrant who had arrived penniless in New York only four years earlier when Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor implored him to start his own hot dog business. He was working part-time as a delivery boy for the Max's Busy Bee eatery making $4.50 a week. On Sunday afternoons he moonlighted at Coney Island dishing out Charles Feltman's famed 10-cent franks. He decided to take the advice of his show-business friends.

Handwerker took his life savings of $300 and with his new bride, Ida, opened a small open-front stand on the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues. He laced his hot dogs with Ida's secret spice recipe. The nickel franks caught on immediately with the thousands of resort visitors.

Handwerker displayed a natural flair for merchandising. In 1917 competitors spread rumors that Nathan couldn't be selling quality all-beef hot dogs for only a nickel. He fought the accusations by hiring a group of college students to stand around his counter wearing white professional jackets with stethoscopes dangling from their pockets. Word spread that doctors from Coney Island Hospital were taking their meals at Nathan's hot dog stand. The crisis passed.

Customers could always find pretty girls behind Nathan's counters.
Clara Bowtinelli, a gregarious redheaded teenager, served up franks for a short time until one of her customers whisked her away to Hollywood. She would resurface as Clara Bow, one of the most glamorous of all silent film stars.

In 1921 Handwerker finally christened his nameless stand "Nathan's Hot Dogs" after hearing Sophie Tucker perform the hit song "Nathan, Nathan, Why You Waitin'?" Handwerker built Nathan's Famous into the largest hot dog stand in the world, acquiring surrounding property as it grew and expanded.

In 1923 the New York subway reached out to Coney Island and thousands of people streamed off trains from the massive Stillwell terminal and headed for Nathan's across the street. Nathan's became a New York institution. President Rockefeller entertained at Hyde Park with Nathan's "red hots". Nelson Rockefeller told Handwerker during a campaign stop that, "No one can hope to be elected to public office in New York without having his picture taken eating a hot dog at Nathan's."

Nathan's had three restaurants when the company went public in 1968.
The chain of fast food restaurants was quickly expanding when Handwerker semi-retired in 1972. He died two years later at the age of 83 as history's most famous purveyor of hot dogs.

McDonalds

2007-02-12T05:22:00.000-08:00

And the men behind the brand are...
Maurice McDonald and Richard McDonald

By 1954 Ray Kroc was 52 years old. He had finally erased years of debt and struggle by selling Multimixers for milk shakes. He had even achieved a modest prosperity, buying a home in Arlington Heights, Illinois, one of Chicago's poshest suburbs.

One day Kroc received an order for eight Multimixers from a hamburger stand in San Bernadino, California. What was this? Each Multimixer had a capacity for six milkshakes. Kroc wanted to see for himself an operation that needed to make 48 milkshakes at one time.

The McDonald’s hamburger stand was run by Maurice "Mac" McDonald and his brother Richard. They had come to California from New Hampshire in 1928 to work in movies, a calling particularly ill-suited to their dour personalities.
The McDonalds wound up managing a movie theater in Glendora instead.

They sold the theater in 1940 to open a hamburger stand in Pasadena.
For eight years the McDonalds worked out their ideas for a self-service food operation, mostly to eliminate the groups of teenagers that hung around the restaurant. On December 12, 1948 they were ready to test their ideas at a new location in San Bernadino.

San Bernadino, 55 miles east of Los Angeles, was the terminus for famed
Route 66. The town was in the center of post-war prosperity and the exploding automobile mentality. C-rations from World War II had also inoculated less discerning American diners with a homogenized diet.

The McDonald brothers devised an ideal food service operation for the new times. They sliced the menu to only four items: a hamburger with condiments already added that they sold for 15¢, crisp french fries warmed with innovative infrared heat lamps, soft drinks and a 12-ounce milk shake.

Everything the McDonalds did emphasized value, efficiency and speed.
There were no plates, no dishes, no condiments. The brothers were frugal and obsessed with cleanliness. Every part of their restaurant sparkled.
When Ray Kroc arrived with his Multimixers he was astounded:
"They had people standing in line clamoring for hamburgers.
I figured that if every McDonald hamburger place had eight Multimixers,
I would get rich."

Kroc was not the first to be impressed by the McDonalds' operation.
The brothers had cautiously sold six franchises in California but had no interest in growing larger. "More stores, more problems," they told Kroc. They pointed to a nearby hill where Mac, a bachelor, and Dick lived. Their houses and three Cadillacs, one for Dick's wife, were all the McDonalds needed.

The brothers were conservative and suspicious of quick money. Only months before Kroc arrived in 1954 they had turned down another big chain offer.
Neither was interested in Kroc's talk of nationwide franchises. Kroc persisted. Finally he left San Bernadino with a 99-year contract to represent McDonalds exclusively.

The arrangement would not last nearly that long. The taciturn brothers increasingly imposed restrictions on the franchises that Kroc found totally unacceptable. In 1960 he offered $500,000 for everything - trademarks,
the Golden Arches, the name. Dick and Mac countered with $2,700,000 - a figure they had arrived at that would yield each of them a million dollars after taxes.

Kroc was flabbergasted. The only financing he could obtain would eventually cost him $14,000,000 to buy out the McDonalds, which, of course, was still a bargain. The brothers had one more surprise as the final papers were signed - they intended to keep their cherished San Bernadino store.

Kroc did not want to lose the money-churning flagship store but wasn't about to blow the deal over it. Rather he built a gleaming new restaurant directly across the street. It was an exact replica of the brothers' restaurant which they had to re-name "Big M." Soon Mac and Dick McDonald were out of business.

The brothers travelled and returned to Bedford, New Hampshire where they lived out their lives in obscurity as their name became the most famous cultural icon in America.

Marriott

2007-02-12T05:20:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Bill Marriott

The Marriott name is known for its hotels and resorts but it began as, and still primarily is, a food business. John Willard Marriott, known as Bill, was born in 1900. He grew up on the Utah range raising beets, herding sheep and serving the Mormon church. He gained a measure of renown around Ogden when, at the age of 14, he shot two brown bears in one day.

Marriott worked his way through the University of Utah selling woolen sweaters and long underwear in logging camps in the Northwest and when he graduated in 1927 he was ready for his own business. He became intrigued with a root beer he enjoyed during hot summer Utah days. Marriott would drive up to the curb and a waitress would bring out ice-cold mugs of 5¢ root beer to the car.

He learned that a man named Allen and a man named Wright had started
A & W Root Beer a few years earlier in Sacramento, selling only ice-cold root beer at their drive-ins. In the summer a good stand was averaging 5000 mugs a day. So Bill Marriott decided to stake his future to root beer.

He had become enamored with Washington, D.C. during a Mormon mission back east and that was where Marriott headed for his franchise. He leased eight feet of frontage from a baker and opened a nine-seat root beer stand on May 20, 1927 - the same day Lindbergh took off for Europe. Marriott placed a small radio of the countertop and prospective root beer buyers gathered round to hear the progress of America’s greatest aviator.

Inevitably Washington’s torrid summers give way to chilly winters. Obviously demand for ice-cold root beer would fall off. A & W franchises were required to sell only root beer but Marriott flew to Sacramento to obtain a special dispensation to include food on his menu. He didn’t want standard burgers and franks but opted for Mexican food, a specialty from home not often enjoyed in the nation’s capital.

When the heavily spiced chili and tamales and barbecued beef debuted Marriott called his new restaurant “Hot Shoppe;” hot food with a touch of English affectation. The new restaurant was a hit and Marriott barely waited for the cash register to fill before opening a second Hot Shoppe. Soon there was a chain of medium-priced family restaurants in the Washington, D.C. area. Marriott waited for the Depression to slow his business but it never did.

Marriott worked non-stop but he was never more diligent than in selecting new sites for his restaurants. He opened a Hot Shoppe out by the Hoover Airport and noticed a trade had developed in passengers and crew taking out food for their flights. In 1937 Marriott started boxing lunches of ham or chicken sandwiches, a small carton of slaw, a frosted cupcake and an apple for Eastern airlines.
“Sky girls” served the first airline food along with hot coffee in thermos jugs.

Marriott’s catering business soon picked up government cafeterias and entered the hospital food service market as well. Bill Marriott had been in the food service business for 30 years when he opened his first hotel in Arlington, Virginia in 1957. Over the next few years, Marriott continued to open hotels as well as Hot Shoppes restaurants.

By 1964 Marriott was ready to slow down. Physically he had survived Hodgkins Disease, battled chronic nervous exhaustion and weathered several heart attacks. While maintaining nominal control of the business he turned daily operations over to his son Bill Jr.

It was hard to let go but Marriott could reflect back on the time his father had entrusted him with a herd of sheep to take to San Francisco on his own at the tender age of 14. His son was no less successful. By the time he succeeded his father as Chief Executive Officer in 1972 Bill Jr. had quadrupled the size of the company. Marriott Corporation now owned the Big-Boy restaurant chain and started the Roy Rogers fast food chain.

The elder Marriott invested his time in the Republican party, entertaining political luminaries on his ranch in northern Virginia. He died at age 84 at his New Hampshire summer home. The business he started by selling root beer for a nickel was grossing $4 billion a year.

Howard Johnson's

2007-02-12T05:18:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Howard Johnson

“I’ve spent my life developing scores of flavors,” Howard Johnson once lamented, “and yet most people still say, ‘I’ll take vanilla.’”

Howard Dearing Johnson was born in 1897, the son of a tobacco merchant.
He entered the retail business shortly after from France and World War I.
His father died and he inherited the cigar-store business, then heavily in debt. Johnson continued to sell cigars until 1924 when he liquidated the business and bought a run-down drugstore near the railroad station in his hometown of Wollaston, Massachusetts. He went from owing $10,000 to owing nearly $30,000.

The small patent medicine store featured a soda fountain, a candy and tobacco counter and a newspaper stand. Johnson resurrected the business with the newspapers, organizing a staff of 75 boys delivering the news. Within a few years his newspapers had made his business prosperous. But it was ice cream that was his first love. He had only three flavors - vanilla, chocolate and strawberry - and he thought a wider variety of flavors and a better quality ice cream were the keys to success.

Johnson bought an ice cream recipe from an elderly German pushcart vendor whose wares appealed to him. He paid $300 for the peddler’s secrets: doubling the butterfat content of his ice cream and to use only natural flavorings.
To expand his product line Johnson used an old-fashioned freezer in the basement, hand-cranking the ice cream.

He was right. The customers began queuing up for his 28 flavors of ice cream. By 1928 Johnson was pulling in nearly a quarter million dollars a year from ice cream sold in his shop and at several nearby beach stands. He added frankfurters and other easily prepared foods and gravitated towards restaurants in 1929. Within seven years Johnson had peppered 25 restaurants along Massachusetts highways.

He then persuaded a yacht captain on Cape Cod to build a restaurant, call it Howard Johnson’s, paint it blue with a bright orange roof, and sell products Johnson would supply. Johnson also trained the new owner. The venture made money from the start. Howard Johnson had pioneered the art of restaurant franchising.

Johnson next developed the concept of convenience food. He maintained control over the food served in his franchises by preparing the food and processing it in centrally located company-operated plants where it was shipped to restaurants for final preparation and cooking. Johnson insisted that the food be plain, simple, wholesome American fare.

To make sure that the ice cream and food sold in the restaurants that bore his name remained at high quality Johnson spent two days a week on inspection tours. He arrived unannounced and unrecognized, on the lookout for everything from dirty restrooms to sassy waitresses.

The ubiquitous orange-roofed restaurants beget motor lodges designed for the vacationing post-World War II family. The first Howard Johnson’s motel franchise opened in Savannah, Georgia in 1954, five years before Johnson turned the company over to his son. Even in retirement Johnson continued to scout for new restaurant and motel sites.

The entire time Johnson was building a $200,000,000-a-year business he never lost his taste for the ice cream that made him famous. It was his favorite dish. He kept at least 10 flavors in the freezers of his Manhattan penthouse. Every day of his life Howard Johnson enjoyed at least one ice cream cone.

Hilton

2007-02-12T05:16:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Conrad Hilton

The first Hilton hotel was set up by Conrad Hilton in his family’s adobe home in
San Antonio, New Mexico in 1907. Business reversals in his father’s general store necessitated the conversion of six of the rooms in the house into quarters for transient lodgers. Hilton, then 19, worked all day in the store and went to the train station at 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. to meet the train and solicit guests. Room and board was $2.50 a day.

Slowly the Hilton family’s financial health was restored. By 1912 Hilton became interested in politics, winning a position in the state legislature just when the New Mexico Territory was accepted into statehood. He introduced nine bills which became New Mexico law but on balance found politics confining and frustrating. He came back home after two years.

Hilton decided San Antonio needed a bank. He organized a syndicate to establish the town’s first bank but the shareholders rewarded him by electing an aged former banker from Illinois as president and made Conrad Hilton a cashier. He began maneuvering for control of the bank. It wasn’t much of a bank,
but he had started it.

Hilton wrested control of the bank from the board of directors but there wasn’t much time to savor the victory. He wore out hot, dusty Texas roads tracking down new depositors and then World War I shattered his plans for a garland of New Mexico banks. Hilton was off to France to serve in the Army.

In 1919, following the death of his father in an automobile accident, Hilton returned from the army. He left for Cisco, Texas looking to buy an interest in a bank. When the slow pace of negotiations forced him to stay overnight he found all the hotels in town overbooked. Instead of a bank Hilton wound up making a deal for a hotel, the 40-room Mobley Hotel.

It didn’t take Hilton long to become a hotel man. He surveyed every inch of The Mobley to eliminate non-revenue generating space. He sawed the front desk in half and added a shop; he ripped out the dining room a nd spaced it off into bedrooms; he rented his own bed and slept on a leather chair in his office.

A few months later he purchased the Melba in Fort Worth, and in 1920 he added the 140-room Waldorf in Dallas. In 1925 Hilton committed himself to building a million-dollar hotel in Dallas, the first hotel to carry his name.
When the Depression hit Hilton controlled eight hotels. It was too much.

In 1931 Hilton defaulted on a $300,000 loan. His creditors hired him to manage his lost hotels but it was a turbulent business marriage. Nine months
later the business arrangement disintegrated into legal matters. Hilton eventually emerged from the Depression with five of his eight hotels; by 1937 he was free of debt.

Hilton began in earnest to take advantage of depressed hotel properties.
In the next few years he took control of the Sir Francis Drake in San Francisco,
the Town House in Los Angeles, the Roosevelt and Plaza in New York and the Stevens and Palmer House in Chicago. In 1946 the Hilton Hotels Corporation was formed, the first hotel company to have its stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Hilton cherished tradition. With each of these great houses he recognized an obligation to retain the atmosphere and individuality which gave it its prestige.
In 1949 he realized a life-long dream with the purchase of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, America’s greatest hotel. In 1954 Hilton executed the largest hotel merger in history, purchasing the Statler hotel chain for $111,000,000.
Hilton clinched the deal by pleading with the widow Statler to keep the great
hotels in “the hands of hotel people.”

Hilton turned the presidency of Hilton Hotels over to his son, Barron, in 1966. The next year Barron Hilton persuaded his father to swap his Hilton International stock for TWA stock. The stock plummeted by half in the next 18 months and the 80-year old Hilton lost the rights to his name overseas.

Conrad Hilton became the world’s premier hotelier by acquiring America’s most prestigious hotels. Only a handful ever carried his name. He assiduously avoided resort hotels and eschewed gambling houses. But under his son the Hilton name was franchised and the Las Vegas Hilton and Flamingo Hilton were purchased. When Conrad Hilton died in 1979 at the age of 91 the hotel-casinos were responsible for nearly 40¢ of every $1.00 Hilton profit. The business he had built proudly on the grandest hotel rooms in the world was being supported by roulette wheels and blackjack tables.

Famous Amos

2007-02-12T05:13:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Wallace Amos

According to Wallace Amos he was sitting in his friend Marvin Gaye's office talking to his secretary while they munched on some of his homemade chocolate chip cookies. At the same time Amos was chewing on his future in the entertainment business. "Why don't we go into business together selling your chocolate chip cookies?" she suggested. And the first celebrity cookies were born.

Wallace Amos was born to illiterate parents in a black ghetto of Tallahassee in 1936. In 1948 his parents divorced and Wallace and his mother went to Orlando where he stayed only a short time before going to live with his aunt in New York City.

Amos worked part-time through school while dodging street gangs. When a school recruiter told him that "cooks make a lot of money" Amos enrolled in Food Trades Vocational High School. He was assigned to the pantry at the Essex House but became discouraged at only making desserts and dropped out of school.

For the first time Amos drifted. He gambled away his aunt's utility payments and lived on the streets. When he finally returned home the 17-year old Amos convinced his aunt to sign papers allowing him to join the Air Corps where he learned to repair radar and radio equipment.

After his tour of duty Amos came back to New York and worked as a stock clerk at Saks while attending the Collegiate Secretarial Institute. Working hard, he was promoted to an executive position at Saks and was sent to New York University to take retailing courses. Amos found math so troublesome he quit rather than try to be a buyer. He was 25 years old.

Amos next landed a job in the mail room at the William Morris Talent Agency and filling in as a substitute secretary. Again he worked hard and was promoted to become the first black agent at William Morris. Amos found success booking musical acts including the Supremes, the Temptations and Simon and Garfunkel.

By 1967 Amos felt burned out and out of touch with the coming of acid rock in the music business. But more importantly he felt he had gone as far as he could go as a black man at William Morris. He left to manage trumpeter Hugh Maskela but the relationship ended quickly. Amos had bounced from one entertainment job to another when he went to see his friend Gaye.

Amos thought it was a terrific idea to sell cookies but he didn't have any money. He turned to his friends in the entertainment industry. Helen Reddy pledged $10,000 if he found other investors. Herb Alpert chipped in $5,000 and Marvin Gaye clinched the venture with another $10,000. The pivotal secretary suggested the name "Famous Amos" and he called his product the "superstar of cookies."

Amos set up shop at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Formosa Avenue,
a most unsavory location. Next door was the Exotica School of Message emblazoned with the sign screaming "Sindy's Nude, Nude, Nude Girls, Girls, Girls." Across the street was the American School of Hypnosis.

Wallace Amos was a natural showman. He donned a white Panama hat and set out to make his store opening a true Hollywood happening. He sent out 2500 invitations. Over 1500 showed up, including many celebrities who sipped champagne and enjoyed a strolling Dixieland band.

He promoted cookies like rock stars. When celebrities enjoyed his cookies he made certain the Los Angeles papers wrote about it. A friend took some cookies to Bloomingdale's in New York and they agreed to carry the "jet-set cookies."
So did Nieman-Marcus. Amos set up a factory in New Jersey to help meet demand.

In 1977 he left Bloomingdale's for the basement at Macy's with the proviso he could appear in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade. For four years Amos marched in front of 20 million viewers becoming a media star himself. By 1979 his factories were baking over three tons of homemade cookies every day. His first store was featured on the Grayline Sightseeing Bus Tour of Hollywood.

As the company grew Amos became less involved in the mundane everyday operations. He moved to Hawaii, further removing himself from the demands of the business. He neglected to franchise the stores, owning only eight.
Other competitors bit into the gourmet cookie market and by 1985 Amos
had to sell all but 8% of the company to private investors.

Amos was not troubled by his shift in fortunes. "I started the cookie business just to make a living and that's still all I'm concerned with," he said. Although not running the business he was still a popular spokesman for Famous Amos and an important campaigner for the literacy Volunteers of America. When the Smithsonian Institute displayed a Business Americana Collection they asked for Amos' trademark embroidered shirt and Panama hat. His was the first food company and he was the first black businessman to be represented.

Colonel Sanders

2007-02-12T05:11:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Harlan Sanders

For half of his working life Harland Sanders made his way as a street car conductor, railroad fireman and insurance salesman, to name just a few of the jobs he tried. In 1930, at the age of 40, Sanders started cooking chicken in a small restaurant in the rear of a service station he operated in Corbin, Kentucky.

Here he perfected his secret blend of 11 herbs and spices, seasonings he claimed stood on everybody’s shelf, to flavor his chicken. The ingredients are still used in Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken today and are still a secret,
even from franchisees. In 1935 Kentucky Governor Ruby Lafoon named Sanders an honorary Colonel for his contribution to the state’s cuisine.

For a quarter-century Sanders prospered. Then in the mid-1950s a new interstate highway was planned that would bypass Corbin and his restaurant. Sanders was now 66 years old, an age when many business owners would retire and watch cars speed past his old restaurant.

But the Colonel auctioned off his operations and hit the road to display his patented pressure cooker and sell his fried chicken cooking process. He signed up only five restaurants in the first two years. Still he persevered. In two more years he had sold 200 franchises. Over the next decade Colonel Sanders and Kentucky Fried Chicken would become famous the world over.

In Japan the Colonel, with his white hair, white goatee, black string tie and double-breasted suit, is the most recognizable of all Americans. A life-size statue stands outside of everyone of the Colonel’s restaurants in Japan. The Colonel traveled more than 250,000 miles a year promoting his chicken.

In 1964 Sanders sold his interest in Kentucky Fried Chicken for $2,000,000 but remained active promoting his chicken and starring in folksy commercials until his death in 1980 at the age of 90. In honor of his achievements his body lay in state in the rotunda of the State Capitol in Frankfort, Kentucky. His chicken was being sold in more than 8000 outlets in 60 countries.

Baskin & Robbins

2007-02-12T05:09:00.000-08:00

And the men behind the brand are...
Burton Baskin & Irvine Robbins

Irvine Robbins grew up on his father’s dairy farm outside Tacoma, Washington. He helped process and sell the milk, ice cream and other products. When it came time to count up the profits each month Irvine saw that the real profits were not coming in selling to groceries and drugstores but from sales made from the family’s little store in a Tacoma alley known as “Court C.”

With the end of World War II Robbins remembered his lessons from the farm and set up his own ice cream shop. Robbins, then 27, opened the Snowbird ice cream store in Glendale, California. Down the road in Pasadena his brother-in-law Burton Baskin started another store in 1946. The goal was to make $75 a week and have some fun.

The early years forged the business philosophy that would weld into Baskin-Robbins when the two became partners shortly thereafter:
sell nothing but ice cream and offer a vast array of fun-to-choose flavors. Baskin-Robbins sold nothing but ice cream and sold it only in their shops.
And they sold it even in the winter.

Soon there were eight stores and sales were booming but the partners had no money. They decided to sell the stores to the managers; the company would supply the ice cream and merchandising ideas. The formula worked. Baskin and Robbins collected the payments and concentrated on the ice cream.

Baskin and Robbins inaugurated a rotating stable of 31 flavors, one for each day of the month. They had hundreds of exotic flavors to choose from.
The names were as appealing as the flavors. When the Dodgers arrived in Los Angeles from Brooklyn in 1958 they were welcomed by baseball-nut ice cream: raspberries (for “razzing” the umpires) and cashews (for peanuts in the bleachers) mixed into vanilla (the all-time winning flavor). Lunar cheesecake ice cream commemorated the first moon landing in 1969.

All flavors were subject to a test panel. Not all flavors survived the scrutiny. Goody Goody Gumdrop - a seemingly ideal Baskin-Robbins fun combination of gum drops and ice cream - was withdrawn because of its tiny tooth-threatening frozen gumdrops. Ketchup ice cream and lox and bagels were allowed to quietly melt in the lab.

In 1967 Baskin and Robbins sold their company for $20,000,000.
Burton Baskin died suddenly only six months later but Robbins carried on with the business. When Baskin-Robbins’s 31 Flavors celebrated its 31st birthday in 1976 the 1600 stores had a flavorful roster of over 500 flavors to choose from.

Schwinn

2007-02-12T05:06:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Ignaz Schwinn

Ignaz Schwinn was born in 1860 in the little town of Hardheim in the province of Baden, Germany. His father, the owner of a thriving piano factory, died when Ignaz was eleven, curtailing his formal schooling. He apprenticed to a machinist where he turned out to be a gifted mechanic.

Like most young men of the age Schwinn was fascinated with the “wonder of the age,” the high wheel bicycle. Seeking work he moved from town to town working on bicycles and bicycle parts whenever he could find the opportunity.
In northern Germany he studied the new “Safety” bicycles imported from England.

Technology was advancing rapidly with the new bicycles and many people, conservative villagers, were slow to respond to the “Safety” bicycles. Schwinn was enthusiastic, however, and purchased a drawing board where he could work out his own bicycle designs at night after his regular job. He showed his designs to Heinrich Kleyer, a bicycle maker and customer of Schwinn’s machine shop.
Kleyer was impressed and hired Schwinn to design and manufacture bicycles. These were some of the very first “Safety” bicycles produced in Germany.

Desiring to participate in the fast-moving technological advances occurring in America Schwinn scraped together the funds to come to Chicago and the great World’s Fair in the early 1890s. He worked around town designing bicycles and planning bicycle factories when he teamed with Adolf Arnold in 1895 to form Arnold, Schwinn & Company.

Schwinn designed the product and the tools to make it, selected machinery
and equipment, engaged the personnel and set up the factory. Annual production estimates at the time were set at approximately 25,000 units. Schwinn’s bicycles proved exceedingly popular and Arnold’s superior business ability gave the business a solid foundation.

In 1908, after several expansions, Schwinn bought the interests of his partner and became sole owner. Schwinn consistently brought design innovations to the bicycle industry. He sponsored bicycle racing which accelerated the development of high performance parts that provided increasing value to consumer bikes.

During World War II Schwinn, then in his eighties, devoted all his time,
energy and resources to the production of war materials, as he had in 1917.
For his efforts Schwinn & Company was awarded the Army and Navy “E” for excellence of its war production performance. Devoted, as always, to the production of his bicycles Schwinn visited the plant every day until his death in 1948.

Rand McNally

2007-02-12T05:04:00.000-08:00

And the men behind the brand are...
William Rand and Andrew McNally

William Rand learned his printing in the eastern United States; Andrew McNally learned his printing in Ireland. They teamed up in frontier Chicago in 1858, announcing "every description of printing on the most advantageous terms."

That first decade the two men decided to concentrate their printing and publishing efforts in the field of transportation. The first sales division of the fledgling firm was railroad printing. Railroads went into places before cities and people needed tickets to get there so the young printers found plenty of customers. They published literary works on railroad timetables to give riders something to read on the train.

In 1868, the year the firm officially became Rand McNally & Company,
Chicago was rapidly becoming the unofficial printing and engraving capital of the nation. Rand McNally published its first book in 1870, The Business Directory of Chicago for 1870-1871, and the following year brought out the first edition of the "Western Railway Guide." The "Guide" was a monthly periodical listing the latest timetables of various railway and steamboat lines.

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 devastated the city. As flames licked the doors of their offices Rand and McNally ran a relay race to safety with two ticket printing machines. Rand hauled them to McNally's stable three miles away and McNally carted the machines to the shore of Lake Michigan where he dumped them in the sand.

Three days later they were back in business in rented space.

In 1872 Rand McNally took out a small advertisement announcing its entry into the map engraving field. The huge growth of railroads had created a tremendous demand for maps. There were many other map manufacturers at the time but Rand McNally innovated modern methods of engraving in wax to accelerate correction work. This single technique was responsible for their emergence
in the map field. Rand McNally was able to draft and correct maps at a fraction
of previous costs.

Railroad maps were given away by the thousands to promote train travel,
many railroads distorting their own routes to display their superiority over rival lines. Rand McNally printed many maps in Swedish and Norwegian which no doubt contributed to the Scandanavian settling of the west.

In 1876 Rand McNally published its first Business Atlas which became the backbone of the firm's dominant map business. Rand retired from the business in 1899 and McNally died in 1904, just as the country's demand for road maps would indelibly stamp their names on American travel.

Phillips

2007-02-12T05:00:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Frank Phillips

In February 1905 Frank Phillips and his younger brother Lee Eldas, always called L.E., drilled their first oil well. They had spent the last two years tirelessly selling shares in the Anchor Oil & Gas Company to raise operating revenues. The Phillips’ first wildcatting venture was under way.

And on June 23 they struck oil!

Their jubilation was short lived. There proved to be only a small pocket of oil and the well soon fizzled. Hole #2 came up dry; so did #3. Now there was barely enough money to try a fourth well. If this didn’t come in what would Frank Phillips, now 32, do?

He had started as an apprentice barber at the age of 14. With a naturally engaging personality Phillips was soon able to buy his own shop and by the age
of 24 he owned all three barber shops in Creston, Iowa. One of his regular customers was the banker upstairs at the Iowa State Savings Bank.
Their relationship blossomed and soon Phillips was married to his daughter
and selling his bonds in Chicago and New England.

Returning from a sales trip Phillips ran into a friend who had been doing missionary work in the Indian territory in Oklahoma. The man reported that
there were tremendous oil possibilities lurking in Oklahoma. And so Frank Phillips, former barber and bond salesman, found himself in the wilds of the Indian territory staking his future on a hole in the ground.

Well #4 was named Anna Anderson for the young Delaware Indian girl from whom the lease was obtained down in the juncture of the Big and Little Caney Rivers, some 3 1/2 miles north of Bartlesville. Phillips had no fancy geology reports to guide him; he selected Anna Anderson because it was the closest
spot to a producing well he could find.

On September 6, 1905 Anna Anderson gushed in - 250 barrels worth a day. The Phillips brothers embarked on a string of 81 consecutive producing wells.
They formed numerous small oil companies to back these drilling ventures and used their profits to start a bank. Deep down what Frank Phillips really wanted was to be a big time banker.

In 1916 the brothers decided the boom and bust oil game was not for them. They opened a bank in Kansas City with a dream of starting a chain of midwestern banks. But World War I intervened, sending oil prices soaring from 40¢ to $1.00
a barrel. The bank plan was put on hold and all their holdings were consolidated into the Phillips Petroleum Company in 1917.

From the beginning, the Phillips brothers found much natural gas while drilling for oil. At the time, without pipelines and distribution systems, most drillers regarded gas as a nuisance and flared it off at the wellhead. But the Phillips sought to tap the gas by extracting liquid products from it. In shot time Phillips Petroleum was the largest producer of these by-products, which could be used in motor fuels.

Frank Phillips’ greatest attribute turned out to be attracting loans and investors to a small, unknown Oklahoma oil company. In New York financial markets backing such a venture was regarded as pure gambling. In 1919 alone Phillips spent 116 days in New York City. He attracted enough money that the company had 900 wells in production by 1921. After ten years in business Phillips Petroleum assets soared from $3 million to $266 million.

In 1927 Phillips decided to enter the gasoline retail business.
For months company officials puzzled over a trade symbol for their
new gasoline. Marketing people were leaning toward the current fad of
combining a numeral with a word or two. The first gas station was
scheduled to open on November 19 and still no name had been tapped.

A special executive meeting was called for the sole purpose of settling
the question of a trademark. On the eve of the meeting a Phillips official was road-testing the new gasoline. “This car goes like 60 on our new gas,” he exclaimed.

“Sixty nothing,” roared the driver, glancing at the speedometer, “we’re
doing 66.” The incident took place on Highway 66 out of Tulsa. That clinched it.
“Phillips 66” would be the brand name. A now defunct premium grade was tagged “Phillips 77.”

The first station opened in Wichita, Kansas, placing Phillips in direct competition with the industry giants. To help boost sales a manager proposed a promotion idea to Phillips: fill up once and get a coupon for 10 free gallons next visit.
His reply befitted a man who had never bothered to learn to drive and was selling gas for 17¢ a gallon. “Sure, go ahead,” he said, “It isn’t worth as much as water anyway. Give ‘em all you want.”

By 1930 there were 6750 dark green, orange and blue Phillips outlets in
12 states. Elsewhere Phillips was building up its aviation fuel business.
The Depression dealt Phillips Petroleum hard as stock prices plunged from $32
to $3 and hundreds of employees were laid off. Frank Phillips quickly restored profitability and had sufficiently weathered the crisis to turn over the presidency
in 1938.

Phillips remained as chairman until 1949, the year before his death. He had built one of the largest oil companies in the United states but he left his successors a special challenge. Always opposed to overseas ventures he had turned down exclusive rights to mideast oil tracts in 1947. Future Phillips Petroleum leaders were forced to play catch up in developing international sources of oil.
There weren’t any places left in the United States where you could drill 81
straight gushers.

Michelin

2007-02-12T04:58:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Edouard Michelin

In 1889 a French cyclist arrived in the workshop of the Michelin et Compagnie rubber works asking for a repair of his punctured Dunlop tire. Edouard Michelin labored for three hours to repair the curious new tire and still the repair didn’t hold. But when he tested it the air-inflated tire gave such a comfortable ride he decided to look for a way to make the troublesome tire practical.

The rubber company, founded by Edouard’s grandfather in the 1830s,
had never made tires. Belts and hoses comprised the product line of the struggling company which was on the verge of disappearing when Andre Michelin took the helm in 1886. Then 33, Andre continued to tend his picture frame and lock business and recruited his younger brother Edouard from fine arts school to help him with the rubber shop. By 1889 a rubber brake pad for horse-drawn vehicles was Michelin’s best seller.

Edouard set to work and by 1891 he had designed a detachable, pneumatic tire that was repairable in only 15 minutes, not hours. The next year it required only two minutes to fix a punctured Michelin tire. In a 1200-kilometer race a Michelin rider endured five punctures and still won by eight hours. The Michelin brothers organized another race and surreptitiously scattered nails across the route.
The unwary riders suffered 244 punctures but proved how easily repairs were made with Michelin tires. In 1893 10,000 Michelins were sold.

In 1894 the Michelin tire was adapted for horse-drawn Parisien cabs.
The improved ride on the five test cabs produced so much extra business other drivers sabotaged the tires. Soon 600 Paris cabs were outfitted with Michelins.

1895 saw Michelin introduce the first pneumatic automobile tire. The Michelin brothers themselves drove Eclair, meaning “forked lightning,” in a June race that year. Only nine of the 19 competitors finished the 1209 kilometer race in the allotted 100 hours. Eclair was one, the first of many Michelin racing triumphs.

Approaching a new century the tire business was intense; France alone sported 150 manufacturers. A strong brand image was crucial and Michelin came up with one of the best of all time. The Michelin Man, a rotund figure composed of tires, bounded onto the advertising scene in 1898.

Another Michelin institution was born in 1900 with the publishing of the first Michelin travel guide, the Guide Rouge. Distributed free, the journey planning advice and hotel listings were liberally spiced with tire information.
By the end of the decade guides were available for Europe, North Africa and Egypt. In 1910 the company published the first road maps of France designed for motorists.

The Michelin brothers were constantly on the lookout for new markets and applications for their tires. The English market opened in 1905, the Italian in
1906 - years later when Michelin became the world’s leading tire manufacturer France would account for less than one sale in six.

The Michelins sponsored an early aviation contest, designing a difficult course culminating with a dangerous landing on a mountain peak in quest of a hefty cash prize. Cynics accused the brothers of setting an impossible task for the sake of publicity, but the prize was won in 1911, on the third anniversary of its creation.

The Michelin commitment to aeronautics continued in World War I.
One hundred bombers for the French air force were supplied free and another 1800 were built at cost. The post-war years brought a surge in motorized traffic and Michelin grew apace. Michelin was in the forefront of road numbering and signposting throughout France.

Andre and Edouard Michelin guided the company, now focused entirely on tires, until they died, Andre in 1931 at the age of 78 and Edouard in 1940 at 81.
The family was torn asunder by the German occupation of france in World War II but emerged with Michelin under family control, as it remains today.

Hess

2007-02-12T04:56:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Leon Hess

Leon Hess was born to Lithuanian parents in Asbury Park, New Jersey in 1914.
In 1925 after twenty years of kosher butchering his father Mores quit to deliver fuel to homes in the beachside town. The Depression killed what little business Mores had built up over the years. Leon's two older brothers and sister attended college but there was no money left for him. Leon Hess got the struggling oil business.

In 1933 that business was a single room in an old building in Asbury Park and an over-mortgaged and undersized truck. Hess drove across bumpy pine-draped roads selling oil and coal by day and delivering on his return trip at night. The coal would soon be dropped from his tiny product line - literally. "I was basically lazy. I didn't want to carry 100-pound bags of coal," he said.

In the late 1930s Hess began to focus his meager resources on residual fuel - the tarry, gunky ooze that remained after refining. The sludge was useful only in massive boilers maintained by public utilities. From his attempts at peddling coal Hess knew oil was replacing coal at power plants and residual oil would become more profitable.

Residual oil had to be transported hot to keep it flowing; if it cooled it became the consistency of a newly tarred street in summer. Hess built a successful fleet of specially designed tankers to deliver the residual oil. He began shipping to distant markets and came in low bid on several federal contracts, submitting the only handwritten bids.

In World War II Hess left the business with his brother Henry and went to battle as petroleum supply officer under General George Patton. He earned a bronze star, the rank of major and invaluable experience in running a large organization efficiently.

He applied his lessons to his oil business which steadily expanded. Hess trucks were soon seen as far away as upstate New York. He began importing residual oil and Hess oil generated the electricity in 75% of New Jersey by the late 1940s.
In 1958 Hess built his first refinery and two years later he marketed gasoline under his own name.

Hess built his business on business no one else wanted; now he was in the business everyone wanted.

He competed on price. He refused to comply with an agreement signed by other New Jersey stations to keep gas priced above a minimum price.
He built huge stations to pump gas only, leaving repair business to others.
His refinery was close to his stations so the pennies saved in distribution were slashed off his gas prices. Hess grew from 28 stations in 1961 to 500 in twenty years across the Northeast.

By the mid-1960s Hess Oil was profitable but he had no crude production, leaving him in a precarious position if his supply disappeared. After prolonged financial maneuvering and at considerable risk Hess took control of Amerada Petroleum in 1969.

At the same time Hess undertook the building of the world's largest refinery in the Virgin Islands, a United States territory not fully answerable to American law. Hess used political connections made by his father-in-law, a former attorney general of New Jersey, to pull off the deal. The refinery cost $600,000,000 and eventually produced 700,000 barrels a day.

Hess Oil was now steeply leveraged but the Arab oil embargo paid off Hess' gamble. His fortunes continued to vacillate with the fortunes of the oil market but Hess, the owner of the New York Jets and a tyrannical but trustworthy businessman, had built his company into the country's 17th largest oil producer.

Hertz

2007-02-12T04:54:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
John Hertz

John Hertz left his fingerprints on nearly every facet of the early transportation industry. He started car agencies and cab companies and bus factories but the one thing he didn’t create is the business that will carry his name into the next century - Hertz Rent-A-Car.

The pioneer of auto renting was Walter Jacobs who in September of 1918,
at the age of 22, opened a car rental operation in Chicago. Starting with a dozen Model-T Fords, which he repaired and repainted himself, Jacobs expanded his operations to the point where, within five years, the business generated annual revenues of about $1 million. At this point he sold out to John Hertz who called the concern Hertz Drive-Ur-Self System.

Hertz had been in the business world since 1890 when he ran away from home at the age of 11. He ran copy for the Chicago Morning News and peddled papers for extra cash. His take each week approached $3, more than enough to cover his room and board. After a year his father, who had brought the family to Chicago from Austria six years earlier, found John and forced him to come home.
He lasted six more months and then left home for good. He was 13.

He worked long nights at the paper but the strange hours caused his health to break. Only 15, a doctor told Hertz to get out during the day and rebuild his constitution. He landed a job driving a delivery wagon and spent nights in a gym boxing, building up a respectable record against local opposition.

Hertz rejoined the journalistic world as a sportswriter for the Chicago Record but when the paper merged all the writers were fired. Hertz drifted into boxing management and developed two potential champions: Benny Yanger and Jack O’Keefe. Hertz soon had $10,000 from his boxing stable, a considerable accomplishment for the day. But his girlfriend didn’t approve of the shady boxing business and, despite its lucrative charms, Hertz left the fight game.

Through an acquaintance Hertz became a salesman for the newest novelty in Chicago: the horseless carriage. Sales were slow the first year and Hertz earned only $900. The he sold service along with the car - John Hertz was available night and day to help you with any car you bought from him. His commissions jumped to $12,000 his second year.

He quit to buy a quarter-share of a French car agency for $2000.
The horseless carriage was catching on quickly and sales topped $500,000 the first year. In 1910 his old friends at the Chicago Athletic Association contacted Hertz to operate a private cab service for its members and guests. Hertz used two of his own fleet and 8 borrowed cars to forge his infant taxi business.

Intrigued by the potential of taxis Hertz went to Europe to study the French taxi system. What he saw opened his eyes. The French utilized small, economical cars stripped of luxuries as cabs, unlike their American counterparts who typically pressed leftover touring cars into service. Cab companies linked their fortunes to local hotels, In America there were no such concessions.

But most importantly in France people simply hailed passing cabs from the curb. Int he United States passengers needed to phone for a pick-up because all taxis looked different. There were countless incidents of people piling into private cars. Hertz immediately realized he needed distinctive, standardized cabs, recognizable from a mile away. He painted his cabs yellow which he thought was easily spotted day or night.

The Yellow Cab Company, thirty cabs strong, picked up its first passengers on August 2, 1915. Hertz built short, sturdy highly maneuverable cars designed to go 300,000 miles or more. It wasn’t long before cities across the country were ordering similar cabs from Hertz. He installed receipt meters, heaters, interior lights.

With his cab business booming Hertz turned his attention to buses.
He engineered a merger with the Chicago Motor Coach Company and built sleek new buses as the Yellow Coach Manufacturing Company. A year later he added the rental car business to his transportation dynasty, establishing the first coast-to-coast network by 1925.

In 1925 the Yellow Cab Manufacturing Company was merged with General Motors in a $16,000,000 deal by which Yellow Cab was tabbed to build the corporations trucks. Hertz Drive Ur-Self was included in the merger, to remain a part of General Motors until 1953. John Hertz became Chairman of the board of the Yellow Truck and Coach Manufacturing Company.

Approaching 50, Hertz loosened his ties to the transportation industry.
He became a partner in Lehman Brothers in 1934, a position he would hold with the investment banking firm until his death some thirty years later.
Away from the office Hertz built one of America’s most renowned
racing stables featuring the fabled 1943 Triple Crown winner, Count Fleet.

When finally felled by ailing health in 1961, after more than 70 years in business, the Hertz Corporation operated more than 1700 drive-yourself stations in 1,000 cities and forty-six foreign countries.

Goodyear

2007-02-12T04:52:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Charles Goodyear

In 1898 Frank A. Seibering was nearly insolvent. His family had started and operated several Akron enterprises including flour milling, oatmeal production, banking, real estate, the Akron Academy of Music, a rubber company, and manufacturing of strawboard, mowers and reapers. All were lost in the years of financial distress in the wake of the Panic of 1893.

Seibering was in Chicago to liquidate much of his holdings when he happened upon an Ohio business acquaintance who was looking to dispose of a seven-acre strawboard plant whose main assets were a small power plant and two dilapidated buildings facing each other on opposite banks of Akron's Little Cuyahoga River.
He had invested $140,000 in the property, he said, but was seeking only $50,000. The desperate buyer accepted Seibering's offer of $13,500.

Seibering returned to Akron wondering what he was going to do with the old plant and how he was going to pay for it. He borrowed the down payment from his brother-in-law and other relatives loaned him money to start a rubber company. He had worked around his father's Akron India Rubber Company, one of his father's businesses, so the industry was not totally unfamiliar to him.
His brother Charles, who had worked three years for India Rubber, joined him in the enterprise.

The new business was incorporated on August 29, 1898 as the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in honor of Charles Goodyear who had accidentally discovered the vulcanization of rubber in 1839 when he dropped rubber and sulphur onto his kitchen stove. Goodyear died insolvent in 1860 at the age of 60.
The company named for him would be the largest tire company in the world in only 18 years with sales exceeding $100,000,000. Every dollar invested in Goodyear in the beginning was then worth $100.

Goodrich

2007-02-12T04:50:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Benjamin Goodrich

Dr. Benjamin Franklin Goodrich was born in a tiny hamlet of New York called
Ripley in 1841. He was orphaned at 8 years of age and grew up with relatives.
At 17 Goodrich began studying medicine with his cousin Dr. John Spencer.
At the age of 20 Goodrich graduated from Cleveland Medical College and signed
on with the Union Army as an assistant surgeon.

Dr. Goodrich emerged from the Civil War more interested in business than medicine. He entered into a real estate partnership in New York City and soon prospered. In 1869 the partners traded $10,000 worth of real estate for stock
in a small factory in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, the Hudson River Rubber Company.

As Goodrich dug into the books of the rubber-maker it became clear to him
how financially crippled the firm was. He traded more real estate for full ownership and became president. His first step back to fiscal health was to
move the business downriver to Melrose, New York and save money on rent.

Progress was slow and Goodrich decided to break clean with New York and establish the first rubber plant west of the Alleghenies, out where there was power, transportation, fresh labor and a fast developing country. On the train west Goodrich met a stranger who spoke so glowingly of a town in Ohio called Akron that he decided to pay a visit.

While in Akron Goodrich met with business leaders and both sides were mutually impressed. One of the Akron men visited the rubber factory in Melrose and offered Goodrich a loan of $13,600 to establish his business in the small canal town of 10,000. Akron was on its way to its destiny as the Rubber Capital of the World.

On the penultimate day in 1870 Goodrich, Tew & Company bought four
lots on the Ohio Canal. At the time there were few commercial uses for rubber. Dr. Goodrich had watched helplessly as a friend's house burned to the ground when a leather hose froze and burst so his first product was a cotton-covered rubber fire hose.

The rubber company struggled financially in the beginning but the business community of Akron helped it through some rough times until sales increased.
In 1880 the business officially became the B.F. Goodrich Company as sales climbed to over $500,000 a year.

Dr. Goodrich died prematurely at age 47 in 1888 but his company had by this time established the reputation that anyone needing to solve a manufacturing problem involving rubber would go to B.F. Goodrich. In the decades to come this innovative thinking would result in a new rubber bicycle tire, automobile cord tires and even the first modern golf ball.

Getty

2007-02-12T04:47:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Jean Paul Getty

In 1957 Fortune published a list of the richest American men. Atop the list, to the amazement of everybody, was not a Rockefeller, not a Ford, not a Mellon but an unknown oilman named Jean Paul Getty. The billionaire as celebrity was born.

For the first 64 years of Getty built a fortune of one billion dollars in relative obscurity. His father, a lawyer, made a fortune in the Oklahoma oil rush in the early 1900s, staked Jean Paul to explore low cost leases in the midwest.
Getty set up in a seedy $6-a-week room in Tulsa and bounced around Oklahoma in a Model-T Ford checking on prospective leases. In 1915 he capped his first well. The following May the Getty Oil Company was incorporated as a father-son venture. At the age of 23 Getty was a millionaire.

The first thing he did was quit. He bought a Cadillac V8 roadster and spent the next few years on a sybaritic binge through the southwest. In 1919, suddenly bored with the life of a playboy, he rejoined his father, just in time to exploit a new oil rush in southern California. This boom made father and son multimillionaires.

There would be no taking time off this time. Getty bought leases and drilled for oil up and down the California coast. When the stock market collapsed the acquisitive Getty expanded his holdings by buying up distressed oil company stocks. In 1930 Getty’s father died and he became president. The bulk of the senior Getty’s $10 million fortune went to his wife, then aged 78 and in poor health.

Getty immediately began a battle with his ailing mother for control of the company. Legend has it that Getty was so ruthless in his business dealings that when he discovered a well he was drilling was bottoming out on someone else’s property, he tried to sell it to his mother. When informed of the shenanigans Mrs. Getty is supposed to have replied, “What you are trying to tell me is that Paul is a crook. But he’s awfully smart, isn’t he?”

Weary of the fight Mrs. Getty finally relinquished her claim to the bulk of the Getty assets and Paul quickly set out to build a global international oil company. He set his sights on the giant Tide Water Associated Oil, quietly buying up blocks of stock. It took Getty two decades of tussling with the John D. Rockefeller cartel to wrest control of the company and its 1200 service stations. It was the major triumph of his career and gave him the nucleus for a worldwide conglomerate of some 200 companies.

While the financial wrangling was going on Getty did not stray from his wildcatting instincts. In 1949 he paid $12.5 million for the rights to prospect for oil in the Neutral Zone, a barren tract of scrub dessert between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. It was one of the few remaining areas in the Middle East unexploited by oilmen. After nearly four years of dry holes Getty struck oil with a last do-or-die drilling. By 1955 Getty had 55 producing wells in the Neutral Zone; his wealth doubled.

With his unveiling as America’s richest man the public clamored for details on Getty’s life. There was plenty to titillate the curious. Getty had five wives, tiring of each almost before the ceremony was over. “My wives married me; I didn’t marry them,” he said.

There were stories of his miserly habits. In 1961 when he appeared on British television for the first time he admitted that, yes, he really had waited five minutes to get into a dog show at a cheaper price. He personally washed his underwear every night - not, he explained, to save money on laundry bills but because he didn’t like the detergent his local laundry used.

Tragedy dogged Getty for the final years of his life. A young son died of a
brain tumor, his oldest son committed suicide, and his grandson was kidnapped.
The boy was returned only after having his ear severed and mailed to an Italian newspaper to convince Getty the plot was real. The old man paid an $850,000 ransom.

In the 1950s Getty moved to England to be centrally located to his global empire. Once there, however, he seldom visited his Middle East holdings and never once set foot in America again. He changed his will 21 times, using it as a weapon to set one person against another. When he died in 1976 at the age of 84 Getty has insured discord in Getty Oil. His company was sold to Texaco for $9.9 billion, history’s biggest corporate takeover.

Firestone

2007-02-12T04:45:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Harvey Firestone

In 1895 Henry Ford, a machinist fiddling with new gasoline engines, walked into the Columbus Buggy Company store in Detroit. Harvey Firestone sold him a set of rubber carriage tires. The two men wouldn’t meet again for ten years but when they did it changed the automotive industry.

The son of an Ohio farmer, the 22-year old Firestone joined his uncle’s buggy company as a salesman in 1890. Firestone quickly demonstrated a flair for sales; by 1892 he was in charge of the entire Michigan district. The sale to Ford proved to be one of his last as the buggy business went bankrupt in 1896. By that time, however, Firestone had seen the future: rubber tires would surely replace bone-rattling iron-banded wheels.

A friend staked him to a retail tire venture in Chicago and it prospered mightily. He sold out for $45,000 in 1900 and left for Akron, already the rubber capital of the world. Firestone took with him not an improved rubber tire but a patent for attaching tires to rims. He organized the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, contributing his patent and $10,000 to acquire 50% of the company which was capitalized at $50,000.

For the first few years other companies provided Firestone with tires but when he began manufacturing his own solid tires the firm became established.
He developed a pneumatic tire which caught the fancy of Henry Ford, who placed an order for 2,000 sets to carry his new runabouts. It was the largest single order for tires ever placed by an auto manufacturer.

The Ford Motor Company sold so many cars that one in every 14 Americans soon owned a car (the figure in Europe was on the order of one in 150).
Most of those cars traveled on Firestone tires. Flushed with Ford money Firestone developed into the world’s most innovative rubber company, producing the first dismountable rim for easy tire changes, the first balloon tire, and the first low-pressure truck tire.

Firestone was the foremost advocate of truck transportation in America, campaigning for improved highways and the elimination of railroad grade crossings. He promoted his tires aggressively in racing competitions to prove their safety and durability.

World War I eviscerated the world rubber market and the post-war depression threw Firestone into a debt approaching $43,000,000. He slashed prices to reduce inventories and was able to completely pay off his obligations by 1924. But when the British put restrictions on rubber production in her possessions Firestone had suffered enough of the vagaries of the world rubber market.

He arranged to lease up to one million acres of Liberian land in Africa in return for a $5,000,000 personal loan and an agreement to improve the Monrovian harbor. By 1936 sixty thousand acres had been planted and during World War II the plantation turned out to be a valuable source of rubber for the Allies. Firestone also acquired textile mills, steel and rim-making plants, and cotton plantations.

Having taken some steps to shore up the supply side of his operation Firestone turned to the retail side. His tires were sold through a network of over 30,000 dealers but was facing stiff competition from the great mail-order houses, Montgomery Ward and Sears, who were beginning to sell tires in retail outlets. Firestone pioneered one-stop service stations offering gas, oil, brakes and,
of course, his tires.

Firestone and Henry Ford forged a relationship outside their business dealings. Together with Thomas Edison the three men frequently disappeared into the wilderness on camping trips. America’s most celebrated campers also enjoyed reunions at their winter homes in Florida.

It was while vacationing on his Florida estate in 1938 that Firestone died at the age of 69. He spent his last hours before passing away in his sleep doing what he enjoyed best: riding in a sulky behind his favorite horse on his hand-built bridle path. He had never quite accepted that horseless carriage.

Evinrude

2007-02-12T04:43:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Ole Evinrude

On a typical sweltering Wisconsin summer day in 1908 Ole Evinrude was picnicking with some friends on an island two miles from shore. When his future wife Bess got a hankering for some ice cream Evinrude got in his boat and rowed back to town. But even a sturdy Norwegian couldn’t make it all the way back to the island before the ice cream melted. And so Ole Evinrude thought someone should invent a motor for a rowboat.

Others had already pursued the same dream. There were even such motors on the market in America as early as 1896 and Cameron Waterman, who coined the term “outboard motor,” had sold more than 12,000 such gasoline engines that very year. But Evinrude’s new motor would soon dominate the market, selling more than all other brands combined.

Ole Evinrude was born in Norway in 1877 but raised on a farm in south-central Wisconsin. When he was 16 he left the family farm to work in a machine shop in Madison. A born mechanic, Evinrude eventually worked in factories making electric motors and gasoline engines. While employed in Milwaukee he crafted his own horseless carriage and dreamed of manufacturing an automobile to be called the Eclipse. But Evinrude’s early business ventures were sabotaged by his thorny personality and problems with financial partners.

One business partner he teamed successfully with was his wife Bess.
After successful tests with his new outboard motor on the Kinnikinnic River Bess placed ads in the Milwaukee newspapers declaring, “Don’t Row! Throw the oars away! Use an Evinrude motor.” The original inventory of 15 was depleted in days. An Evinrude motor, generating 1.5 horsepower, weighed 62 pounds and sold for a dollar a pound. Bess Evinrude next placed the same notice in a national magazine and more than a thousand Evinrude motors were sold in 1910.

Like many manufacturers Waterman stressed the technical features of his motor; Bess Evinrude, now business and advertising manager, emphasized the convenience of the Evinrude motor. She also negotiated contracts with Scandinavian fishermen for several thousand outboards. By 1914, six years after Ole Evinrude rowed off that island, the Evinrude motor was internationally known. That year Bess fell ill and Ole once again began bickering with a partner in the Evinrude Motor Co. He sold his share of the business for $137,500 and the Evinrudes spent the next few years traveling around the United States.

Ole Evinrude did not abandon outboard motors, however. By agreement,
he promised not to compete with his old company for five years but when the covenant expired he was ready with a new motor, lighter and 50% more powerful than his best-selling original model. He went back into business in 1920 as the Elto (Evinrude Light Twin Outboard) Outboard Motor Co.

Evinrude continued to improve his motor throughout the 1920s until 1929 when Elto merged with his original Evinrude Motor Company and the Lockwood-Ash Motor Company. Evinrude was installed as president of the new conglomerate. But any sense of triumph was short-lived. Bess, Ole Evinrude’s motivation in business since the day he rowed across the lake with melting ice cream, once again became sick and died in 1933 at the age of 48. Evinrude returned to tinkering in the plant and died the next year at the age of 57.

Dunlop

2007-02-12T04:40:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
John Dunlop

The streets of 1880s Belfast were pitted with granite outcroppings and tramlines, hardly the course of choice for young cyclists. Ten-year old Johnnie Dunlop pleaded with his father to create something to make his high-wheel tricycle rides more comfortable. His father, a prominent veterinarian, promised to do his best.

John Boyd Dunlop grew up in Scotland, the son of a tenant farmer.
He managed to get into the Royal Dick Veterinarian College in Edinburgh from which he migrated to Northern Ireland. Over the years he built his practice so that he employed 12 horseshoers. It wasn’t the classic background to revolutionize the transportation industry.

Dunlop started with a rubbered canvas and stretched it over a rubber tube which he attached to the periphery of a wooden disk. He inflated the tube with air and put it through some crude tests. The results were encouraging enough to continue working on tricycle tires based on the same principle.

On the night of February 28, 1888 the Dunlops gathered to secretly road test the new tire. A total eclipse of the moon injected added suspense but when Johnnie returned he beamed with pleasure about his ride. Dunlop proceeded to patent his tire and followed it up with two more patents in 1889, including one to cover the form of an inflation valve.

Dunlop’s new tire was so obviously better than solid tires that they began appearing on racing cycles within six months. William Hume, described as only a “medium rider,” was the first to use a Dunlop pneumatic tire. He crushed stronger riders in all three races he entered that day. The laughter in the crowd that greeted his “pudding tires” was quieted by day’s end.

The Pneumatic Tyre Company formed to meet the demand for the new tires. Dunlop received 300 pounds in cash and 3000 $1 shares in the newly formed venture. But it turned out Dunlop had not invented the pneumatic tire.
He had reinvented it. The patent office disallowed his claims citing an 1845 Aerial Wheel with air tubes submitted by R.W. Thomson. Thomson’s design, while sound, was ignored for nearly a half a century.

When his patent was ruled invalid Dunlop shifted from tires to bicycles.
His new bicycle rode on traditional solid tires, which were rapidly being replaced by his pneumatics. By 1895 he was gone from the business. A year later the Pneumatic Tyre Company became the Dunlop Pnuematic Tyre Company,
the forerunner of Dunlop Rubber.

John Dunlop lived to the advance age of 81, dying in 1921. Just before his death he published The History of the Pneumatic Tyre, a rambling reminiscence by an octogenarian looking back on the pivotal time in the development of the tire.

Boeing

2007-02-12T04:36:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
William Boeing

Today there are more Boeings in the air than any other airplane. Boeing is America's #1 exporter with a 55% share of the most expensive product in the world not awarded by the bidding process. For a while in the beginning it looked like that product would be bedroom bureaus and chests, not airplanes.

It all began as a hobby for William Boeing. The son of a Great Lakes timber and iron baron William was raised in Michigan and educated in Switzerland.
He matriculated at Yale, for which he showed no particular proclivity. Before his class graduated William was in Washington state buying timber lands for the family business.

He settled in Hoquiam, Washington in 1903 at the age of 22. The lumber business continued to be good to Boeing. In 1912 William Boeing was introduced to Conrad Westervelt at the University Club in Seattle. The tow men hit it off immediately. Both liked fast boats and a lively hand of bridge. Both had studied engineering. And although neither had ever been in a plane both evinced an interest in early aviation.

Boeing and Westervelt began building seaplanes as a lark. On June 15, 1916 Boeing took off from Lake Union in a clumsy-looking flying machine christened Bluebill. It was their first successful flight. Shortly afterwards the Pacific Aero Products Company was incorporated with Boeing as president. The business would sell planes if possible but the two men were also prepared to operate flying schools, stage exhibitions, and carry passengers and freight.

World War I loomed on the horizon for America. The United States Navy became interested in developing successful seaplanes. The Bluebill would not be one of them. It flunked its Navy tests. Years later Boeing would sell the plane to New Zealand where it set altitude records but for now the Navy urged Boeing to hurry production on a new model. He hired an aeronautical engineer.

The United States declared war on April 8, 1917. The Navy scheduled tests for Boeing's new "C-model" planes in July. He packed two planes on trains bound for the Naval testing site in Pensacola, Florida.

The weather for the trials was abominable. Waves crested at over four feet, winds whipped the beaches at more than 35 mph. But the Navy fliers praised the Boeing "C" planes as the best they had ever flown. The Navy ordered 50 planes from the newly named Boeing Airline Company. William Boeing personally invested $30,000 to meet production goals.

The war ended and with it so did business. Boeing issued more stock to raise money, most of which he bought himself. Many aircraft companies simply went out of business. Boeing survived with the manufacture of non-aircraft items, mainly bedroom furniture and phonograph cases. Even with the new products it did not appear Boeing would survive.

In November 1919 Boeing landed a remodelling contract for a British plane. Over the next several years the company subsisted by building other engineer's designs and its remodeling contracts. Boeing supplied planes to Edward Hubbard, whose Hubbard Air Transport was the world's first airline. Finally convinced of the viability of his business Boeing surrendered the presidency and became Chairman of the Board in 1924.

In 1925 Boeing gambled on a new aircraft designed for the United States Postal Service. He sold only one Model 40. But in 1927 when postal bids were accepted for the western routes of the transcontinental mail system Boeing was ready.
The new Model 40A was so light and could carry such a greater payload than its competition that Boeing's bid was fully 50% of what the Post Office was prepared to pay. It was so low William Boeing had to personally underwrite a $500,000 bond to guarantee the job.

Even in the mail business where each additional letter was added revenue William Boeing insisted on including a passenger seat in the Model 40A.
"From the start of the mail operation, I looked ahead to the time when we could 'wash out' the mail and not care about it. I expected passengers to become of primary importance," he would say later.

The new division, Boeing Air Transport, was a success from the beginning with its versatile and popular Model 40A. Boeing secured more and more mail routes, eventually forming the original United Airlines. But the new Franklin Roosevelt administration became convinced that the original mail routes were awarded unfairly. After Federal investigations and hearings Roosevelt suspended all airmail contracts on February 9, 1934. the Army took over delivery of the mail.

It was a disaster from the outset. Planes crashed and men died.
There was over $300,000 in damage in the first few months. The cost of transporting a pound of mail went from $.54 to $2.21 a mile. The public outrage forced Roosevelt to reinstate mail bids but only to new or reorganized airlines. Companies like Boeing could either serve as carriers or manufacturers, but not both.

William Boeing chose neither. He had always intended to retire at 50 and was already three years into his intended "retirement." He was tired of the political headaches indigenous to the aircraft industry. He sold all his stock in Boeing.

William Boeing retired to a life of leisure as his company established itself as the world's leading manufacturer of airplanes. He dies on his yacht in Seattle in 1956, months before the introduction of the first commercial jet plane, the Boeing 707.

Avis

2007-02-12T04:33:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Warren Avis

As an Air Force combat flying officer during World War II Warren Avis traveled many hard miles in Europe and America. Unfortunately much of it was after landing - making his way between the airport and his destination. Decent ground transportation was so scarce Avis sometimes carried motorcycles in the bomb bays of his planes so he would be able to get around when he landed.

The solution was simple enough: a car-rental system needed to be set up at airports. It was not a new revelation but anyone who had thought of it considered it impossible. A national car-rental network would be required; huge fleets of cars necessary; elaborate controls mandatory. Even industry giant Hertz was reluctant to tackle the logistical nightmare presented by the airport market.

It was left to Avis - who mustered out of the Air Force in 1946 - to be the first to rent cars at airports. Avis, who started dealing bikes and used cars as a teenager, was an auto dealer in Detroit and began there. He signed an exclusive contract to open the Avis Airlines Rent-A-Car System at Detroit’s Willow Run Airport. Simultaneously, he opened a rental location at Miami Airport,
a favorite destination for both vacationers and business travelers.

There was much to overcome. Many people didn’t know how to rent a car in those days; Avis set up counters near the baggage pick-up areas where he had twenty minutes or so to educate travelers on the Avis rental system. There were scores of details to work out: where to park the cars, how to advertise the service inside airports, what kind of insurance should be offered, how to train and staff counter workers.

Once Avis figured everything out in Miami and Detroit other Avis-owned airport operations sprouted in New York, Chicago, Dallas and Washington. By 1948 Los Angeles and Houston had come on board. As the system expanded Avis began to align himself with the airlines. He wangled Avis pamphlets into the airplane seat pockets - the first non-airline information allowed in seat pockets. He advertised jointly with American Airlines, welding Avis’ rental cars with the airline in the public’s mind.

For three years Hertz, the industry giant, sat on the sidelines and watched. They were still convinced Avis would fail. Instead, Avis prospered mightily, so much so he entered the Hertz stronghold - downtown hotels and offices in 1948. When Hertz finally moved into airports they were always playing catch-up.

At the time Hertz was owned by General Motors. A Ford dealer, Avis had no problem striking a deal with Ford Motors. He began the unheard-of practice for car renters of buying new Ford autos every year. Avis pointed out that his renters would, in essence, be test-driving new Ford models. Ford let the cars go cheap and Avis got a reputation for quality from a fleet of reliable autos.

It was an exciting time. But Avis was a builder, not a manager. In 1954, with 185 Avis locations in the United States and another dozen in foreign countries, Avis sold his Avis System for a reported $8 million. Over the years that followed Avis was in and out of over 30 businesses. He did well in real estate, not so well in oil. Condominium conversions were a success, flowers-by-wire less so. He authored books and built Avis Ford into the largest Ford dealership in Michigan.

In his business adventures Avis always sought to make a contribution to society. For most of his years he did this through his companies. In 1988, however, saying, “We have to stop being a conflict society,” Avis established a $2 million encounter group program in Ann Arbor to explore peaceful co-existence. To many, world peace is a pipe dream. Exactly what they said about rental cars in airports.

Woolworth's

2007-02-12T04:11:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Frank Woolworth

As a young boy growing up in Jefferson County, New York Frank Winfield Woolworth knew he was going to be a merchant. He thought store, he dreamed store, he played store. Often in the evening he and his brother would arrange make-believe merchandise on the dining room table and take turns selling to each other.

Yet the man who was to build the largest chain of stores in the world was turned down time and again in his quest to land his first retailing position.
In 1871, at the age of 19, Woolworth drove around Watertown, New York in an old sled looking for a sales job. Finally he was offered an opportunity at the Dry Goods firm of Augsbury-Moore. Of course he wasn't going to be paid but he wouldn't be charged anything for being around and learning, either.

After 2 1/2 years Woolworth worked hard enough to command a salary of $6 a week. He left for an offer of $10 a week but was soon cut to $8 for not moving enough goods. His health broke soon afterwards and Woolworth returned to the family farm to recuperate.

In 1877 his former employer Moore called him to run his store for $10 a week. In the spring of 1878 Woolworth arranged a number of slow-moving items on an old sewing table and priced them for 5¢ each. All the goods, heretofore unattractive to customers, sold the first day. It was the beginning of Woolworth's career selling an assortment of goods at one low price.

He convinced Moore to stake him with $300 to open a 5-cent store in Utica, New York in February 1879. At first the goods sold briskly but sales dropped to $2.50 a day and the store closed. Moore and Woolworth did not give up on the idea and launched another store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on June 21 the same year.

The Lancaster store was a modest 14' x 35'. The opening inventory was worth $410, comprised totally of nickel items. First day sales totalled $127.65, nearly 30% of his inventory. He later added 10¢ items and the Lancaster store became the first of over 2300 Woolworth 5 & 10s across the world.

In the 1880s few manufacturers would consider dealing with retailers. Woolworth realized the only way to give his customers the best deals was to buy directly from the suppliers. Only through persistence and imagination was he able to break through these traditional retailing barriers. By buying in large quantities he was able to offer high quality merchandise for 5¢ and 10¢.

Woolworth expanded the idea rapidly. He brought his brother, his old store-playing partner, into the 5 & 10 business. His brother, Moore and other close friends and associates all started chains of 5 & 10 stores, six chains in all.
In 1912 the F.W. Woolworth Company organized to take over all the 5 & 10 stores, 596 in all. The men had never been competitors and often bought and consulted together. The consolidation was a logical progression.

In 1913 Woolworth built the world's tallest building - the 792-foot Woolworth Tower. Other buildings were to grow taller but none so captured the imagination of the public, erected as it was in an age when the public was entranced with the romance of American business. Woolworth paid for the entire cost of $13,500,000 out of his own pocket - a gargantuan monument constructed literally from nickels and dimes.

Woolworth remained active in the business until his death in 1919, accumulating a fortune of $65,000,000, never having sold an item for more than a dime.

Wanamaker's

2007-02-12T04:08:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
John Wanamaker

John Wanamaker had sacrificed his job in a Philadelphia clothing store to weakening health and began a supposedly more benign employment as permanent secretary for the Y.M.C.A., the first such paid position in the country. But he soon found himself amid the toughs of south Philadelphia trying to establish a new Sunday School. Wanamaker’s untiring efforts would eventually make Bethany Mission, which he opened in 1858, the largest Sunday School in the world.

His work in the religious movement also yield two unexpected bonuses:
a wife and his first business partner. In 1860 the 22-year old Wanamaker took Mary Brown as his wife and teamed with her brother Nathan to start a clothing store. Wanamaker had learned the retailing business thoroughly at Tower Hall, the most prominent clothing establishment in Philadelphia.

Oak Hall, as the partners named their new store, floundered in the beginning but a rush of orders for military uniforms at the outbreak of the Civil War started the store on the road to success. The influx of cash enabled Wanamaker to test his flamboyant advertising methods. He distributed handbills and calendars at county fairs, launched huge balloons from the roof with prize offers of a free suit inside, and plastered the Oak Hall name around town wherever he could.

But where Wanamaker truly made his mark was in newspaper advertising. Hardly a paper hit the Philadelphia streets without a Wanamaker ad in it;
he eventually pioneered half-page and full-page mercantile advertisements.
He wrote most of the copy himself, especially favoring rhyming couplets.
Even though this rendered many of the ads nonsensical it made Oak Hall
one of Philadelphia’s most popular stores by the end of the war.

Nathan Brown died in 1868 and Wanamaker was sufficiently well off to buy his partner’s interest. Wanamaker immediately set out to build a second store,
a “New Kind of Store,” as he envisioned it. At a time when retailing was confined to specialty shops Wanamaker wanted to put the widest possible variety of goods under one roof, with each department more richly stocked than the leading specialty store with which it competed.

When a huge abandoned Pennsylvania Railroad shed became available Wanamaker bought it and converted it into the most varied retail store in the world. Counters of goods radiated from the center of his Grand Depot in concentric circles with items Wanamaker had stocked from trips across Europe. His “New Kind of Store” opened in 1877 with 650 employees. By 1882 the store was such as success that the payroll swelled to 3,000.

With his two stores booming Wanamaker had become one of Philadelphia’s leading citizens. He left everyday affairs to his younger brothers and sons and entered politics. He served as chairman of the Republican national finance committee in 1888, raising the largest campaign war chest ever seen.
As a reward he was named to President Benjamin Harrison’s cabinet at
Postmaster General.

After his stint in Washington Wanamaker made unsuccessful runs for the Senate and governorship of Pennsylvania. All the while Wanamaker never slackened in his work for Bethany Mission. While in Washington He returned to Philadelphia every Sunday to teach his class. But as rewarding as the spiritual side of his life was it couldn’t fill a man as inexhaustible as Wanamaker.

In 1896 he acquired the lease on the world-famous A. T. Stewart emporium in New York City, when the store of his idol slipped into bankruptcy after the founder’s death. To meet increasing competition in New York Wanamaker built the largest department store in the city in 1907. The store was an immediate success and Wanamaker returned to Philadelphia in 1910.

Now 72, the “father of the modern department store” was not quite finished. Across the street from Philadelphia’s City Hall Wanamaker built the largest building ever devoted to selling goods. It covered an entire city block, reached 12 stories into the sky and contained 45 acres of floor space. It was as ornate as it was grand. The organ in the gallery was so large it required 13 freight cars to transport it from the St. Louis Exposition. And it was only one of three organs in the store.

Profits in the Wanamaker stores skyrocketed during World War I,
in part due to a sharply inflated prices. After the war Wanamaker gambled that prices had reached their zenith and, seeing a chance to perform a public service as well, he reduced all merchandise in both his New York and Philadelphia stores by 20%. The sale lasted two months. Extra help was hired to handle the volume. His timing was prescient; prices indeed had peaked and began dropping rapidly.

The great sale of 1920 was Wanamaker’s farewell gesture. He turned over both stores to his son and focused on his religious work. In 1922 heart failure caught up with him and John Wanamaker died at age 84. His list of innovations from 60 years of retailing stretched beyond any other.

Tiffany's

2007-02-12T04:06:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Charles Tiffany

In 1837, at the height of America's first great Depression, Charles Tiffany and John Young opened a fancy goods store in lower Manhattan with $1000 borrowed from Tiffany's father. Tiffany had first operated a store ten years earlier when he ran a country store for his father, a wealthy mill owner. Now he put his retailing ideas to work in a simple wood-and-brick structure opposite City Hall.

The first week's profits totalled 33¢. But Tiffany & Young had correctly gauged the popularity of imported Chinese goods and their business flourished. The fancy goods business expanded through 1838. On New Year's Day 1839 robbers invaded the emporium and carted away everything transportable, over $4000 of goods. Fortunately the partners had taken all the cash home with them for the holiday, enough to restock. Quickly they were growing again, adding costume jewelry for sale for the first time. Tiffany would later recall the popular baubles as cheap, garish, in poor taste and crudely made. But real gems of any sort were rare in the United States at the time.

Tiffany's instituted a firm price policy. The price on the tag was the price to be paid - no haggling as was the custom of the day. It was a policy Tiffany's would later adhere to even with $100,000 necklaces.

In 1845 Tiffany & Young discontinued paste jewelry and began featuring gold jewelry. In 1847 Swiss jeweled watches were added to the line and a year later Tiffany started a gold-smithing shop, making the first company-designed jewelry. He brought out the first Tiffany Blue Book catalog, adopting the famous "Tiffany blue" packaging.

Charles Tiffany was a master of publicity, teaming with neighbor P.T. Barnum on several occasions. Tiffany's crafted a tiny silver horse and carriage for the wedding of Barnum's celebrated midgets, General Tom Thumb and his bride Lavinia.

The New York press dubbed Tiffany the "King of Diamonds" when he displayed the French crown jewels, although the gems were actually purchased by his partner Young. From that day to this Tiffany's has been regarded as America's greatest jeweler. In 1853 Charles Tiffany bought full control of the business and moved the Tiffany & Co. store uptown.

Prior to the Civil War the United States had no standing army.
Tiffany prepared for the hostilities by submitting the first list of equipment used
by the French army to the quartermaster general. Thereafter his firm sold gold epaulets, cap ornaments, navy lace and other military accouterments.
Mrs. Lincoln, who was coldly received by Washington society, consoled herself
with several shopping sprees at Tiffany's. When the ear ended Tiffany did a
brisk business in commemorative swords for returning heroes.

After the Civil War Charles Tiffany was ready to outfit America's Gilded Age. "We'll give the customer what we want," proselytized the country's leader in good taste. In 1867 Tiffany's won the first international medal awarded to a United States silver-maker at the Paris Exposition Universelle. Tiffany's would continue to win prizes - and valuable publicity - everywhere its jewelry was exhibited.

In 1870 Tiffany built a new iron store on Union Square. The New York Times hailed the store as "a Jewel Palace...the largest of its kind in the world.
A school of taste...a teacher of art progress." Tiffany's now became a museum that incidentally sold its exhibits. A trip to Tiffany's was a must on every rich traveler's New York itinerary.

The gem that attracted more visitors than any other was the Tiffany Diamond. Found in the new Kimberly mines in South Africa in 1877, it was once purchased for $18,000. Tiffany thought it might just be just one of many yellow diamonds found and cut it and held it for years without publicity. But the Tiffany Diamond remains the largest flawless and perfectly colored canary diamond ever mined.
It is worth over two million dollars.

Charles Tiffany's biggest problem in the last quarter of the 19th century was finding diamonds, not selling them. Newly discovered mines in South Africa helped but by far the most romantic source was the royal houses of Europe who sold their collections when they became strapped for cash. Tiffany routinely sold $6,000,000 of diamonds a year. At times he could have $40,000,000 in gems in his vaults.

In the 1880s and 1890s a new millionaire could prove his status to his associates merely by sending his wife to a ball, weighed down with enough jewels to cripple a good Sherpa. Tiffany catered to the new money as well as the old.

The store kept seven employees just to get information and photographs on the wealthy in every American city. If someone walked into Tiffany's and his photo and financial status were on file the new customer could take his jewels without payment. "When we give credit to anyone who had supposed himself unknown to us we are sure to retain him forever," said Tiffany.

Charles Tiffany was inexorably linked with the rich and famous of America although he lived comparably simply. He enjoyed nothing more than a hearty walk. When he discovered a new pedometer he added it to his Blue Book. He died in 1902, his life spanning virtually a century, at the age of 90, leaving an estate of $35,000,000. He was planning yet another uptown move for Tiffany's.

Speigel's

2007-02-12T04:03:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Joseph Spiegel

The Spiegel family trace their ancestry to a prosperous 16th century German textile merchant who bought the largest mirror (spiegel in German) he could find in town. He carted the mirror up to his hillside home but could not find a way to get it through the door. He leaned it against the wall by the door and searched for a way in. He never found it. The mirror remained on the hill and became a town landmark. The family who lived in the house came to be known as the Spiegels.

In 1848 the current Spiegels fled their homeland to escape political strife and went to New York. They had no money, no friends and spoke no English.
Trying to survive the best they could the family splintered; the father working all the time peddling needles and small housewares, daughters marrying into hopeful circumstances, a brother moving to Ohio.

When the Civil War erupted 19-year old Joseph itched to join his older brother in battle. Marcus, a German revolutionary, rose rapidly to the position of Colonel in the Union Army and promised the family he would keep young Joseph from harm. Marcus assigned him to a regimen of volunteers.

The 120th of Ohio was sent on an ill-advised invasion of the Texas Red River area in an attempt to secure wool for New England textile mills and was summarily turned back. Returning from the campaign on the City Belle, the paddlewheeler was ambushed by Confederate trips. Marcus was killed and Joseph taken prisoner.

After the war Joseph went to Chicago to live with a sister and her husband. Spiegel found the brawling town to be little more than a step up from prison with unsanitary water and a ubiquitous stench from the new meat-packing houses.
But the young town had a vibrancy and promise. In less than a month his brother-in-law had set him up in the furniture business.

At J. Spiegel and Company he waited on customers, ordered stock,
tended the books and packed merchandise. By 1870 Spiegel assumed full control.
The next year the Great Chicago Fire consumed the business district and Spiegel scrambled to haul as much stock as possible to his backyard before his small wood shop was destroyed. The next morning he leased a lot on Michigan Avenue and began selling what he could under a tent.

A rebuilding Chicago needed his furniture but the Panic of 1873 sapped his remaining resources. He was able to entice an investor, Jacob Cahn, to remain open as Spiegel and Cahn, Retail Furniture Dealers. Business was brisk and when Cahn retired in 1879 Spiegel was once again selling furniture as J. Spiegel and Company.

At the time a wave of immigrants populated Chicago and spawned a spate of cut-rate, low-quality furniture dealers. Spiegel, who deplored the trade in cheap goods, responded aggressively with advertising, even supplying furniture to theaters as props in exchange for mentions on the playbills. But his wealthy customers were deserting traditional areas for newer homes in the suburbs. Spiegel was looking at a dying business.

He finally succumbed to his son Modie’s idea of an entire spectrum of household goods sold at low cost on consumer credit. Modie attracted $32,000 in investors for his plan and in 1893 the business incorporated as Spiegel House Furnishings Company. Joseph acted as general administrator, stationed formally at the front door to greet customers and guide them to salesmen on the floor. In 1898 the first branch store for new markets opened to chase their former clients to the outreaches of Chicago.

Selling was a high-pressure environment and Spiegel’s gained a reputation for “wacky” goings-on. Modie ran the show - and often it was. The floor covering area could transform overnight into an Arabian Nights desert home to move a few Persian rugs. But the real showstopper was unlimited credit - “All you want -
on your terms.”

More Spiegels entered the business. The least promising was Arthur, Joseph’s youngest son. Given a job as a salesman he often fell asleep on a pile of a rugs. He was exiled to the warehouse and eventually given the lowest job his father could find - answering the mail. Spiegel occasionally received letters about ordering by mail on credit and it was Arthur’s job to politely invite the inquirers to visit a Spiegel store in Chicago.

One day Arthur asked his father how many of these letters he thought Spiegel received in the course of a year. Joseph’s guesstimate was ridiculously low. Arthur pestered his father for a trial at filling these orders. His father, perhaps seeing this as a way to inspire his unenterprising son, relented. Arthur handled each request personally by providing information about the wanted items, figuring the down payment, explaining the terms and figuring freight costs. In no time he had more business than he could handle, all of it unsolicited.

What would happen if Spiegel advertised? Joseph couldn’t understand offering credit to complete strangers but Arthur couldn’t be dissuaded. He produced a 24-page booklet of mail-order merchandise. Tiny Spiegel’s only innovation in a field dominated by Sears & Roebuck and Montgomery Ward was free credit. Arthur wrote an editorial on “The Beauties of Installment Credit” and adopted the slogan, “We Trust the People - Everywhere!”

The tiny Spiegel House Furnishings had more orders than they could fill.
By 1906 mail sales reached $980,000 - double the volume of retail stores.
Arthur and his staff was working 90-hour weeks. To fuel the growth Spiegel incorporated and never looked back.

Joseph Spiegel, approaching 70, was glad to let the mail division boom in another direction. He was never comfortable mailing good merchandise to people he had never met. Joseph continued doing what he liked best - greeting customers in his store and selling furniture to his friends.

Sears & Roebuck

2007-02-12T03:59:00.000-08:00

And the men behind the brand are...
Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck

First some facts. In its heyday Sears & Roebuck had the most stores, the most customers, the biggest building. The company was the biggest publisher in America. They shipped enough catalogs to fill a train of boxcars 30 miles long. One out approximately every 200 American workers worked for Sears.
Sears alone accounted for 1% of the American Gross National Product.

And it all began with a shipment of refused pocket watches.

Richard Sears was 15 when he became the family breadwinner in 1879.
He worked in the offices of the Minneapolis-St. Louis Railroad but pestered his bosses for a field job. They sent him to North Redwood, Minnesota as a freight agent.

Checking shipments in the station everyday Sears quickly learned about the mail order business. In 1886 a town jeweler refused a shipment of "yellow watches." The Chicago commission house handling the watches wired Sears that as the station agent he could have the watches for $12 each rather then incur the return shipping costs.

Sears knew the popular gold pocket watches were fetching $25 in retail stores. But he wasn't interested in retailing. He took the watches and sold them to local station agents down the line for $14 each. Anything they made over that they could keep.

Sears was hooked. As a bonded freight agent he did not have to pay to take delivery. He could settle his account when other agents paid him. It was a venture without risk, only profit. Sears began ordering more watches C.O.D.
In six months he had amassed more than $5000, a substantial fortune in 1886.

He moved to Minneapolis, the biggest city he knew, and founded the R.W. Sears Watch Company. He began advertising watches in the paper, unheard of at the time, and found he had a natural flair for the work. So many orders poured in he needed to move to Chicago to facilitate shipping in 1887.

In April 1887 an advertisement appeared in the Chicago Daily News:
"WANTED - Watchmaker with reference who can furnish tools. State age, experience and salary requirement." A tall, lean man from Hammond, Indiana answered the ad. He presented Sears an example of his best work. Sears studied it closely for a moment and admitted, "I don't know anything about watchmaking, but I presume this is good, otherwise you wouldn't have submitted it to me." Alvah Curtis Roebuck was hired.

Sears continued to build his business by undercutting the competition in price, often buying discontinued lines from suppliers. With low prices come suspicions of quality. Sears quelled such doubts with the strongest guarantees in the business.

Richard Sears was an aggressive, dynamic salesman who thrived in business competition. But a large part of him also longed for the bucolic country life.
In 1888 Sears sold his watch company for $72,000, retaining a half-interest in the firm's Toronto branch. Roebuck owned 25% of the Canada business.
Sears invested $60,000 of his money in Iowa farm mortgages.

By 1889 Sears was again selling watches in Minnesota, doing business as the Warren Company, his middle name. Again he lasted only a year before retiring. This time he sold his Toronto business and his Minnesota concern to Roebuck.

A week later he was back. He asked Roebuck for half the company and soon their first watch catalog, featuring 52 pages, was published. Sears added products to the book as they caught his fancy. By 1893 he had added bicycles and organs and other general merchandise and the catalog grew to 322 pages. It was the first familiar all-purpose catalog from Sears & Roebuck, "The Cheapest Supply House on Earth."

The business was always buoyed by its pledge: We Guarantee Satisfaction and Safe Delivery on Everything You Order. The story circulated through the Midwest of a customer who had come to Richard Sears with a crusty, bruised watch he had dropped on a rock in the mud. Sears handed him a new watch. When the customer protested that the damage was his own fault Sears stopped him,
"We guarantee our watches not to fall out of people's pockets and bounce in the mud."

Sears wrote to the farmers in their own language - simple, earthy and direct. He called his catalog "the farmer's friend" and built confidence in rural America that they could comfortably write to the big city. Sears called his business plan "Iowaization."

In 1893 Sears & Roebuck again outgrew Minneapolis and returned to Chicago. Despite the general economic Panic Sears stepped up his advertising, driving the company into debt but boosting sales. If the orders slowed the company would fail and Sears kept expanding.

It was the proper strategy for long-term growth but the short-term risk was too much for Alvah Roebuck, who was at heart a tinkerer not a high-stakes gambler. In 1895 he asked Sears for $25,000 for his share of the company and got out.
In short order Sears located two new partners and Roebuck returned as the firm's head of watches and jewelry, seemingly not perturbed at the new arrangement.

Richard Sears was something of a loose cannon. His outrageous advertising claims were legendary. Once he started a banking department where customers could drop off savings for 5% interest, in complete violation of state banking laws. A sound businessman was needed to balance the irrepressible Sears.
Alvah Roebuck gave up but Julius Rosenwald, his next partner, steadied the enterprise.

Sears & Roebuck continued to expand as the economy strengthened. In one issue of Comfort magazine Sears placed 70 different ads, each bursting with copy from border to border. Sears travelled extensively in Europe seeking medical help for his ailing wife but kept a steady stream of ideas flowing to Chicago.

The Panic of 1907 exacerbated the differences between the expansionist Sears and Rosenwald. His chief satisfaction was derived not in making money but in making the company grow. In 1908 Sears resigned as president. He was named Chairman of the Board but never attended a board meeting. He spent his time on his great farm outside Waukesha, Wisconsin until his death in 1914 at the age of 50.

After Alvah Roebuck left the company in the early 1900s he made a modest fortune developing equipment in the infant motion picture industry. He was wiped out by the Depression and returned to Chicago at age 69 to seek work with the company that bore his name.

He stopped by a local store and the manager asked if he could publicize the visit of one of the founders. People poured in to see the Roebuck of Sears & Roebuck. He went on salary, touring for several years and writing a personal history of the company's early days. He died in 1948 at the age of 84, once again a shareholder in Sears, Roebuck & Company by virtue of the firm's profit-sharing plan.

J.C. Penney's

2007-02-12T03:57:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
James Cash Penney

James Cash Penney named his first store "Golden Rule." He was going to combine ethics and business in his store on the frontier. The ethics he had learned growing up as a minister's son in Hamilton, Missouri. The business instincts seemed to come naturally.

His career started in 1883 at the age of 8 when his father told him he would have to buy his own clothing. James had saved $2.50 from errands and bought a pig. He fattened the pig for several months, sold it at a profit and reinvested in more pigs. Soon he had a dozen pigs - and some unhappy neighbors. His father forced him to give up his young business.

As a young man Penney worked as a clerk. His first job paid $2.27 a month. He journeyed to Colorado for health reasons and invested his small savings in a butcher shop. His meatcutter told him his most important duty would be supplying the chef at the local hotel with a bottle of bourbon each week. Penney did it once and regretted it immediately. He ended the liquor bribes and lost his biggest account and the business.

In 1902 Penney went to the mining town of Kemmerer, population 1000,
in the southwestern hills of Wyoming. With $500 of his own money and $1500 of borrowed capital he joined a 1/3 partnership in a store Penney would run.

The Golden Rule was a shack on a muddy sidestreet in downtown Kemmerer. On one side was a laundry, on the other a boarding house. Penney lived upstairs with his family. The venture was not without risk. At the time part of a miner's wage was scrip redeemable only at the mining company store's inflated prices. Outside competition was decidedly not welcome.

Penney was determined to sell goods at prices as low as possible with a one-price policy for all. He would cater to the needs of rural America by selling basic types of merchandise his customers would need. His concepts were well-received. First day cash receipts totalled $466.59.

Penney did so well he was able to buy his partners out for $30,000 in 1907. Right from the start he had dreamed of a chain stores. He developed a partnership idea where the new store owner would own 1/3 of the new Golden Rule provided he had a man trained to run the store. These men trained others who would go and start their own stores in new western towns. The policy led to rapid and successful expansion. By the 1930s there was a Penney's store in every western town with a population greater than 5000.

In 1913 Golden Rule became J.C. Penney. The name was so trusted that lumberjacks were known to leave six months pay for safekeeping with a Penney's manager whom they had never seen but whom they trusted merely because he was a Penney's man.

In 1917 James Penney retired as President to devote himself to philanthropic interests. He remained as Chairman of the Board, a strictly honorary position. The Stock Market Crash drained his $40,000,000 fortune and broke, discouraged and ill Penney entered a Battle Creek, Michigan sanitarium where he prepared himself to die, considering himself a failure.

But he recovered and returned home with a renewed interest in the Penney Company. He travelled around the country attending company conventions and rarely missed an important store opening. Everywhere he went people were thrilled to see the J.C. Penney in their store. He raised prize cattle, his life having come full circle. Penney lived to be 95, just short of his oft-stated goal of 100.
He was the last of the great merchant princes.

Montgomery Ward

2007-02-12T03:55:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Montgomery Ward

The Montgomery Ward catalog has been chosen on many lists as one of the 100 most influential American books ever published. One such nominating committee, the Grolier Club, stated: "The mail order catalogue has been perhaps the greatest single influence in increasing the standard of American living. It brought the benefit of wholesale prices to city and hamlet, to the crossroads and prairie."

It wasn't so obvious at the time.

Aaron Montgomery Ward was born in Chatham, New Jersey in 1844 and his family went west to Niles, Michigan in 1853 where his father took up the cobbler's trade. Aaron left school at 14 to work in brickyards and a barrel factory where he learned his most valuable lesson: "I learned I was not physically or mentally suited for brick or barrel making."

He clerked at a shoe store and then a country store earning $6 a month -
plus board. Ward was ready to go to the big city. In the 1850s Chicago was home to 30,000 people and known, none too affectionately, as "The Mudhole of the Prairies." The streets were barely above the level of Lake Michigan and covered with bottomless goo.

But by the late 1860s Chicago was teeming with post- Civil War energy.
Fifteen railroad lines moved 150 trains a day out of the busy terminals.
Like thousands of other young men Ward arrived in Chicago in 1866 and began work in various dry goods firms, including one operated by Marshall Field.
He became a salesman, his income rising to the princely sum of $12 a week.

As he made his tedious rounds through the mud in his horse and buggy he took particular notice of the country stores on his route. They were congenial places with pot belly stoves and made fine meeting places for local farmers but they were far from friendly when the farmers had to actually buy something. Selection was small, prices were high. The storekeeper was at the mercy of the big city wholesalers.

Ward considered how he could help the disadvantaged farmer. He decided on a mail order store. He would set up in the big city where he could easily reach suppliers and buy in quantity to get the best prices. A catalog listing his prices would be sent to farmers who would receive their order by mail, cash on delivery. It was not a new idea but the few direct mail firms at the time sold only one or two items. Ward was going to bring the whole store to the farmer.

Ward worked and saved. He talked about his idea with friends and associates. They all agreed he would go broke trying to sell goods sight-unseen to back country folk. He was not dissuaded.

By 1871 he finally saved enough money to buy a small amount of goods at wholesale prices. On October 8, 1871 the Great Chicago Fire engulfed the city for 30 hours. Every building in a 4-square mile area was destroyed. So was Ward's inventory.

Back to work. By August 1872 he scraped up some money and convinced a few people to join him, raising $1600 in working capital. He printed up a one-page price list and hand-addressed the first circulars to the Grangers, a co-operative farm supply organization. One of his earliest price lists contained 163 items under the banner "Supplied By The Cheapest Cash House In America." Most of the items cost $1, including clothing, a 6-view stereoscope, and a backgammon set.

For most of 1873 Ward's mailbox was bare. His partners wanted out and Ward, who still had his sales job, managed to buy them out of their small investments. The Panic of 1873 was sinking established traditional retailers, let alone his radical enterprise.

His business was ridiculed by the Chicago Tribune as a disreputable firm "hidden from public gaze with no merchandise displayed and reachable only through the post office." Under threat of a lawsuit the Tribune printed a retraction.
The retraction was added to the next flyer and sales increased.

About this time ready-made clothing began appearing. It was always believed that no two people had the same measurements and tailors were needed to make quality clothes. But the crunch for uniforms in the Civil War demonstrated that certain combinations of measurements could be standardized. Ward told his faraway customers - "Give your age and describe your general build and we will, nine times out of ten, give you a fit."

Ward, a short, stout man, wrote all the early copy. He always included a message in his catalogs, often educating the reader about buying and selling,
"It is best to make your order around $5. Shipping charges on small orders will eat up your savings. Consider joining a buying club with your neighbors."

Business began to grow rapidly as consumers came to trust Ward's unseen store. He bound his first catalog in 1874 and the book exploded to 72 pages in 1875. Ward began to worry he might become too big and took an ad in Farmers Voice just to reassure his customers he had not lost touch with their needs.

In 1893 Ward sold controlling interest to George R. Thorne who had come on as a partner late in 1873. Ward remained president but after awhile he even stopped attending board meetings. The last twenty years of his life were spent preserving the Chicago waterfront as a park for the people. He spent over $200,000 of his own monies to defending the public's right to open space.

His long-time efforts to prevent the erection of buildings along Lake Michigan won him the title of "The Watch Dog of the Lake Front." At one time there were 46 building projects planned in the park and he fought them all successfully, losing many influential friends along the way. Finally, just before his death in 1913 he won his final legal battle to forever keep the waterfront an open area.
The Tribune, no friend of Montgomery Ward, wrote,"We know now that Mr. Ward was right, was farsighted, was public spirited. That he was unjustly criticized as a selfish obstructionist or as a fanatic. Before he died, it is pleasant to think, Mr. Ward knew that the community had swung round to his side and was grateful for the service he had performed in spite of misunderstanding and injustice."

Marshall Field's

2007-02-12T03:53:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Marshall Field

"The customer is always right!" History does not record exactly when, or even if, Marshall Field, the 19th century's wealthiest merchant, ordered that declaration but it exemplified his retailing philosophy and came to represent the American retailing credo. In an era of "caveat emptor" Field's stores emphasized full credit refunds for any reason whatsoever.

Marshall Field did not carry the stamp on greatness upon him in his early years. After Field achieved unprecedented success in Chicago his first employer remarked about Field's four years as a Pittsfield, Massachusetts clerk, "Well, I'd never thought it of him. He was about the greenest looking lad I ever saw when he came to work for me."

With $1000 saved from his Pittsfield job Field, a slender, handsome man of average height, went to join his brother in Chicago in 1856. His brother got him a clerk position in the largest wholesale drygoods house in Chicago. Field's salary was $400 a year. He slept on the premises and saved $200.

Field progressed rapidly and became a partner in 1860 at the age of 25.
Prices rose with the Civil War brewing and when the war ended Field bought into the store of Potter Palmer who introduced fashion to the rough frontier town of 50,000 that was Chicago in 1865.

Palmer soon concluded that his present Lake Street location did not hold as much promise as a State Street address. State Street was little more than a muddy ribbon flowing through rows of dilapidated shacks but Potter quietly acquired all the property on State Street. He built a street 100 feet in width, erected a 6-story building and opened his doors. State Street was on its way to becoming one of the great shopping streets in the world. Field and his partner Levi Leiter leased the new building.

In 1871 Field was turning over $8,000,000 of inventory each year when the Great Chicago Fire destroyed the city. Field's losses were over $3,500,000 and only $2,500,000 was insured. The firm was caught in the financial panic of 1873 and in 1877 the store again went to the ground in flames. Despite the setbacks of the 1870s the company not only survived but prospered.

In 1881 Field bought out Leiter for $2,000,000. Over the next 25 years sales tripled from 25million dollars to 73 million. Field stressed quality and would have nothing to do with shoddy merchandise. He believed in providing his customers with the most attractive facilities possible in which to shop.

Outside of retailing the merchant dabbled in railroads, real estate, banking and steel. He financed the Chicago Natural Museum of History with over ten million dollars. When Marshall Field died in 1906 his estate was estimated at $150 million. He was the largest taxpayer in the United States.

Macy's

2007-02-12T03:51:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Rowland Macy

Rowland Hussey Macy was born of Quaker stock on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts and like many young men was seized by the sea. He sailed at the age of 15 on the Emily Morgan, bound for Cape Horn and beyond. He spent four years sailing through the South Seas before returning to Massachusetts.
Although he was often called Captain Macy in later years he never again set to sea, save as a passenger.

Macy had no clear idea what to do after his sea adventures and for several years his trail is lost to history. He surfaced in the dry goods trade in Boston is 1844, his first of several marginally successful retail operations. In 1849 Macy headed for San Francisco in the Gold Rush, leaving behind his wife and family.

His success in the gold fields is unknown but by 1850 he was doing business in Marysville as Macy & Company but the merchant partnership was soon put up for public auction. We next find Macy back in Haverhill, Massachusetts operating a store offering a full line of dry goods in 1853. He was experimenting with many of the principles that would later become Macy staples: dealing only in cash, a single price policy and extensive advertising. But this venture failed also.

Macy tried brokering for a short while and then bolted to Superior City, Wisconsin in 1857 to engage in land speculation just as the boom shipping town was going bust. At the age of 35, struggling in the nation's heartland, it was hard to see how Rowland Macy had laid the foundation for creating the world's most famous department store.

Macy came to New York in 1858 and opened a small fancy goods store.
He chose a corner uptown from the main shopping district where several merchants before him had failed. As an adventurer from Boston veteran New York merchants conceded Macy would meet the same fate.

His tiny 20 foot by 60 foot store had counters running down both sides and through the middle leaving but two narrow aisles. Was the site selection foresight or simply the result of lack of funds? For years the location was no great advantage but slowly the New York trade moved away from the southern end of Manhattan towards Macy.

Three weeks after opening Macy was burglarized of over $1000 worth of goods and several months later a window fire cost him $2000 in losses. They were setbacks a merchant grossing $5 a day at the start could ill afford. For two years Macy's was only one of scores of similar stores struggling to survive when he offered a department of "French and German fancy goods": pocketbooks, handbags, frames, games and dolls.

Gradually Macy's store was becoming a department store, although there was no such appellation at the time. He had 22 distinct lines of goods and struggled with a suitable name for his business. He tried such cumbersome titles as "Macy's Grand Central Fancy Goods Establishment."

By whatever name Macy prospered. He advertised relentlessly and with great innovation. He was not afraid to use white space in the grey, copy-heavy papers of the time. He repeated words and used special eye-grabbing patterns with his headlines. Macy wrote his own copy in a personal anecdotal style rather than the formal tomes of his competition.

Macy continued his policies, first nurtured in Massachusetts, of dealing only in cash, offering his goods at the lowest prices possible and setting a single price for all. These tenets would become standard practices by department stores that would follow Macy's.

Macy pioneered many promotional selling tactics. He began using a five-point red star to identify his goods as early as 1862. He used clearance sales, free delivery and solicited mail orders. Macy introduced fractional and odd pricing to suggest bargains. His ads proclaimed that "Macy's will not be undersold."

The small original store expanded piecemeal until Macy had the ground space of 11 stores, employing over 400 people. Receipts had grown into the thousands each day. Macy, however, began to suffer the ill effect of constant attention to his business. In the 1870s he contracted Bright's disease of the kidneys.

He sailed to Europe for rest and medical treatment in 1877. Suspecting the gravity of his situation Macy had arranged his affairs so his partners could continue the business in the event of his death, which in fact came in Paris at the age of 55.

Levitz

2007-02-12T03:49:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Ralph Levitz

Pottstown, Pennsylvania seemed an unlikely spot for a revolution. Here, for more than a quarter-century Ralph and Leon Levitz operated two furniture stores that looked pretty much like their father’s store which opened in nearby Lebanon in 1910. In fact it looked pretty much like every one of the other 25,000 furniture stores across the country.

The Levitz family netted about $60,000 in a good year and had built a net worth of maybe $500,000. Each year they advertised a year-end clearance sale from their warehouse and customers came in drove. The rest of the year they made the occasional buck waiting for the year-end bonanza. What would happen with warehouse sales all year round?

The first Levitz warehouse store opened in Allentown in 1963. Immediately inside the door the customer was dwarfed by cartons stacked 20 feet high and spread over a warehouse the size of a football field. On the other side of the warehouse was a showroom with 250 model-room vignettes.

Selling brand name furniture without delivery charges, no decorating services, and a limited choice of fabrics the Levitzs were able to slash prices by 25%.
Also, the American population was becoming increasingly mobile and didn’t want to be tied to expensive furniture. The first wave of post World War II retirees were buying second homes and not looking to plow a fortune into furnishings.
The cash register never stopped ringing.

Ralph Levitz, a quiet, genial 58-year old conventional furniture retailer,
had stood the staid, sleepy furniture industry on its ear. Levitz wasted no time in spreading his “concept” of warehouse selling. He targeted 55 major markets, opening outlets near highway interchanges where land and rental costs were below prime downtown locations and near railroad sidings to keep delivery costs down.

In ten years Levitz sales ballooned to $175 million a year. The Levitz stock became the darling of Wall Street, exploding from $4 a share to $150. The family net worth jumped past $300 million. It was all a bit much for small town furniture retailers. In 1974 a professional manager was recruited as President and Chief Executive Officer to shepherd Levitz through its era of protracted expansion.

L.L Bean

2007-02-12T03:46:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Leon Leonwood Bean

All he really wanted was to keep his feet dry on deer-hunting trips. The all-leather logger's boot popular at the time gave good support but was uncomfortable and became unbearably heavy when wet. Rubber boots kept his feet dry but were awkward in the field.

What he needed, Leon Leonwood Bean knew, was a good hunting shoe.

Bean would later write, "My life up to the age of 40 years was most uneventful, with a few exceptions." One was his first hunting trip when he was 13.
The exhilaration over felling his first deer cultivated a life-long love affair with the outdoors.

Bean, born in western Maine in 1873 and orphaned at age 12, made his way by working on the farms of friends and relatives. As a young man he survived by trapping, selling soap door-to-door and doing anything that came along that didn't take too much time away from hunting.

In 1912 Bean attached some rugged lightweight leather upper to rubber overshoe bottoms. He field-tested the new boot himself and was delighted.
He made some boots for friends. They were pleased as well. Anybody who hunts should have these, he decided.

L.L. Bean obtained a mailing list of Maine hunting license holders and prepared a three-page brochure that proudly trumpeted: "You cannot expect success hunting deer or moose if your feet are not properly dressed. The Maine Hunting Shoe is designed by a hunter who has tramped the Maine woods for the past 18 years. We guarantee them to give perfect satisfaction in every way." When the rubber bottoms separated from the leather tops on 90 of the first 100 pairs of boots Bean kept his promise and refunded the money.

He borrowed money, perfected the bottoms and resumed selling his boot with unshaken confidence. The public could not resist the common sense or the genuine enthusiasm of his appeal. By 1917 he had sold enough boots to move to another location in the heart of Freeport, Maine.

In 1917 he added hunting apparel items to his line. Bean personally used each item and chose only those he thought his customers would appreciate. In 1927 he added fishing and camping equipment to his catalog with the good news: "It is no longer necessary for you to experiment with dozens of flies to determine the few that will catch fish. We have done that experimenting for you."

By the 1920s the Maine Hunting Shoe had gone to the North Pole with Admiral MacMillan and L.L. Bean was employing 25 people. Word of mouth and customer satisfaction were paramount to his success. He was genuinely shocked if one of his products failed. He would barge around the factory bellowing for an explanation. He would then write the customer, return his money, enclose a gift and maybe invite him up to Maine for some fishing.

Bean was obsessed with building his mailing lists and advertised extensively in the outdoor magazines to promote his "free catalog." The book he mailed was a cluttered, fun-to-read compendium of practical, high-quality outdoor merchandise. Despite the Depression business increased four times. Sales passed $1,000,000 a year in 1937; "L.L. Bean. Freeport, Maine" was all that was scratched on many envelopes he received.

In 1942 Been wrote a short book called "Hunting-Fishing and Camping" to "give definite information in the fewest words possible on how to hunt, fish and camp." It sold 200,000 copies.

The L.L. Bean factory was always a lively place to work. In 1945 Bean set up a special retail salesroom in the middle of factory with a night bell for the convenience of hunters and fishermen who might need a license or a packet of flies at 4 a.m. In 1951 the single L.L. Bean retail store opened 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. "We have thrown away the keys to the place," boomed Bean.

He died in 1967 at the age of 94. L.L. Bean summed up his success as "the fact that I tried on the trail practically every article I handle. If I tell you a knife is good for cleaning trout, it is because I found it so. If I tell you a wading boot is worth having, very likely you might have seen me testing it at Merrymeeting Bay."

His customers included Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Franklin Roosevelt, John Wayne and Amy Vanderbilt. L.L. Bean was a cult. Across the country people named dogs, and even babies "Leonwood" in honor of Bean's little-known middle name.

Kroger's

2007-02-12T03:43:00.000-08:00

One the man behind the brand is...
Bernard Kroger

When he was 13, in the Panic of 1873, Bernard Kroger’s German immigrant father’s Cincinnati dry goods store failed. Young Kroger was forced from school into the working world, securing a position as a drug store clerk. The wages were good but his mother couldn’t abide her son working on Sundays and made him quit.

Unable to find work in Cincinnati Kroger shipped away to a farm 30 miles northeast of town. He worked from 4:30 in the morning until nightfall before returning exhausted to his unheated loft on top of a shed. He soon contracted malaria but couldn’t stop working and surrender his $6 a month. Finally, after nine months with his weight down to 100 pounds, he gave up. Kroger walked the 30 miles back to Cincinnati to save the train fare.

Still ill, he applied the next day for work as a salesman for the great Northern and Pacific Tea Company. The owner was none too eager to take on the gaunt, shriveled figure standing before him. He didn’t look like he would last the week. But Kroger talked his way into a trial. He left with a sample case of sugar, coffee and tea.

Kroger was soon making a steady $7 a week in commission sales, more than he had ever earned. Times were good but he realized that sales were slowly slipping. Kroger investigated and discovered the store owner was cutting back on his quality. Kroger learned the lesson that was to guide him through the rest of his business career: “You can’t fool people on food.”

Now experienced Kroger had no difficulty in finding another sales position.
He landed with the Imperial Tea Company but the owners proved to be inept and Kroger was prepared to move on when he was offered managership of the store. He negotiated complete control and set out to implement his retailing theories: long hours, frugality, and quality for the price.

Eleven months later Kroger had the store operating at a profit but the owners would not meet his terms for continued employment. With no hesitation Kroger and a friend opened their own little store. The Great Western Tea Company greeted its first customer on July 1, 1883. But owning your own business isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.

Two week later Dan, his delivery horse, was killed and his wagonload of goods smashed in a railroad crossing accident. Then one of Kroger’s brothers died and he had to assume funeral expenses. A month later the Ohio River overflowed and flooded the store. Yet, by year’s end the store was established with not a debt outstanding.

Kroger bought out his partner for $1500 and by 1885 he was stocking four stores. He bought directly from producers and in bulk which allowed him to cut prices. When the country experienced a general business downturn in 1893 he bought more stores. In 1902 when he owned 40 stores and changed the business name to The Kroger Company & Baking Company.

Kroger had become the first grocery store to bake its own bread in 1901.
He was able to sell loaves of bread for 2 1/2¢ a loaf and still make a profit.
Other items Kroger wasn’t looking to make a profit on; he introduced the practice of loss leaders to the industry. When Kroger became the first store to combine groceries and meat he entered a drawn out battle with butchers in the community.

In 1908 Kroger celebrated 25 years in business. His 136 stores, all painted bright red inside and out, were beginning to become known outside the Cincinnati area. Kroger’s grocery business was booming but he was unable to transfer his success to other businesses. A newspaper venture failed and a foray into railroading was equally unsatisfying. At one point a Kroger train collided with a Kroger delivery truck. When he learned of the accident the boss railed, “There is just one spot in the whole United States where one of my damn railroad cars could hit one of my damn trucks and you fellows succeeded in finding it.”

Kroger met more success in banking when he founded the Provident Bank in Cincinnati. But nothing matched his grocery empire. Kroger established a great laboratory staffed with food experts and chemists to scrutinize every food item his stores sold. He had stores in more than 1000 communities in the midwest, thirteen bakeries, three packing plants, a candy factory and plants for roasting coffee and packing tea.

In 1928 Kroger sold his shares in the company for $28 million. His life became one of golf in the morning and cards in the afternoon. When the market crashed he bought much of his stock back but retired from business for good in 1932.
His last six years were devoted to philanthropic interests. When Bernard Kroger died in 1938 he operated 4,844 stores.

Kresge's

2007-02-12T03:42:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Sebastian Kresge

Sebastian Spering Kresge's first business enterprise was a single hive of bees he nursed into a colony of 32 hives as a young boy. He would keep bees as an adult hobby because, he said, "My bees always remind me that hard work, thrift, sobriety and earnest struggle to live an upright Christian life are the rungs of the ladder of success."

The profits from his hives helped finance his schooling at the Eastman Business College in Poughkeepsie, New York. What he couldn't pay for he borrowed from his father with a bargain that he would give his father all his earnings, save board and clothing, until he was 21.

At 19 he worked one year as a country school teacher for $22 a month but was anxious to get underway in business and began clerking in a Scranton grocery store in 1889. With his obligation met at age 21 Kresge began exploring the business field working in door-to-door selling, insurance, bookkeeping, and baking before settling into the sale of tinware for five years on straight commission.

One of his customers was F.W. Woolworth who impressed Kresge with the size and efficiency of his cash-only business. Kresge attempted to join Woolworth's
5¢ & 10¢ business in 1896 but was not successful. He entered into other retailing partnerships with $8000 he had carefully saved, working in stores in Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Michigan.

By 1899 he was on his own in Detroit. Kresge put a large number of items on open counters where they could be examined and appraised. The slogan over his door said it all: "Nothing over 10 cents." Immediately Kresge set about to build a chain of 5 & 10s.

He had an uncanny knack for site location and saw each new store as a personal challenge. His stores were in heavily trafficked areas and appealed to bargain hunters. By 1916 he had 150 Kresge 5 &10 stores.

With inflation after World War I the heyday of the 5 & 10 came to an end.
As a result Kresge started "Green Front Stores" in 1920 which featured goods from 25¢ to $1.00 to distinguish them from his Red Front 5 &10s. Both concepts prospered.
Kresge retired as president in 1925 devoting much of his time to the Kresge foundation which he endowed with $1,300,000 in cash and $65,000,000 in securities. Kresge was extremely generous with employees and associates but never learned to spend money on himself. His personal frugality was legendary. His stinginess was cited as a complaint in two messy, highly publicized divorces.

He used a pair of shoes until they were completely worn out - and then lined them with paper. His inexpensive plain suits lasted until the last thread. One of his rare indulgences was an air-cooled Franklin motor car which according to a close associate, "he ran until the wheels fell off." At age 58 some friends persuaded him to take up golf but he gave up the sport after three rounds because, he said, he could not afford to lose a golf ball.

After his retirement as president he remained active in company affairs as Chairman of the Board, a post he retained until the age of 98 when the company had grown to include 670 Kresge variety stores, 150 K-Mart department stores and 110 Jupiter discount stores. He died in 1966, within sight of his birthplace in Mountainhome, Pennsylvania where his Swiss ancestors settled in 1765, at the age of 99. He lived to within one year of his mother, whose picture he displayed in every Kresge store until she died in 1940 at the age of 100.

Hudsons

2007-02-10T11:07:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Joseph Hudson

Aristede Bouciaut is credited with opening the first department store in Paris in 1852. Until that time the prevailing retail philosophy was to turn stock slowly and mark prices high. A merchant never marked a price on an item, all transactions were haggled to a conclusion.

Bouciaut changed all that. He operated under a completely opposite philosophy. He was the first to establish marked, fixed prices which allowed him to start price advertising. Until Bouciault came along there was an implied obligation to buy when a customer entered a store. Bouciaut introduced the "free" entrance. He also pioneered the refund on unsatisfactory merchandise.

All these were new ideas when Joseph Lowthian Hudson arrived in Michigan at the age of 15 to begin a five-year merchant apprenticeship. Hudson was born in Newcastle-on-Tyne in industrial England and came with his family to Hamilton, Ontario in 1855. His father followed the new telegraph trade to Michigan as the Civil War broke out in 1861.

After his apprenticeship Hudson opened a small general store in Ionia, Michigan in 1866. The business flourished but expanded too quickly and filed bankruptcy. Hudson was legally obligated to pay only 60¢ on the dollar but his sense of pride and integrity would not accept the settlement. He paid back every creditor in full - plus the compound interest on the debts. This earned Hudson an unlimited line of credit for the rest of his life.

In 1877 Hudson went to Detroit to manage a men's and boy's store owned by his mentor. It was not a true department store but he was moving in that direction. Against the advice of friends Hudson invested $110,000 of his own money and $242,000 of borrowed money to build an 8-story store in downtown Detroit. Critics warned that the mega-store was too far from the commercial district but Hudson made it so attractive and value-packed that people came to shop.

In an era of economic uncertainty sales didn't increased for 13 years. Hudson was sustained during this period by smaller stores in other states. Good times returned in 1905 and Hudson quickly grew into Detroit's wealthiest merchant.
His merchandise was always of the finest quality, durability and value.
He was extremely giving to charities with his fortune and always enjoyed going
into the community and begging for anything he considered a worthy cause.

In 1912 Hudson desired to return to his homeland one more time and sailed to England. He never returned, dying in Worthing, England at the age of 66.

Hallmark

2007-02-10T11:06:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Joyce Hall

“I’d like to be the kind of friend you are to me.” Those words, from Edgar Guest, were the first to ever appear on a Hallmark card, in 1916. In the 19th century it was simply too expensive to pay a messenger to deliver sentiments on paper and the thought of sending someone else’s words was simply preposterous. Today more than one-half of all the personal mail delivered in the United States is greeting cards, about seven billion a year. And ten million cards sent each day bear the mark of the man who changed the holiday calendar in America: Joyce Hall.

Hall was born in David City, Nebraska where his father abandoned the family when Joyce was nine. At the age of 15 he was working in a bookstore in Norfolk, Nebraska where his favorite merchandise were not the impressive new books but the intriguing picture postcards the store stocked from Europe. In January 1910 Hall moved to a room in the YMCA in Kansas City (there is even a postcard of the YMCA in Hall’s autobiography).

The next year his brother Rollie joined him in opening a specialty store for postcards, gifts and stationery. The boys were prospering until a fire in 1915 burned away their business. The promise shown by the young men was enough to land a $25,000 loan to rebuild the store and purchase a neighboring engraving firm. The first two Hall cards appeared in 1915. They were unfolded, a little smaller than a postcard, and decoratively handpainted.

Gradually the Halls built a business around gifts. During Christmastime in 1917 Joyce Hall was running out of red and green tissue paper and substituted decorative envelope lining paper. Gift wrap and greeting cards were empire-builders for Hall but no all his innovations were hits. In 1924 he introduced “Greetaphones,” flat cards with records containing an 8-line sentiment with a musical background which no steel needle could decipher when played.

Greeting cards became extravagances of the first order during the Depression in the 1930s but Hall refused to lay off any employees. In 1936 he revolutionized the greeting card business with the introduction of lighted, eye-level display cases featuring rows and rows of cards. Prior to that greeting cards were purchased by asking a clerk who would select an appropriate card.

The British invented the Christmas card but it was the rare greeting that was sent at any other time of year. In America, however, there seemed hardly any occasion that wasn’t worthy of a greeting card. Hall stoked the passions for greeting cards with the first advertising in national magazines in 1928 and by 1944 all his radio commercials were trailed by the unforgettable, “When you care enough to send the very best.” Hall had at first rejected the tag line, written by staffer Ed Goodman, as too long but it soon came to symbolize his entire philosophy.

He started a Hallmark Gallery on New York’s Upper Fifth Avenue as an elegant showcase for Hallmark products and sponsored high-quality television specials - he even aired an opera - as early as 1951. These critically acclaimed ventures were not financially successful but the reputation Hall developed was priceless. When he wanted to feature some of Winston Churchill’s paintings on greeting cards Churchill agreed when told it was for Hallmark. “A good firm,” he said.

Hall retired in 1966 but still maintained a busy work schedule. He spearheaded the conversion of 85 ruined acres, 25 blocks, on the southern edge of Kansas City into the stunning Crown Center. Work was still underway on his last project when he died in 1982 but the new Hallmark headquarters when finished embodied the credo he always lived for, “Good taste is good business.”

Eckerds

2007-02-10T11:04:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Jack Eckerd

Jack Eckerd was never one for waiting around. It was a trait that was to mold his business career and alter American’s shopping habits.

As a 19-year old in 1932 Eckerd set out to be a barnstorming pilot around Erie, Pennsylvania. He convinced his father to buy an airplane so he could fly him around to his small chain of drugstores. After two years he flew to California for
a one-year course in commercial aviation. But waiting around for a pilot opening was not for him and Eckerd went east to the drugstore business.

He bought a quarter-interest in two Wilmington, Delaware drugstores but World War II interrupted his blossoming retail career. Eckerd spent the war in the Air Transport Command delivering planes from Wilmington to Prestwick, Scotland. After the war he bought both stores outright.

In 1948 Eckerd bought two dilapidated drugstores from his father in Jamestown, New York. He didn’t plan to just rebuild the tired stores. Eckerd had investigated self-service in California and was ready to try the no-waiting concept in his new stores. Customers were thought to want to rely on a druggist’s help but Eckerd anticipated the over-the-counter explosion with open access to goods.

When his small chain reached Erie Eckerd was forced to call his self-service drugstore QuikCheck to avoid confusion with his father’s stores. The new store was a phenomenal success but people still confused newspaper ads with the conventional Eckerds’ stores. Jack Eckerd didn’t want to change the name so he started considering a totally new market.

On a dreary March day in 1952 in his Wilmington office a direct mailing arrived from a Tampa druggist offering three stores for sale. The gray skies outside were excuse enough to fly to Florida and check out the properties. He raised $150,000 in cash, in part from his brother in exchange for 50% of the new stores and his Jamestown stores.

It took two years for the Florida stores to break into the black and after six years only three stores were added when he was offered a chance to build 5 stores with Publix, the leading Florida grocery chain. This twinning of drugstores to supermarkets ignited Eckerd’s growth. Eckerd built his chain to 1700 stored from Florida to New Jersey.

Jack Eckerd spent the 1960s building his business and in the 1970s, dissatisfied with Florida government, he entered the state gubernatorial race. Despite never running for anything in his life Eckerd forced a run-off with the incumbent governor before losing. He lost a race for a United States Senate seat in 1974 and another bid for governor but went to Washington and served as administrator of the General Services Administration under Gerald Ford. After his flirtation with politics, Eckerd retired, devoting his time to Christian charities and sailing.

Bloomingdales

2007-02-10T11:01:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Lyman Bloomingdale

Lyman Bloomingdale loved store windows. He rented his first store, with his brother Joseph, in 1872 far from fashionable Union Square in New York's depressed upper East Side. The building was only 20 feet wide by 70 feet deep but it had two large, perfect plate glass windows.

Lyman set out to create exciting showcases in his windows while Joseph looked after the books. He believed that storefront windows were wasted if all they did was show merchandise. Bloomingdale's windows would be silent stages with eye-catching panoramas to lure curious customers inside.

Bloomingdale saw more in his location than attractive windows. He knew the city of New York had purchased a huge tract of land on the East Side and was developing a fresh, green haven to be called Central Park. New Yorkers would soon migrate to his location at the future park's southern tip Bloomingdale figured.

The Bloomingdale family had a history of being on the cutting edge in New York. With his father, Lyman had operated Bloomingdale's Hoop Skirt and Ladies Notion Shop to keep New York women in step with high European fashion prior to the Civil War. Joseph was a successful traveling salesman, taking hoop skirts as far as California.

First day sales were only $3.68. But one month later the brothers knocked down the storeroom partition to provide more selling room. The Panic of 1873 caused a shift in merchandising philosophy to the best value at the lowest prices. Lyman Bloomingdale created the 19th Ward Gazette, a free paper that supplemented his regular advertisements. The paper provided light news and features in depressed times, binding the store to the community.

Meanwhile New Yorkers migrated towards Central Park. Railroads developed and soon Bloomingdale's marked the epicenter of Manhattan's web of mass transit routes. Lyman set out to let the world know that "All cars transfer to Bloomingdale's." He placed the phrase on placards in New York's trolleys,
in his ads and on his horse drawn delivery cars. A patron of the arts, he commissioned scenic European paintings on his exterior store walls.

By 1880 Bloomingdale's had grown into a five-story building - a department store with plenty of show windows. Lyman took out full page newspaper ads to draw people into the store. Once inside employees demonstrated new products. He had a young woman read from popular books of the day in the book department. He installed New York's first neon arc lights, fascinating shoppers.

The brothers built their grandest building in 1886 at 3rd Avenue and 59th Street. The new store was six stories high with 245 feet of street space for window shoppers. The first story was an impressive 18 feet high to better show off Lyman's displays. He used glass elevators he called "sky carriages" to transport customers throughout the magnificent store.

In 1892 Lyman installed his first escalator, a dream machine seemingly invented for him. It was not only a fantastic attention-getter but gave people a slow, panoramic ride on their individual platforms gazing at his merchandise. Lyman invested in the escalator company.

Bloomingdale's continued catering to lower middle class patrons but started importing fine European goods for society-conscious Americans. The brothers opened offices in Paris, Berlin and Vienna to provide exclusive continental goods for Bloomingdale's.

Sales boomed. Rather than build another building Lyman and Joseph bought adjacent buildings until they owned 80% of the block. Joseph retired from the business on New Years Day 1896 while Lyman continued as sole proprietor until his death in 1905 at the age of 64. Joseph had died a year earlier at age 62. Lyman's son Sam carried on the $5,000,000 business built on its exciting store windows.

Stetson

2007-02-10T10:34:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
John Stetson

John Stetson stood transfixed on a St. Louis hillside as the rampaging Missouri River savaged his brickyard below. Finally, as the flood waters carried off his inventory, Stetson roared, “Let ‘er go! I’m not the first man to make a fortune and lose it.” Stetson could embrace that philosophy easier than most. He had, after all, only come out to the West to die.

John Batterson Stetson was born into a family of hatters in Orange, New Jersey in 1830. The youngest of the Stetson boys, John learned the family trade as well in his father’s hat shop. But the education came at a terrible price. At the age of 21 Stetson was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a malady common to early-day hatters. Doctors gave him only a few months to live.

Young Stetson decided to spend his final days outdoors and headed to the frontier. But by the time he reached St. Louis he had regained his health.
He found work in a local brickyard and two years later Stetson owned the business - just in time to watch it wiped out by the floods.

Stetson took off for the gold fields of Colorado where he found his hatter’s skills adapted well to the trail. Tents of the time were fashioned from joined animal skins. These crude shelters were routinely compromised by the elements and quickly acquired an ungodly stench. Stetson was able to apply the ancient process of felting to produce a soft, waterproof tentcloth from the animal furs.

Turning to hats Stetson crafted a roomy, wide-brimmed chapeau for himself that shaded the withering sun of the Plains and warded off pelting rain. One day a passing rider offered Stetson a five-dollar gold piece for his hat. That one sale represented a good portion of his earnings in the Gold Rush.

In 1865 he returned to Philadelphia with $100 and set up a small one-room millinery. He busied himself repairing, trimming and making the European-looking hats of the day. At most he was able to sell one or two hats at a time.

Impatient with his progress Stetson created a daring hat based on his experiences in the American West. His “Boss of the Plains” was big with a four-inch brim and a four-inch crown. It was natural-colored and sported a leather strap for a hatband. A “Boss of the Plains” sold for an extravagant five dollars. Finer material would run you ten dollars. And, at the top of the line, pure beaver or nutria could be had for thirty dollars.

Stetson sent a sample hat to dozens of merchants throughout the Southwest with a letter asking for a minimum order of a dozen “Boss of the Plains” hats.
It was a bold move. Stetson was risking his business and his line of credit on an entirely new style.

The plan worked. The new Stetson hat soon blanketed the West. John Stetson would eventually stitch together a network of 10,000 dealers and 150 wholesalers. His one-room millinery evolved into a modern factory - fireproofed with the finest in ventilation - covering an entire Philadelphia block.

In his later years Stetson gobbled up thousands of acres of Florida real estate, including several orange groves, in the cultivation of which he took great pride.
He founded Deland, Florida as his retirement home and held a controlling interest in nearly all its industries and institutions.

He provided a million-dollar endowment for Deland Academy, which was renamed Stetson University. He took an active role in the school’s affairs, serving as president of the Board of Trustees. In 1906 John Stetson, who had been told he was going to die shortly 55 years earlier, died suddenly, in apparent good health, after a trustees’ meeting in Florida. A blood vessel had burst in his brain.

Ralph Lauren

2007-02-10T10:33:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Ralph Lauren

Ralph Lifshitz was born in the Bronx in 1939, the son of an artist and house painter. The father changed the family name to "Lauren" in the 1950s, just before his son started a stint in the Army.

Lauren always had an interest in clothes. He spent most of his spare money on clothes and wanted to get into fashion designing after his discharge but he had no portfolio, no sketches. "All I had," said Lauren later, "was taste."

He worked as a salesman and garment buyer until 1967 when he landed a design job with Beau Brummel Ties. Using unusual fabrics Lauren created ties 4" and 5" wide, 50% wider than traditional ties. The tie was the only fashion statement a businessman could make and Lauren's innovative ties were wildly successful. He persuaded Beau Brummel to allow him to start his own division which Lauren called Polo because of its aristocratic image.

Lauren took Polo on his own shortly afterwards. He built his entire empire on the shape of a tie. The tie made a larger knot so he had to design shirts with large collars and suits that complemented the shirts. His clothes were distinctly American with more shape than traditional menswear.

Lauren was widely criticized not only for his clothes but lack of formal design training. He was accused of stealing styles and eras for his designs. Lauren was not affected by the carping. He was one of the first designers to leave a specialty and design across the entire spectrum of clothing. In 1971 he crossed over from mens clothes to womens clothes.

This line was popular as well but Lauren's company was near collapse. Business was not Lauren's strong suit. He had been staked by Norman Hilton in 1968 for $50,000 in exchange for 50% of the business. He bought Hilton out for $633,000 in 1972 and strained the company treasury. Now he switched some lines from manufacturing to licensing to steady the ship.

The man who sells more than a billion dollars worth of clothes with a personal fortune in excess of $400 million personally favors faded jeans and tweed jackets: "I wanted to be a history teacher. I liked the gum-soled shoes and tweed jackets and the pipes. I never liked the business world because I wanted a life that was free of not being honest or straightforward."

Liz Claiborne

2007-02-10T10:31:00.000-08:00

And the woman behind the brand is...
Liz Claiborne

In retrospect the concept seems so logical: design attractive clothes the average woman could wear and free working women from the standard office uniform of navy blue suits. But it took until 1976 and Liz Claiborne to execute the idea.
The result was one of the fastest growing companies in United States business history, reaching the Fortune magazine list of 500 largest companies within ten years.

Liz Claiborne was a shy women who always followed her own path. As a young girl she lived so many places following her banking father that she never finished high school. She wanted a career in fashion but her father was against it so she went to Paris and Brussels, her birthplace, to study painting. In 1949, at the age of 20, Claiborne won a Harper's Bazaar design contest and a year later she returned to the United States. Against her parent's wishes she cut her long hair and got married. She took jobs as a sketch artist and New York model.

In her mid-twenties Arthur Ortenberg hired Claiborne as a designer. They shed their respective mates and married in 1957. Claiborne became chief designer at Jonathan Logan where she spent years lobbying for a new line of clothes for the emerging class of highly paid working women of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
When their son reached 21 in 1976 Claiborne and Ortenberg struck out on their own with $50,000. Two other partners brought in another $200,000. Claiborne designed well-made fashionable sportswear for the office, weaning women away from formless suits.

Within two years Claiborne's designs were generating $23,000,000 in revenue.
She had dreamed of a small company where she would make clothes for professional women. She was clearly onto something bigger. The four partners retreated to the Pocono Mountains for three days to chart their future. There were two votes to stay small - but they weren't Claiborne and Ortenberg.

Ortenberg was the genius behind the organization. They created "Claiboards" which showed department stores how to mix and match Claiborne fashions to maximize visual appeal. They hired no sales force, making buyers visit their offices to see new designs. Claiborne created six seasons rather than four so there was a constant flow of material for the department stores, the exclusive outlet for Claiborne fashions.

By 1981 Ortenberg took the company public with one of the most popular stock issues in history. Claiborne, as Chief Executive Officer, retained 4.3% of the stock in the two billion dollar company. Her designs clothed 60% of the 12,000,000 women who went to work every day in the 1980s.

Levi's

2007-02-10T10:29:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Levi Strauss

In 1877 two pairs of overalls arrived in the offices of Levi Strauss & Company in San Francisco. A letter was attached that read: "The secratt of them Pents is the Rivets that I put in those Pockets and I found the demand so large that I cannot make them fast enough. My nabors are getting yealouse of these success and unless I secure it by Patent Papers it will soon become a general thing.
Everybody will make them up and thare will be no money in it.

"Therefore Gentleman, I wish to make you a proposition that you should take out the Latters Patent in my name as I am the inventor of it, the expense of it will be about $68, all complit..." The letter was from Jacob Davis, a Latvian immigrant from Reno, Nevada.

Levi Strauss paid for Jacob Davis' patent for "Improvement in Fastening Pocket Openings." The patent would be the most illegally imitated patent in United States history.

Levis Strauss was already successful when he learned about Jacob Davis, had been for nearly 30 years. Strauss was born in 1829 in Bavaria, the youngest of six children. After his father died in 1846 he emigrated to New York to join his brothers Jonas and Louis in the dry goods trade.

In 1848 Strauss struck out on his own to sell dry goods in Kentucky.
Peddling on the streets Strauss often lugged 100-pound loads to his customers.
In 1849 Strauss sailed to San Francisco to join the Gold Rush. He went to work in his brother-in-law's store, in the midst of the greatest population explosion in American history.

At first Strauss served the miners, peddling goods in lawless boomtowns.
The population grew so fast that every cargo ship that arrived in port was immediately under siege from eager merchants needing to replenish their shelves. Strauss made sturdy canvas work pants, often using sails and tents when material from his brothers in New York did not arrive in time.

The company grew steadily as Strauss established himself as boss of the enterprise. He took over completely in 1861 an set up Levi Strauss & Co.
By this time Strauss was importing a French denim from which he made "waist high overalls." "Jeans" was a derogatory phrase referring to cheap-type work pants from Genoa, Italy. "Jeans" is from the French word for Genoa, "genes." Strauss dyed his denim blue to mask soil stains.

In 1865 Strauss built a new headquarters in downtown San Francisco.
Wary of the numerous fires that flashed through town he built his new offices out of brick and stone. Three months later an earthquake cracked its foundation.

Strauss was one of San Francisco's leading merchants when he bought Jacob Davis' patent. His name appeared on a list of men who were worth at least $4,000,000 in a local newspaper. He owned a large chunk of downtown San Francisco real estate.

Now his business exploded. Davis came to San Francisco to be head tailor and Strauss expanded into factory production. He sold 21,600 pairs of riveted pants and coats the first year of production. So buyers could recognize the Levi Strauss brand a special stitching was added to the pockets, shaped in a crossed, double V in orange thread.

In the 1880s a new label made of leather was created. Levi's "Two Horse Brand" work clothes were even known in Paris. Strauss promised a "new pair free" if his riveted pants pockets ever ripped. In 1890 his patent was gone. Strauss kept his high quality work pants, known as 501s, in his catalog but offered a cheaper version as well.

By this time Strauss had turned much of the business over to this nephews. Partly due to the paucity of pioneer women in his younger days Strauss never married. He traveled extensively and donated great sums for Jewish charities and education. He died in 1902 at age 73 when jeans were still a workman's pants.

Lee

2007-02-10T10:28:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Henry Lee

All Henry David Lee wanted was to have his clothing orders filled on time.
He was 62 years and had built the dominant wholesale grocery business in the Midwest. But when he diversified his mercantile operation to include clothing he discovered his textile suppliers were not as reliable as his growers. Lee solved the problem the best way he knew how; he built his own garment factory near his warehouse in Salina, Kansas in 1911.

Lee was born in Vermont in 1849 and started his business career distributing kerosene in Galion, Ohio. In 1888 he sold his business to John Rockefeller and left Ohio for Kansas. The next year he was back in business as the H.D. Lee Mercantile Company, distributing food instead of fuel. Over the next dozen years he added hardware, stationery and notions - and the bothersome clothing to his line.

Lee started in the garment trade with rugged overalls, jackets and dungarees. A one-piece pullover, helpful in protecting regular clothing, called the Union-All was his first big seller. Developed in 1913 the Union-All was a pair of dungarees sewn to a jacket. It was adopted as an official fatigue by the U.S. Army in World War I and by 1916 Lee had four garment plants in operation. The next year he pioneered national advertising for apparel in the Saturday Evening Post.

The Union-All marked the beginning of product innovation for Lee. Denim cowboy pants, which would become the famous Lee Riders, reached the market in 1924; two years later jeans with zippers appeared and soon thereafter came tailored sizing. Henry Lee died, still president, in 1928; his company well on the way to becoming America’s largest manufacturer of work clothes.

Lacoste

2007-02-10T10:25:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Rene Lacoste

Rene Lacoste was 10 years old and searching desperately for a way to beat his older sister at tennis. Hour after hour he beat balls against a wall, chasing each one down. Of course he became one of the greatest players in the world, acquiring the nickname “The Crocodile” both for his tenacious retrieving style, learned against that wall, and his countenance, dominated by a strong nose.

Lacoste became an integral part of the fable French tennis team known throughout the world as the “Mosquetaires.” When the Mosquetaires brought the Davis Cup home to France in 1927 they were accorded a reception rivaled only by Lindbergh’s at Le Bourget. In 1929, at the age of 25, Lacoste retired, partially on the advice of his doctor and partially because he considered the “play” phase of his life over. He had won two Wimbledon titles, three French championships and two U.S. Nationals.

Of frail constitution, Lacoste was especially susceptible to colds during tournaments. He suspected the culprit to be the “floating” shirts of the day - long-sleeved white shirts with cuffs and collars and buttons. Lacoste had a shirtmaker take shirts favored by polo players, with soft material and short sleeves, and attach a collar. He attracted attention wearing the shirt and some “Lacoste shirts” appeared on the market but Lacoste didn’t give it much thought.

After tennis Lacoste joined his father’s automobile company in France.
Anxious to work on his own Lacoste forged Air Equipement, a company which grew into a mammoth automobile, aerospace and parts corporation. Meanwhile, in the early 1930s a friend approached Lacoste and pointed out that it was foolish to allow companies to sell Lacoste shirts without any compensation.

Lacoste and his partner started a shirt business. It was a small proposition that ended altogether with World War II. After the war they started again, exporting the shirts to America. At first the shirt was considered odd-looking; it was given away to celebrities to help lure Americans to the new style. By the 1970s the craze hit. The shirts with the tiny crocodile emblem - called an alligator in the United States - were so popular 50 manufacturers were soon making them.

Lacoste could never understand it. The shirt with the crocodile was all the rage. Sports shirts, however, were a tiny part of his far-flung industrial interests. He had been nicknamed the Crocodile on the tennis court and it turned out to be a wildly popular identifying mark - all by chance.

A French tennis hero, Lacoste was never allowed to forget tennis. Late in his career he merged his sport and business. The lightweight steel and new plastics used in his aerospace endeavors seemed to have logical applications in tennis rackets. Steel had been used in rackets before, most notably by the Dayton Company in the 1920s but the steel strings that had to be used tore balls apart.
It was Lacoste who figured out a way to string steel rackets by wrapping gut strings with wire around the frame instead of punching holes through it.

In many ways tennis equipment in the 1960s was virtually indistinguishable from that used in the 1890s. The steel racket had nearly every advantage over the traditional wood racket but acceptance was slow. Until swashbuckling Jimmy Connors burst onto the tennis scene brandishing a lightweight steel racket.
In little more than 15 years the wooden racket was an antique.

Lacoste had once again reshaped the tennis world. But there was always more to turn ones attention to: tennis balls that became worn too soon, tennis elbow, racket shape, heavy shoes...

Kinney

2007-02-10T10:23:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
George Kinney

For a man who had the burden of responsibility constantly thrust upon him in his personal life it is ironic that George Romanta Kinney made his fortune by abdicating responsibility. Kinney was one of America’s first franchisers - the managers of his stores made all day-to-day decisions while the “home office” was responsible only for purchasing.

Kinney was born to a Candor, New York merchant whose store failed shortly thereafter. His father died in 1875 when Kinney was nine. He raised money for the family working around town until the age of 17 when he left for the big city of Binghamton and a position with the Lester Shoe Company. In 1888 Kinney was promoted to manager of a store in Waverly, New York, providing enough of a stake to marry. But his wife died in childbirth in 1890 and the Lester Shoe Company went bankrupt.

Left alone to start over Kinney bought the failing Lester’s inventory for $1500. He opened another store in Waverly with one employee, cobbler Milner Kemp. He sold shoes to the entire family at discount prices, at a time when few retailers sold mens, womens, boys and girls shoes under one roof. Moreover Kinney hung his shoes on wallboards outside his shop and posted prices on the boards.

The innovations worked as Kinney was able to open a second store in Corning, New York within the year. By 1899 he was operating eight stores. Every new manager Kinney brought into the business was regarded as a partner. The partner invested in the store and ran the daily operations. Kinney retreated from the retail floor to the Woolworth Building in New York City where he concentrated on buying shoes and shoe factories.

George Kinney’s empire building was ended by his death in 1919 from complications stemming from a circulatory attack in 1907. At the time the 53-year old Kinney had more than four dozen shoe stores in 13 states.

Hart, Schafner & Marx

2007-02-10T10:21:00.000-08:00

And the men behind the brand are...
Joseph Schaffner and Harry Hart and Max Hart

In 1887 Joseph Schaffner stopped in the shop of two of his close friends, Chicago clothiers Harry and Max Hart. He was seeking career advice. After seventeen years of bookkeeping in the credit business Schaffner was contemplating a new opportunity in Minnesota, a total departure from his accounting work.
Before making such a radical change, the Harts suggested, why don’t you
come into business with us?

Harry Hart, then 21, and his brother Max, 18, had been selling men’s clothing since 1872 when they pooled $2700 their father had saved from their teenage days as delivery boys to start a mens store. The Harts figured that Chicago’s estimated 100,000 homeless after the Great Fire of 1871 would need to be clothed. Within three years they were successful enough to open a second store and began manufacturing suits for other retailers.

The Harts brought brothers-in-law Levi Abt and Marcus Marx into the business in 1879 and it was Abt who Schaffner would be replacing in the team’s management. Schaffner, the life-long bookkeeper was, incongruously, a literary man at heart. With Hart Schaffner & Marx he supervised the firm’s sales letters with such eloquence that when an anthology of Selected English Letters was published years later one of the firm’s sales letters was included alongside those of Jonathan Swift, Abraham Lincoln and others.

Schaffner’s literary bent led inevitably to the industry’s first national clothing ads in 1897. The industry was not impressed and it was years before other clothiers joined Hart Schaffner and Marx in print. Schaffner’s illustrated ads were supported by moralistic books he penned on “Courage” and “Enthusiasm.” Many booklets didn’t even include the company in the copy.

Hart Schaffner and Marx assumed industry leadership in other areas as well.
At a time when salesmen of the day lugged as many as twenty wardrobe trunks of samples into accounts, Hart Schaffner and Marx salesmen switched to displaying fabric swatches. They pioneered standard pricing with no discounts for favored customers. A Hart Schaffner and Marx suit was the first to be guaranteed to be 100% wool when it said 100% wool. In 1906 Hart Schaffner and Marx identified 14 basic body types with led to the creation of 250 specialty sizes in suits.

It seems the Harts had given Joseph Schaffner excellent career advice a generation before.

Hanes

2007-02-10T10:19:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Marcus Hanes

Hanes is the only corporation in America ever to form from two independent , non-competing businesses from the same family. That merger, in 1962 brought the saga of the Hanes family, founded when Marcus Hanes settled in York, Pennsylvania from Germany in 1738, around full circle.

Marcus Hanes bought 1060 acres in North Carolina and moved his family south. Here, brothers Pleasant Henderson Hanes and John Wesley Hanes grew up in the middle of the 19th century. Pleasant, five years older, was born in 1845 and served in Company E of the 16th North Carolina Cavalry during the Civil War. Hanes distinguished himself in duty and was named a special courier to Robert E. Lee, serving with the Confederate commander until Appomattox.

After the war the brothers began selling plug tobacco from wagons they guided throughout North Carolina. In 1872 the brothers started a tobacco company in Winston. Pleasant and John shepherded the P.H. Hanes Tobacco Company through two factory fires until they had built the third largest tobacco business in America. A serious illness to John forced the brothers to sell the business to R.J. Reynolds in 1900 for $175,000. When John regained his health the Hanes re-invested their profits into the textile industry - but as independent proprietors.

John Wesley concentrated on men’s stockings and named his company Shamrock Mills; Pleasant manufactured a new type of knitwear, men’s heavyweight, two-piece underwear. John’s health broke again and he died in 1903. The company changed names in 1914 to the Hanes Hosiery Mills and by 1920 women’s hosiery had replaced men’s socks as the firm’s only product.

Pleasant Hanes continued in charge of his P.H. Hanes Knitting Company until his death in 1925 at the age of 79. The two firms continued to operate autonomously under the brothers’ descendants until 1962 when the two Hanes companies consolidated, back under the family name once again.

Haggar

2007-02-10T10:17:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Joseph Haggar

Joseph Marion Hajjar was born into hardscrabble circumstances on a Lebanese farm in 1892. His father died in a fall from a horse when he was just two putting further hardship on the family to cull a living from the sparse soil. At 13 Joseph fled the impoverished village to join a sister in Mexico. He stayed three years, peddling on the streets until he left for the United States, paying a $2 border tax to cross into Laredo.

Penniless and speaking no English, Haggar, as he would now be known,
got work on a railroad, then a cotton farm and eventually migrated to the Little Lebanon region of St. Louis where he made his first real money brokering an oil lease. He further homed his business skills as a salesman for Ely & Walker, a dry goods wholesaler, where he closed deals in his native Arabic, acquired Spanish and adopted English.

Having earned enough to marry and start a family and supremely confident in his sales ability, Haggar went out on the road selling Oberman work pants on straight commission. By 1926 he was ready to open his own business, making menswear in Dallas. He sold only on a one-price policy, unique for the industry, which he hit upon while selling on the road.

Haggar’s pants were unlabeled and just a cut above work pants.
He sold enough to weather the Great Depression and in 1939 he became the first manufacturer to nationally advertise branded slacks. At the time the only men’s clothing identifiable by name was Arrow shirts. Haggar was always ahead of the industry: first to offer two pairs of pants for a reduced price, first to sell pre-packaged ready-to-wear slacks, first to manufacture double knit pants. Legend had it that the “Slacks King” could handle a piece of fabric and tell what mill it came from.

In 1976, on the occasion of his company’s 50th anniversary, Joseph Haggar was presented with the Horatio Alger Award, in recognition of how far he had come from the rocky Lebanese desert. In the same year he received an honorary doctorate of law from Notre Dame University, an ironic tribute to a man who always crossed out the legalese on the back of contracts and scribble in his own personal guarantee.

Gucci

2007-02-10T10:16:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Guccio Gucci

In the 1970s the Gucci shop in New York City earned the title, bestowed by New York magazine, as “The Rudest Store in New York.” Gucci management was so “upset” by the customer abuse detailed within that the author was sent a $500 floral bouquet. After all, Guccio Gucci had cultivated snob appeal from the time he opened his first store in Florence, Italy in 1922.

Guccio was born in Florence in 1881 where his family managed a struggling straw hat factory. He had no intention of fighting his father’s battles and left for London at the turn of the century. Gucci found a job at the world famous Savoy Hotel where he was waiter to the rich and famous for three years. On the job Gucci paid studious attention to what the glamorous patrons wore and how they spent their money.

When World War I ended Gucci was ready to implement his ideas.
He learned the leather goods business with an Italian firm called Franzi and then opened Gucci’s. From the start Gucci specialized in the highest quality leather luggage and handbags, many of his designs based on what he had seen in the Savoy. Gucci bags traveled on the arms of international trendsetters who had stopped in Florence to view the city’s many art treasures.

Guccio Gucci created a linked GG symbol that resembled a jointed mouth bit for a horse and equine motifs became a Gucci trademark. The signature Gucci red and green stripe was borrowed from horse blankets. The Gucci trademark was internationally registered in 1953, launching an almost continuous barrage of lawsuits against Gucci knock-offs.

1953 was a landmark year for Gucci in other ways as well. Gucci opened its first New York store in a small nook in the Sherry Netherland Hotel, bringing the elegant Gucci moccasin and hand-stitched glove and other desirable luxury items to the United States. Americans would learn the name Gucci from movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly and Kim Novak who were some of Gucci’s best customers. But they would never get a chance to know Guccio Gucci; he passed away in 1953.

Foster-Grant

2007-02-10T10:13:00.000-08:00

And the men behind the brand are...
Samuel Foster and William Grant

In 1920 Jack Goodman received a large order for plastic dice embedded with rhinestones from Kresge stores. It was a huge account and Goodman would do whatever he must to satisfy Kresge. That included taking a harrowing trolley ride twenty miles out to Leominster, Massachusetts to visit the Viscoloid Company,
the leading plastics manufacturer of the day.

Viscoloid was too busy to fill Goodman's order. The account was too important to abandon his quest and Goodman began to investigate the small plastics firms around Leominster that handled Viscoloid's overflow business. When he happened upon the dilapidated Foster Grant office it hardly seemed worth his time. But the 37-year old man with the endearing Austrian accent he found inside soon changed his mind.

Samuel Foster turned out plastic dice of such superior quality that within a year he was making 1/3 of all Goodman's plastic products including combs and costume jewelry. In another two years he was producing it all. The Foster Grant Company was a going concern at last.

Foster had been working ever since his family had arrived in New England in 1897 when he was 14. His first venture was making and selling fireworks but the tiny enterprise literally exploded on him. He became a waiter and a maker of costume jewelry when he went to business for Viscoloid supervising their plastic comb-making operations in 1907.

Foster stayed with Viscoloid for a dozen years until leaving to start the Foster Manufacturing Company to produce tiny plastic flower jewelry. He took on a salesman-partner named William Grant. For whatever reason Grant lasted only three or four months. Returning Grant's investment left Foster so financially strapped that he couldn't afford to legally change the company name back from Foster Grant and so it stayed.

Now with Goodman's business Foster's fortunes swung. He found success with a 4" x 6" plastic bird cage and plastic canary. He created a memo pad with attached plastic crayons capable of carrying imprinted advertising which were a huge hit.
No one knows when Samuel Foster first decided to make sunglasses; it was sometime between 1927 and 1929. He sketched a design on ordinary brown paper wrapping and moistened it in oil. He applied several pieces to plastic frames and temple bars fashioned on a jigsaw. The first pair of Foster Grants were made as a kiddie toy and sold for 10¢.

Tinted glasses had been used sporadically to that time, mostly as protection in industry. But as the movie industry grew in Hollywood picture stars were photographed in fan magazines wearing sunglasses to shield their eyes from the California sun. The style quickly caught on with the public.

Foster Grant was a pioneer in plastic frames. In 1930 Foster brought a German machine to Leominster for injection molding of plastics. Foster Grant technicians made it the first commercially adaptable injection molding machine in the United States. By 1942 Foster Grant had perfected injection molding techniques and Samuel Foster withdrew from the company at the age of 59.

He took a financial settlement and headed to Los Angeles. Foster established a string of self-service gas stations and dabbled in real estate as Foster Grant became the most famous name in sunglasses.

Florsheim

2007-02-10T10:12:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Sigmund Florsheim

Sigmund Florsheim sold shoes in Chicago from a shop he opened in Chicago in 1856. In 1892 his son Milton, then 24, founded the Florsheim Shoe Company. Florsheim turned out 150 pairs of shoes a year, each stamped with his name on every sole, one of the first shoes identified with a brand name. It was one of many innovations by Milton Florsheim in the shoe industry.

He began national advertising in The Saturday Evening Post, one of the first nationally advertised shoes. He introduced low-cut shoes for men which quickly became the standard for the well-dressed man. Florsheim pioneered retail stores for shoe manufacturers and his stores were the first to put all styles of shoes on display rather than have the salesman bring the merchandise out one style at a time for the customer to inspect.

Milton Florsheim was chairman of the board until his death in 1936.
Florsheim’s sons continued the business until selling out in 1953.

Endicott-Johnson

2007-02-10T10:09:00.000-08:00

And the men behind the brand are...
Henry Endicott and George Johnson

The man who was destined to have one of the largest payrolls in America didn’t seem to be able to hold a job of his own. Henry Bradford Endicott left his father’s Dedham, Massachusetts farm in 1871 at the age of 18 for the big city. In Boston he got work in a plumber’s shop. Later he would allow that all he ever knew about the plumbing business was the extortionate prices one had to pay. When a state fair opened Endicott went there instead of the shop. He was fired.

His job at a hardware store lasted ten days because he didn’t like the way the customers were treated. Positions as an errand boy, porter and woolen goods clerk all came and went before the year was out. Then Henry Endicott wandered into the leather district.

This he liked. When he was 22 he used a legacy from his grandfather and a loan from his father, $2900 in all, to open his own leather supply business.
He prospered in this endeavor and in 1890 he bought into a distressed Lester Brothers Shoe Company in Binghamton, New York.

Endicott sold enough boots to turn a small profit but he was dissatisfied with his manager. A foreman applied for the job and stated confidently that he would work for nothing for one year if he did not show results. George F. Johnson would eventually become Endicott’s partner.

With Johnson handling the manufacturing and Endicott the finances the business grew rapidly. Endicott-Johnson became the first manufacturer to open its own company shoe stores. They built tanneries and achieved total integration of the shoe business.

They initiated an “Industrial Democracy” to manage their work force, which would grow to over 30,000 under their command. Companies towns of Endicott, West Endicott and Johnson City sprouted in southern New York to house workers. An Endicott-Johnson employee was given an opportunity to acquire neat, clean homes at cost and enjoyed recreational facilities, health care and libraries.
In an era of unrest Endicott-Johnson suffered not one strike. Endicott and Johnson initiated a profit-sharing scheme by which all profits went to the employees after 7% had been earned on the preferred stock and 10% on the common.

With the onset of World War I Endicott was recruited to assist the war effort on the homefront. He threw himself completely into the role, never once visiting his company office for the duration of the war. Endicott personally adjusted nearly 150 labor disputes to keep the American war machine rolling.

The effort seemed to sap the life out of him. He died in early 1920 at the age of 66. Johnson assumed the mantle of presidency for America’s leading shoe manufacturer. By the time Johnson stepped down in 1930 Endicott-Johnson had sold its one billionth shoe.

Converse

2007-02-10T10:07:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Marquis Converse

It is a sad irony that the man whose name graces one of America’s greatest athletic shoes was, for much of his life, sickly. Marquis Converse was born in Lyme, New Hampshire in 1861. Infirmities stalled his early business career but he worked his way into a superintendent’s position in Boston’s Houghton & Dutton department store by his early twenties. The job was short-lived, however,
as sickness forced him to resign.

In 1887 Converse co-founded a rubber shoe agency but once again illnesses left him to weak to participate in the venture. This time he spent three years recovering. When Converse resumed his business activities it was as a salesman. In 1908, at nearly 50 years of age, Converse started his own firm again.

By 1910 the Converse Rubber Shoe Company in Malden, Massachusetts was producing 5500 rubber shoes a day. In 1917 Converse introduced the high-topped canvas All Star, America’s first basketball shoes. Charles “Chuck” Taylor was hired as one of sport’s earliest player endorsers. In the days before professional basketball Taylor starred for barnstorming teams across the country, playing and pushing his Converse shoes.

From his experiences on the court Taylor designed sturdier soles and increased ankle support and traction. In 1923 Taylor’s signature was sewn to an ankle patch. The highly recognizable shoe was adopted by the United States Olympic team in 1930. One year before he died in 1969 Chuck Taylor, a pioneer in sports marketing, was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

Despite the success of the All Star business was as much a daily struggle for Marquis Converse as was his health. By 1929 his firm had slipped into receivership. Two years later he dropped dead on the streets of Boston from a fatal heart attack. He had improbably lived into his seventieth year but did not live to see the athletic shoe become a part of everyday fashion.

Cannon

2007-02-10T10:06:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
James Cannon

James William Cannon came of age in the Reconstruction Period of the South.
His schooling ended when the Civil War ended at the age of 13. There was distress and destruction everywhere. The war-torn South was a total economic disaster area.

Cannon began clerking in a general supply store for bed and board, earning nothing but his keep. He clerked until he had developed a successful business buying and selling cotton crops and opened a general merchandise store in Concord, North Carolina in 1877.

The South was still reeling from the devastation of the War. For ten years Cannon watched poverty-ridden farmers come to his store and pay high prices for commodities imported from the North, particularly cloth manufactured out of cotton they ad sold for pennies a pound.

Like other men of the day Cannon realized that the South must have industry, not just agriculture. He studied the small mills around Concord with the idea of starting mills to provide employment and rupture the high-priced competition. With $12,000 of his own money and $75,000 from the sale of stock he started Cannon Mills in 1887.

His product that first year was a cotton yarn and he then introduced a coarse grade of cotton known as Cannon cloth. In 1898 Cannon produced the first cotton hand towel produced in the South. He built a series of mills to produce the popular towels until 1905 when he purchased a 600-acre farm to build a state-of-the-art factory to produce hand towels.

A rambling company town soon formed on the farm to house Cannon's 20,000 employees. It was called Kannapolis (Greek for "loom city') as Cannon grew to be the largest of the manufacturers of household textiles. Cannon was able to make it all work because of integrity and industry. He had never played as a boy and never played as an adult. He had no hobbies, no form of recreation. He was not social, not public-minded, not inclined to publicity. "The less you say the less you will have to take back," said the man who presided over the mills until his death in 1921.

Much of the progress and development in household textiles is the result of Cannon's merchandising, advertising and research. He planned a vast consumer advertising program - unheard of in the textile trade - but couldn't come up with a way for people who liked his products to ask for them by name before he died.
It was left to one of his six sons to discover a way to sew the Cannon trademark to each towel and expand the immense textile business beyond even his father's vast vision.

Calvin Klein

2007-02-10T10:04:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Calvin Klein

Calvin Klein and Barry Schwartz were childhood friends growing up in the Bronx. Calvin always seemed to have a knack for knowing which combinations of clothes looked good. When Barry's mother took him clothes shopping she always took Calvin along to hear his opinions.

Klein attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and began work in 1962 as a 20-year old apprentice at $25 a week. Schwartz went into the army but his father was killed in a hold-up at his Harlem grocery store and Barry was discharged to run the store and support the family. He turned the grocery store into a profitable business. In 1968 he offered 50% of the business to his friend Calvin.

Klein was sorely tempted. After six years he had found little success.
But he suggested they both come into his industry instead. Klein invested $2000 and Schwartz $10,000 to start Calvin Klein, Limited. A few weeks later Martin Luther King was assassinated and rioting looters destroyed the Harlem store. Schwartz was in the fashion business full-time.

It was not a boom time in the world of fashion. The Hippie generation was an era of dressing down, anti-fashion. On area where style was still in vogue was women's coats and Klein concentrated his efforts there. He created a classic understated version of the trench coat and personally wheeled his samples through the offices of Bonwit Teller, landing a $50,000 order. Calvin Klein Limited was off.

Klein designed and Schwartz sold. When Klein launched a line of ladies sportswear Schwartz wouldn't sell any popular Klein coats unless the buyer bought the sportswear too. While European designers still emphasized a layered look Klein created clean, classic clothes that showed off women's bodies.

In 1975 Klein announced he would no longer use man-made fabrics and introduced a designer jean. Jeans had been the lowest garment imaginable.
They were popular as a uniform in the grungy 1960s and early 1970s but as fashion came back jean sales fell off. Connie Dowling, a Bloomingdale's buyer, suggested that Klein make a stylish jean and market it as a high-fashion item emblazoned with his name.

Klein priced his new jeans at $50, twice the cost of traditional jeans.
They were a hit and when Klein launched provocative advertising campaigns they became a sensation. For many Americans Calvin Klein jeans were the first designer item they ever owned.

Klein's quality and designs for the masses made America the fashion capital of the world. By the 1980s European designers were copying American mass culture. Stores were selling over one billion dollars of Calvin Klein clothes as he became a celebrity.

Bulova

2007-02-10T10:02:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Joseph Bulova

Joseph Bulova arrived in New York City in the years following the Civil War.
In his native Bohemia, now Czechoslovakia, Bulova had learned the watchmaking and jewelry trade. For several years Bulova worked around town, studying the prospects for a jewelry business. Finally in 1875, at the age of 23, Bulova realized his dream by opening a small jewelry store on Maiden Lane.

Bulova began making timepieces so that his jewelry shop could offer a wider selection of items for his customers. For the next quarter-century Bulova sold pocket watches and jewelry in New York while building his reputation.
In 1911, as he sold fine pocket watches in unprecedented numbers, he began manufacturing Bulova boudoir and desk clocks.

Wristwatches appeared sporadically before World War I but men still preferred the pocket watch. During the war, soldiers discovered the greater convenience of wearing a wristwatch and returning veterans inaugurated a new market. Bulova responded instantly to the new fashion trend. He marshalled his production facilities to design jeweled wristwatches, introducing his first full line of men’s watches in 1919. It was followed by the industry’s first complete line of ladies’ wristwatches and the first collection of diamond wristwatches.

Bulova was an innovator in advertising to promote his new wristwatches.
In 1926 radio stations across the country began announcing the hour as “at the tone, it’s 8 p.m., Bulova watch time.” Bulova cemented his relationship with the medium of radio when he introduced the world’s first clock radio in 1928.

In 1931, Bulova broke all industry records by launching a million-dollar advertising campaigns. He supported retailers by offering Bulova watches on time-payment plans. The campaign culminated on July 1, 1941 when Brooklyn Dodger fans sat down to watch a televised baseball game and were greeted by a simple picture of a clock centered in a map of the United States. Across the bottom of the screen they were told, “AMERICA RUNS ON BULOVA TIME.”
It was the first TV commercial.

Although he never retired before his death in 1935 at the age of 83, Joseph Bulova turned most of the everyday operations to his son Arde in later years.
At the end of World War II, after supplying the United States military with an assortment of precision instruments, Arde Bulova established the Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking in honor of his father. The school opened its doors to disabled veterans hoping to become self-sufficient. To this day watchmakers still send already accomplished craftsmen to the Bulova school for advanced training.

Brooks Brothers

2007-02-10T09:59:00.000-08:00

And the men behind the brand are...
Henry Brooks and John Brooks

On the seventh of April, 1818 Henry Sands Brooks, then 45 years old, realized the culmination of a dream when he opened a clothing emporium on the corner of Catharine and Cherry Streets in Manhattan. The son of a Connecticut doctor, Brooks had been a successful enough New York grocer to enjoy shopping junkets to Europe where he indulged his taste for fancy clothes. Like every other merchant starting out Brooks pledged “to make and deal only in merchandise of the best quality and to sell it at a fair profit only.”

The business was not confined to retail selling but also did a great trade among seafaring men in that part of New York. A grand tradition evolved when a seaman purchased an outfit: he was regaled with a hearty draft from a black bottle kept for this purpose beneath the counter.

Brooks brought his relatives, first his brother John and then his sons Henry and Daniel, into the business which allowed the small shop to continue after his death in 1833. Men’s clothing styles closely emulated English fashion trends and like other clothiers Brooks offered as many classic London lines as possible.

Henry and Daniel envisioned the future of American dress. In 1845, at a time when most clothes were still tailor-made or sewn in the home, the Brooks brothers were the first to recognize the potential of ready-made clothing. They created the first ready-to-wear suit, an innovation that made fashion affordable.

In the 1850s four younger brothers gravitated to the clothing business and the name officially became Brooks Brothers, by which time the Brooks tradition of clothing originals was firmly established. A sheep suspended by a ribbon was adopted as the official Brooks Brothers trademark. This symbol of British wool merchants dates back to the fifteenth century when it was the emblem of the Knights of the Golden Fleece.

Brooks Brothers continued to adapt British styles to American wardrobes, introducing the foulard necktie in 1890 and the button- down collar shirt in 1896, inspired by English polo players who buttoned their collars against the wind.

It was the sack suit that cemented Brooks Brothers as the father of the classic American style of dress. Designed to flatter all body types, the sack suit was an immediate hit when it was introduced shortly before the turn of the century, replacing the tubular silhouette and padded-shoulder look that had been popular until then. The Brooks Brothers sack suit would become known as the first genuinely American suit, the quintessential business suit.

In 1915, shortly before Brooks Brothers’ centennial, a new flagship store opened at 346 Madison Avenue in New York City, its current location. The store started by Henry Sands Brooks, who toasted sailors across the counter when they bought a suit, has been providing furnishings for men, women and boys for 175 years.

Yale

2007-02-10T09:56:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Linus Yale

As more and more Americans began entrusting their money to banks in the early 19th century it became incumbent on these new institutions to guarantee the safety of these deposits. Many tinkerers were working on an infallible vault lock. One was Linus Yale. Another was Linus Yale.

Linus Yale, Jr. was born in Salisbury, New York in 1821 where his father was an inventor of sorts, having produced a thresher, among other machines. Young Yale received a formal education but followed an artist’s muse after school. He scraped out a living as a mediocre portrait artist for nearly ten years. Meanwhile, in 1840, Linus, Sr. began to manufacture bank locks in Newport, New York.

Independently Linus, Jr. began to work on locks as well. While his father created the association between the name Yale and locks it was the son’s “Yale Infallible Bank Lock” which revolutionized the security industry. He improved his lock constantly, patenting in rapid succession the “Yale Magic Bank Lock” and the formidable “Yale Double Treasury Bank Lock.”

At the time a “lock controversy” raged on the ultimate security afforded by bank locks. At the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851 it was demonstrated that the best English locks could be picked. Yale traveled to England and figured how to pick the celebrated Day & Newell “Parautoptic Bank Lock.” When he returned to his Stamford, Connecticut factory he discovered how to pick his best Yale Double Treasury Lock. The experience led him to develop the Monitor Bank Lock, the first of the combination, or dial, locks.

Between 1860 and 1865 Yale undertook work on a small key lock for doors and storage chests. Keys of the day were clumsy and often weighed more than one pound. Yale crafted a flat key “Cylinder Lock” based on a pin-and-tumbler mechanism devised by the ancient Egyptians. With refinements the lock was virtually pickproof.

Yale lacked the financial resources to mass produce his new security locks until he met Henry Robinson Towne in 1868. Although half his age, Yale found much to recommend the 24-year old Towne. He had graduated early from the University of Pennsylvania and was designing and installing Naval engines while still in his teens in the Civil War. And he brought with him plenty of capital as the son of a wealthy foundry owner.

There would be no locks sold by the new partners, however. On Christmas Day 1868 Yale suffered a massive heart attack and died at the age of 47. Although their business association lasted only a brief three months Henry Towne had great respect for Linus Yale and saw to it that his name was stamped on every key blank the company stamped.

Weyerhauser

2007-02-10T09:53:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Frederick Weyerhauser

Who owns the most land in America? Well, if all the land in the United States was divided up equally we would all get about 10 acres. The Weyerhauser Company owns a little more than their share; they control over 4 million acres.

Frederick Weyerhauser came to America from Hessen, Germany in 1848 when he was 14 with a profound respect for thrift and a hearty appetite for hard work. He began in a lumberyard in North East, Pennsylvania before joining his brother-in-law to operate a sawmill in Rockville, Illinois in 1860.

Weyerhauser-Denckman soon prospered. But being downriver from the timber growing regions of Wisconsin meant his logs had to float past many other mills to reach his.

To insure a steady flow of logs Weyerhauser travelled up and down the Mississippi to urge other small mill operators to join him in buying logs from Wisconsin's Chippewa Valley. Together, he reasoned, they could buy logs in quantities large enough to secure a steady supply and good prices. The Mississippi River Logging Company organized as one of America's earliest mergers of substantial size in 1871.

Years of dispute followed with the local Chippewa millmen who watched enormous flotillas of logs go by their mills downriver to Weyerhauser's co-operative. In 1880 devastating floods crushed many Wisconsin sawmills and washed their log inventories downstream and smack into the log booms of the hated Mississippi River Logging Company.

Weyerhauser now held the future of many of his competitors in his log booms. He engineered a peaceful settlement by agreeing to buy the stray logs at market price and sell others at the same price to Chippewa mills that would re-start.
This agreement ended the decade-old power struggle and brought the Chippewa loggers into the co-operative. Weyerhauser was elected president of the Chippewa Logging Company, the largest sawmill in the world.

In the 1890s Weyerhauser began buying timber stands and sawmills in Minnesota. He moved to St. Paul and purchased a house on chic Summit Avenue, although he did not seek the haughty social life. Weyerhauser was painfully shy because of his thick German accent and spent much of his leisure time keeping bees. But he did become friendly with his new next door neighbor.

After moving in Weyerhauser discovered his new neighbor was James J. Hill, railroad baron of the great Northern Pacific. In 1899 Hill wanted to sell land awarded the railroad as a land grant and offered 900,000 acres of remote western land to Weyerhauser for $7 an acre. Weyerhauser countered with $5; they settled on $6. The two neighbors had consummated the largest private land sale in American history.

Company officials grumbled that Weyerhauser could have gotten the land cheaper. They learned that Hill had been offering parcels of some of the land to the public for 50¢ an acre a year earlier. No matter, Weyerhauser just loved to buy timber. He said, "The only mistake we ever made was in not buying pine trees whenever offered."

Weyerhauser bought much of the extremely speculative Douglas fir regions of the Pacific Northwest. He once remarked to an associate that he liked to buy timber when it rained and sell it when the sun shone. However, no one recalled that he ever sold any pine timber, rain or shine.

The Weyerhauser Company would continue to buy timberland after Frederick's death and became noted for their efforts to renew the timber stands they already owned. Weyerhauser introduced the first tree farms, tending mountains that wouldn't be harvested for 60 years, refurbishing the founder’s legacy in America’s timberlands.

Tupperware

2007-02-10T09:51:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Earl Tupper

When Brownie Wise received her first plastic Tupper “Wonder Bowl” it took her three days to figure out how to work the seal. Then, once she got the bowl sealed, she dropped it as she was putting it in the refrigerator. But instead of breaking the bowl bounced. And the stubborn seal kept the contents from spilling. The world was about to discover plastic.

Earl Silas Tupper became convinced that plastic was “the material of the future” when he worked with polymers in a DuPont chemical plant during the Depression. Born and raised on a rural New Hampshire farm in 1907 Tupper always fancied himself an inventor imbued with Yankee ingenuity. So he left Du Pont to form the Tupper Plastics Company in 1938.

Nothing much happened for a few years and then World War II forced the government to restrict distribution of critical raw materials. Tupper’s experiments with plastics could only continue when he obtained some leftover material from his former employer, a chunk of rock-hard, putrid polyethylene slag. Tupper worked with the black slag until he developed a purifying refining process. He also pioneered an injection-molding machine which produced the first unbreakable plastic. The first of what would grow to be more than 400 Tupperware products was a seven-ounce tumbler.

Some of Tupper’s creations were busts. Americans would never see his plastic shoe heels but they would come to know his food containers. Plastic was viewed with suspicion by consumers in the 1940s; quality was inconsistent and no one saw the urgency to switch from comfortable glass. It was Tupper’s seal that broke down consumer resistance.

He modeled his airtight seal after a paint can, flaring the rim out slightly and molding the lid to lock onto it. When the air inside was “burped” out a partial vacuum was created and the food inside would not dry out in Americans’ new refrigerators. This is what Brownie Wise discovered in her own kitchen.

Tupper first sold his containers through hardware stores and catalogs when they were introduced in 1945. He then began to tap into the popular home demonstration parties after World War II. Wise was a Stanley Home Products distributor when she started to buy Tupper’s plastic containers from her wholesalers. When shipments were delayed one day in 1949 she called Tupper directly to complain. By the time he put down the phone he had made her director of a new home-sales program.

Wise was so energetic, so positive, so successful that Tupper pulled his products from store shelves and sold exlusively through direct sellers. In 1951 Tupper Plastics became Tupperware Home Parties. When Wise took over there were some 200 independent dealers in Tupper’s sales system. Three years later there were 9000 and $25 million in sales.

Tupperware was strong and elegant in its simplicity. Tupper used only the best raw materials and adhered to the strictest tolerances in his molds. Tupper was so exacting in his manufacturing specifications that he sold his products with a lifetime warranty. The only receipt a customer ever needed to replace a defective product was the name Tupperware on the container.

In 1958 Wise left the company and Tupper sold the business to Rexall Drugs for $9 million. He retired to Costa Rica and by the time Earl Tupper died in 1983 it was estimated that Tupperware could be found in 90% of all American homes.

Tappan

2007-02-10T09:48:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Bill Tappan

W.J. “Bill” Tappan was well-known in the Ohio Valley in the 1880s. There wasn’t a single door in the territory he had not knocked on trying to sell the iron stoves he cast in his foundry. Many of the farmers were poor and Tappan often accepted payment in vegetables and grains because he felt folks should be able to cook on a good stove.

In 1891, after Tappan had stoked his foundry for ten years, a solar eclipse darkened the eastern half of the United States. He viewed the astronomical event as an omen and changed the name of his entire company from the Ohio Valley Foundry Company to the Eclipse Company. Perhaps it was an omen meant specifically for Bill Tappan because his Eclipse Stove was soon selling beyond the Ohio Valley and became one of the best-selling ovens in America.

Tappan went on to become one of the leading innovators in the American kitchen, becoming a name synomous to cooking. In 1920 the old Tappan cast iron stove gave way to sheet steel and the modern range. In the 1940s the company name reverted back to the Tappan Stove Company and when it introduced the first commercial microwave oven in 1955 there was no need to take it door to door as Bill Tappan had done 75 years earlier. It was readily accepted as the quintessential American convenience.

Steinway

2007-02-09T13:03:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Heinrich Steinweg

Heinrich Engelhardt Steinweg was born the youngest of twelve children to a foresting family in Germany in 1797. His father and several brothers left to fight in the Napoleonic Wars and only the father came home. Worse, while seeking refuge from marauding troops, Steinweg’s mother died of exposure in a crude hut during a bitter German winter.

Several years later, in 1812, Steinweg, his father and three remaining brothers were working a hillside when a thunderstorm threatened. The family huddled inside a temporary shelter which was destroyed by a bolt of lightning. Only Heinrich Steinwag crawled out of the wreckage alive. He was the only one remaining from his family of 14. He was fifteen years old.

Struggling to support himself Steinweg joined the Army himself. He was reputedly at Waterloo in 1815, serving as a bugler, and stayed in the military until he was 22 years old. He had no musical training but built his first instrument, a zither, made with 30 strings stretched across a box, after the war. He longed to build instruments professionally but was not willing to serve the required seven-year apprenticeship and turned to cabinetmaking.

Although it is not known for sure, it is generally assumed that Steinweg built his first piano at the age of 39 as a gift for his wife, crafting it in his kitchen. In 1839 a Steinweg piano won a gold medal at the Brunswick, Germany trade fair. He sold the piano for 300 marks and was in the piano business. With the help of three of his six sons the Steinwegs were able to make ten pianos a year in Seesen, Germany.

Political upheaval was once again threatening Germany by mid-century.
On June 29, 1850 Heinrich Steinweg landed in New York City, following the lead of his son Theodore, who had emigrated a year earlier. Theodore’s letters, although clearly indicating that all things being equal he’d rather still be in Germany, convinced his family a less stressful life awaited them in America.

Father and sons worked in piano factories around New York but the family was not scraping for money after their successful German days. On March 5, 1853 Heinrich Steinweg opened his own piano factory. Aware of prejudices against Germans around New York he began business as “Henry Steinway & Sons.” Steinway was never completely won over by his adopted land; he didn’t officially change the name until 1864 and German was always the official language in the factory during his lifetime.

The Steinways started in a loft on Varick Street. Their first piano sold for $500; it is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art today. The eldest daughter, Doretta, was the company’s best salesperson and she often offered free lessons with the new piano. The firm’s success was assured when a Steinway square piano won a gold medal at the New York Industrial Exposition of the American Institute. The first Steinway grand piano was sold in 1856.

By 1859 Steinway was making more than one piano a day. A new plant, swallowing an entire city block, went up off Park Avenue in 1860. With 350 men and steam-powered tools Steinway’s production increased to 30 square pianos and five grand pianos a week. The superior resonance of a Steinway piano was attributed to its overstrung bass strings on an iron frame. It quickly became the standard concert piano in America. In 1866 William Steinway built Steinway Hall which was New York’s premier concert hall until Andrew Carnegie built his palatial hall in 1890.

Henry Steinway endured the same tragedies with his offspring that he had with his brothers. Three of his sons died of illness within a short period in the mid-1860s. Henry himself passed away at the age of 74 in 1871, having started a legacy that fate had oft times seemed determined to sabotage.

Stanley

2007-02-09T13:01:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Fred Stanley

Frederick Trent Stanley always had a bit of the promoter in him. When he he was making suspenders during Andrew Jackson’s presidency he sent Old Hickory a pair to show him fine Connecticut craftsmanship. Jackson penned Stanley a testimonial to his fine suspenders. which he was able to use to impress future customers.

But Stanley’s flair for selling seldom seemed to carry his manufacturing efforts very far. Born in 1803 Stanley clerked for a time as a boy on a Connecticut River steamboat and migrated to North Carolina for three years to try his hand at country peddling. He crafted his suspenders for a bit and in 1831 he teamed with his brother William to produce some of the earliest house trimmings and locks in America. This business sputtered along for a time until the Panic of 1837 mercifully crippled it fatally.

Frederick Stanley went to Mississippi at that point and out of the reach of his chroniclers. He next surfaced in 1843 back in New Britain, Connecticut in a nondescript one-story wooden structure that had once stood as an armory during the War of 1812. Here Stanley would lay the foundations for the most famous toolworks in America.

The Stanley Bolt Manufactory was one of hundreds of little manufactories struggling to make a go of it, the majority of which were one-man shops.
The only thing setting Stanley apart was a single-cylinder, high pressure steam engine shipped up from New York and carted by ox to the little wooden shop. Stanley’s was the only automated shop int he region.

Stanley peddled his bolts by horseback and wagon across the back country.
His tiny business must have impressed his neighbors because in 1852 five friends pooled the staggering sum of $30,000 to form The Stanley Works, with Frederick Stanley as president. Losses the first year totalled $361.72 but sales of wrought iron strap and hinges slowly elevated profits through the decade.

Clearly the outstanding achievement of Stanley’s presidency was his recruiting of William Hart, a 19-year old “jack-of-all-trades” when first hired in 1852.
By 1865 Stanley was making hand tools and hardware for the expanding West but faced four strongly entrenched competitors - all bigger and closer to cheap iron and easy water transportation.

But The Stanley Works alone survived. Hart expanded production, increased efficiency and cut labor costs by 25%. He packaged screws together with hinges for the first time. When retailers were hesitant to accept the pre-packaged hinges he went to stores and bought traditional hinges. Then he asked a clerk for matching screws, all the while timing the transaction with a stop-watch.
When he pointed out the magnitude of the time savings his hinge-and-screw package was an easy sell.

With Hart at the controls Stanley veered towards civic service and politics.
He served as the first mayor of New Britain. But the Depression years of the early 1870s left The Stanley Works in its worst shape since its first year two decades earlier. Just before his death Frederick Stanley underwrote employee notes for money borrowed from banks and, along with new cold-rolled steel hinges pioneered by Hart, who succeeded him as president, insured the company’s success for the next generation.

Singer

2007-02-09T12:59:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Isaac Singer

Isaac Merritt Singer was born in upstate New York in 1811. He ran away from his parents at age 12 to join a group of traveling actors. Singer remained an actor until he was 24. After that he worked as a machinist and acted on the side.
For years his means were small and he despaired of ever inventing anything successful.

He patented a device for carving wood-block type and went to Boston in 1850 to sell the type to manufacturers. There enthusiasm was decidedly restrained for his wood-type but one day while in the office of a prospective client he became intrigued with a broken-down sewing machine. Singer set out to familiarize himself with all aspects of the sewing machine.

What he learned was that sewing machines were available as early as 1790 in England. But since their inception sewing machines were horribly unreliable and in need of constant repairs. Singer set to work and quickly invented a reliable machine with a straight needle that moved up and down. He was granted a patent in 1851 and formed I.M. Singer & Company.

Singer’s sewing machine was an immediate success and also attracted the attention of Elias Howe who had patented a sewing machine in 1846. Singer hired a lawyer named Edward Clark to defend him in exchange for 1/3 of the business. The arrangement eventually became 50-50 with Singer handling the manufacturing and Clark the finances.

Clark stymied the lawsuits and brought the men together to pool their patents by creating the Singer Machine Combination - the first patent pool in United States history. By arrangement Singer and Howe each received $5 from every sewing machine sold.

At first the only market for the Singer sewing machines was professional tailors and harness makers. Seeking a way to bring the machine within reach of the American family Clark introduced the first consumer installment payment plan.
For many Americans the sewing machine was their most expensive possession.

The Singer-Clark partnership came to an abrupt end in 1863 when certain unsavory details of Singer’s personal life came to light. Seems Isaac Singer had fathered 24 children by four women. Both men retained an equal share of Singer Company stock but sold the rest to their employees.

Family troubles aside the profits of the sewing machine business made Singer a wealthy man. Rather than ride out any scandals in America Singer went abroad, settling in Tourquay, a well-known watering place in England until his death in 1875.

Simmons

2007-02-09T12:57:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Zalmon Simmons

Zalmon Simmons was a man whose imagination ran to telegraph companies and railroads. But his name survives, not in anything so grand, but surely something more important to most Americans: a good night’s sleep.

Simmons started out in 1849 as a $200-a-year clerk in a general store in Kenosha, Wisconsin. At the time the telegraph was new and the country was dotted with little telegraph companies, most of which were making no money.
The head of one such Wisconsin company owed Simmons some money and was about to sell his business to pay his bill. Simmons decided he may as well take over the business, if that be the case, and cancelled the man’s bill and paid $200 for the telegraph line.

Simmons built up the Northwestern Telegraph Company, partly by letting the railroads use his lines free in return for allowing him to put his poles along their right-of-way. This proved particularly valuable in the rugged west where poles were frequently toppled by storms and buffaloes.

This piqued his interest in railroads and he eventually built the first cogwheel railway up Pikes Peak. The first bed business Simmons got into was the railroad bed business: he supplied clay ballast for railroads that ran across the Great Plains and frequently sunk in the mud during rainy periods. He became president of the Rock Island Railroad.

Simmons got into the bed business quite by accident. He had built himself a little factory in which he manufactured cheeseboxes for his dairy and wooden insulators for his telegraph lines. He met an inventor who showed him a woven-wire mattress, which was really a frame with strands of wire woven through it. The spring was crude but an improvement over the wooden slats or ropes used to support mattresses of the day.

Simmons bought the invention and began making woven-wire mattresses in a portion of his cheesebox factory. The business went well and Simmons put in a line of wooden beds, principally the old-fashioned folding bed, noted for trapping potential sleepers. In 1892 his factory burned down and when it resumed operations Simmons dealt primarily in metal, especially brass, beds.

When Zalmon Simmons died in 1910 at the age of 81 the metal bed was about to be supplanted by wooden bedroom furniture. But it would not matter to the Simmons company as Zalmon Simmons II was guiding the business away from beds and into mattresses. When the Beautyrest hit the market in 1925 Simmons was exclusively in the mattress business.

Sherwin-Williams

2007-02-09T12:55:00.000-08:00

And the men behind the brand are...
Henry Sherwin and Edward Williams

Nobody thought you could sell ready-mixed paint. Painting one’s house was a very personal thing; the homeowner would always want to mix their own paints.
Henry Alden Sherwin thought differently.

Sherwin was born in 1842 and raised in Vermont. He quit school at the age of 13 and went to work in a store, spending his off-hours sleeping upstairs. For years Henry listened to his uncle, a lawyer in Cleveland, rave about the bustling city by Lake Erie.

Finally, in 1859 Henry saved up enough money to go to Cleveland.
Sherwin thrived in business. He worked as a bookkeeper for a wholesale grocery and was soon offered a partnership. A religious man Sherwin never reconciled himself to the fact that his firm sold liquor and he not only turned down the partnership but resigned his position.

In 1866 Sherwin invested $2000 in a partnership of Truman Dunham & Company, a manufacturer of linseed oils. For three years Sherwin agitated for the company to take an active role in developing ready-mixed paints. Finally it was agreed that Sherwin would take what little paint business the firm had and the other partners would take the linseed oil business.

In 1870 Sherwin found another partner in good-natured, fun-loving Edward Porter Williams. Williams proved to be a born salesman who spurred the company's growth while Sherwin toiled meticulously to create a superior ready-mixed paint.

It took ten years. In 1880 Sherwin-Williams introduced their first ready-mixed paint. Henry Sherwin was convinced that his paint far surpassed any of the inferior canned paints then on the market. He had created a mill that ground color pigments fine enough to remain suspended in the oils that carried them. Sherwin-Williams paint would stay as fresh as the day it was mixed in the factory.

To overcome consumer resistance Sherwin-Williams ready-mixed paint came with an ironclad warranty: "We guarantee that this paint, when properly used, will not crack, flake or chalk off, and will cover more surface, work better, wear longer, and permanently look better than other paints. We hereby agree to forfeit the value of the paint AND THE COST OF APPLYING IT if in any instance it is not found as above represented."

It didn't take much convincing for homeowners to abandon their linseed oil pots and turpentine jars in favor of a pre-mixed paint that covered their walls. Sherwin-Williams ready-mixed paints were an immediate success. The company began to sell only pre-mixed canned paints. Warehouses spread up in Newark, New Jersey and Boston to meet demand.

Sherwin quickly expanded his lines to turn homeowners into paint experts.
He introduced surface preparations, primers, brushes and clean-up materials. Meanwhile Williams concentrated on developing finishes for the powerful railroad industry which led to the company's first plant outside Cleveland. In 1888 Sherwin-Williams started a factory in Chicago, destined to be the largest paint manufacturing plant in the world.

By the end of the century Sherwin-Williams warehouses spanned the continent. The firm was taking steps to own and manufacture raw ingredients when Edward Williams died in 1903. Two years later the "Cover-the-Earth" trademark, a can of paint spilling across a globe, was adopted.

Henry Sherwin resigned the presidency in 1909 to serve as Chairman of the Board. He lived long enough to participate in his company's 50th Year Golden Jubilee before dying in 1916.

Oster

2007-02-09T12:53:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
John Oster

The fortunes of many of America’s companies have been intertwined with the country’s wars. John Oster had built a solid business in the years before World War II but government orders during the war not only exceeded any received before but pushed the company into new directions which would make Oster a “household” name.

John Oster made his first hair clippers in 1924, working out of a basement with 15 employees. At the time hair clippers were heavy and indiscriminately used to clip animal as well as human hair. Women in the “Roaring Twenties” began bobbing their hair and Oster’s new lightweight clippers were ideal for the intricate hairstyles.

In 1928 Oster invented a postage-sized motor to power his hair clippers,
the first portable electric hair clipper. Priced far below the $100 professional models on the market Oster’s hair clippers became the standard in barber shops across the country. Oster faced four major competitors; he bought two of them and a third went out of business. With his reputation firmly established Oster searched for other uses for his pint-sized motors. In 1935 he developed an “Oster massager” which was a big success in hospitals and sanitoriums.

Millions of American heads were shorn with Oster clippers during World War II but the company also utilized its expertise in small horsepower motors to produce compact motors for mines and artillery. After the war Oster realized that there would be a great demand for new, high-tech consumer products in American homes. He purchased the Stevens Electric Company, which had been making commercial drink mixers since 1922.

With refinements by Oster engineers the first “Osterizer,” a practical food blender appeared on the market in 1946. While housewives everywhere were chopping, slicing and dicing food with their new portable blenders the Oster line was expanding to include hair dryers, knife sharpeners, humidifiers and ice crushers. By the time the Oster Company was purchased by the Sunbeam Corporation in 1960 John Oster had taken his miniature motors into every room in the house.

Maytag

2007-02-09T12:51:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Frederick Maytag

Daniel Maytag came to America in 1852 at the age of 19 as a carpenter but ended up operating a store in Cook County, Illinois. In 1866 he traded his store for open prairie land in Iowa. So it happened that 10-year old Frederick Louis Maytag tended the family farm while his father built barns, houses, and churches throughout the developing countryside.

To supplement his farm income young Maytag supplied coal to area schoolhouses. One dark night his horse stepped in a rut and snapped his foreleg. Maytag lost an entire winter's profits. He left the farm in 1880 to sell agricultural supplies for $50 a month.

Maytag entered the manufacturing business in 1893 as half-owner of the Parsons Band Cutter and Self Feeder Company. In addition to farm implements Maytag also became a leading manufacturer of buggies and dabbled in early automobile experiments.

He began looking for new products to replace the firm's increasingly obsolete line of buggies. In 1907 he began selling a power washer with a gas engine for farm use. In 1909 Maytag bought out his partners and renamed the business the Maytag Company. Maytag now devoted all his energies to his washing machines. And they needed it.

The company struggled for more than a decade. By 1922 Maytag was 65 years old and owed large sums of money when the breakthrough came.
Howard Snyder, a Maytag employee for 15 years who had started as a serviceman, invented a gyrowasher with an aluminum tub. The new machine used a gyrator to create violent water action rather than rubbing, pulling, and twisting clothes.

The Maytag Company was 8th among 60 washing machine manufacturers when Fred Maytag travelled west to try and sell his new gyrowasher. He met little success until he finally convinced one dealer to carry the Maytag Aluminum Washer with "gyrofoam washing." That was all it took. The plant was soon swamped with orders.

Maytag sent sample machines unsolicited to 100 dealers for demonstrations. Only seven returned it. On any dealer order over 12 machines a Maytag salesman would travel to the store and work for 30 days with the dealer to sell them.
Within 18 months of the introduction of the gyrofoam washer Maytag was the number one seller of washing machines in America, with more sales than the next four manufacturers combined.

Fred Maytag was now free to pursue his non-business interests. He had been nominated for the Iowa State Senate back in 1893 but scoffed at the acclamation. He didn't campaign at all and lost handily. But in 1901 he actively campaigned for the Senate seat and won easily, serving until 1912. He was mayor of his hometown of Newton Iowa and was the first director of the Iowa State budget in 1925.

He gave freely of his money, donating $250,000 to the Newton Y.M.C.A. and building a park and public swimming pool. He also gave thousands of dollars to various midwestern colleges. On his 70th birthday he distributed $132,000 to his employees. Fred Maytag retired to Beverly Hills where he died in 1937 at the age of 80.

Mason

2007-02-09T12:49:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
John Mason

Food preservation in early America was at best a short term proposition.
Fruits and vegetables were stored in cellars, buried in pits lined with charcoal, baked sawdust, chopped straw or corn husks. Dried fruits and vegetables were the best winter fare available and fall spelled the beginning of ever-increasingly monotonous menus.

A French confectioner, Nicolas Appert, won a 12,000 franc prize in 1810 for his theories that heat would preserve fruits, meats, fish and vegetables by arresting the natural tendency of foods to spoil. For the next half-century there was virtually no advancement in the salvation of the consumer’s taste buds.

In 1858 John Landis Mason left the family farm in Vineland, New Jersey and moved to New York to work as a tinsmith on Canal Street. Holed up in a small rented room at 154 West 19th Street the 26-year old Mason worked on the problem of an airtight jar, undoubtedly spurred on by the thought of the coming winter and its dreary diet.

In the middle of November Mason took out his first patent for a mold which could turn out a glass jar with a threaded top. The threads would allow a metal cap to be screwed down, forming an airtight seal. Mason took out a second patent on his “improved Jar” on November 30, 1858, the date which glass jars carried for the next 75 years.

That winter Mason took on partners and moved his modest business to 257 Pearl Street. Mason and his partners crafted the tops on Pearl Street. The jars were ordered from glassblowers who had made the molds, generally costing less than $10, according to the specifications in Mason’s patent. From these beginnings it is estimated that over 100 billion jars have been made from Mason’s creation.

The humble Mason jar is surely one of America’s most important inventions,
for it changed the dietary habits of a nation and spawned one of the country’s great industries. Mason’s jar proved to be a blessing to housewives on farms and cities alike. The chemically inert qualities of glass preserved fresh flavors.
Clear, transparent jars permitted housewives to see contents at a glance.
Easy to clean and re-use, Mason jars could be effortlessly stored by the hundred. Individual jars were often handed down from one generation to another.

The Civil War interrupted Mason’s thriving new business. After the war, Mason re-established his factory in New York until 1873 when he moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey. Here Mason became associated with the Consolidated Fruit Jar Company, which soon acquired rights to the first two patents.
These patents expired in 1875, after seventeen years, and accordingly entered the public domain, free of protection. The next year Mason assigned his remaining rights on eight other jar patents to Consolidated.

John Mason busied himself with his new family - he had married in 1873 when he moved to New Brunswick and his new wife would present him with eight daughters - and dabbled in new inventions. He patented a folding life raft, a soap dish, a brush holder, and a sheet metal cap die but never again devised anything as perfect in its utility as the Mason jar.

Kohler

2007-02-09T12:47:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
John Kohler

John Michael Kohler was doing a brisk business selling products from his foundry in Sheboygan, Wisconsin to immigrants passing through the city on their way west. He sold enameled tea kettles and flat-rimmed kitchen sinks. He also made an enameled iron vessel that farmers used as a combination hog scalder and watering trough.

Sensing an emerging market for household products, Kohler designed and cast four ornamental iron feet. He welded them to his hog scalder and, in 1883, put the first Kohler bathtub on the market. That first bathtub, so the legend goes, sold to a local farmer in exchange for one cow and 14 chickens.

The Kohlers were cheesemakers and dairy farmers in the ancestral home in the Austrian Alps when the family came to America in mid-century. The Kohlers settled in rural St. Paul, Minnesota, where there is still a Kohler dairy selling Kohler milk. John, however, left the family farm to peddle goods in Chicago.

On a sales trip along Lake Michigan Kohler met a young woman named Lillie Vollrath in Sheboygan. By 1873 the 29-year old Kohler was married and buying out his father-in-law’s interest in a small foundry and machine shop. Kohler directed twenty-one employees in the manufacture of plows, road scrapers, hitching posts, cemetery crosses, garden settees and any ironwork a customer might need.

In 1880 the factory burned to the ground. Kohler rebuilt the plant, added an enamel shop and started shifting production from plowshares to plumbing fixtures. As sales increased he was able to indulge in civic interests. Kohler became part owner of the Turner Hall and the Sheboygan Opera House, two of the major cultural centers in the community. Kohler even put in one term as mayor of Sheboygan.

In 1899 Kohler moved his foundry from Sheboygan to a small village called Riverside four miles west of the city. Many hailed the move as “Kohler’s Folly.” They found if difficult to understand why a prospering foundry would locate away from its skilled work force, away from utilities and away from city services and convenient transportation.

John Kohler would not live to see his the full scope of his vision realized. He died before his new plant was in full production. Three months later fire destroyed the factory and the company was forced to move back to Sheboygan.

Kohler’s sons returned the business to Riverside to re-establish the family factory, devoted now solely to plumbing products. A small cluster of employees’ homes grew up around the Kohler factory. In 1912, by popular vote of its residents, the village of Riverside was incorporated and its name was changed to Kohler.

John Michael Kohler had always dreamed of building a model city. It was a dream he passed on to his family, and they would not let it die.

Johnson

2007-02-09T12:46:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Samuel Johnson

For much of his lifetime Samuel Curtis Johnson migrated from town to town in the Midwest. The eldest of 11 children born on Christmas Eve, 1833 his family moved every few years. Appropriately his first job was with the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad. Never able to obtain a proper education in his youth Johnson decided to enroll at Oberlin College in Ohio at the age of 24.

A year later he was on the move again, working for the Kenosha, Rockford & Rock Island Railroad in Kenosha, Wisconsin. When he married shortly thereafter he began investing half of his monthly $100 salary in the railroad. The line went bankrupt and Johnson lost his entire savings.

For the next 30 years Johnson’s career was undistinguished as he drifted in and out of a variety of jobs. In 1886 he hired on with the Racine Hardware Company selling decorative parquet floors. Johnson bought his employer’s company that year and began selling and installing parquet floors on his own.

After spending so lavishly for their special floors Johnson soon found himself fielding questions on the best way to care for the inlaid floors. He knew that fancy European parquet floors had been maintained with beeswax for centuries. Johnson began mixing his own waxes and starting in 1888 every floor his company installed came with a free can of Johnson’s Prepared Paste Wax.

Although other waxes and polishes were available it was Samuel Johnson who gained a wide reputation as a wood-finishing expert. By 1898 Johnson was selling more wax and paste than parquet floors. Although waxed floors are not the priority they were one hundred years ago when expensive wood requires extra care it is still Johnson’s wax, manufactured with the exact secret formulation that gets the job done.

Johns Manville

2007-02-09T12:44:00.000-08:00

And the men behind the brand are...
Henry Johns and Charles Manville

Just as fire has always fascinated man so to have materials that can be set ablaze without burning. The asbestos story in America is the story of two men: Henry Ward Johns and Charles Branton Manville.

From his childhood Johns was captivated by the heat and fire resistant properties of asbestos. Fires were common tragedies in the 1800s extracting a heavy toll on human life. When he reached the age of 21 in 1858 Johns left his West Stockbridge, Massachusetts farm and came to New York to start a small business as a jobber of roofing materials.

Ten years later Johns received his first patent for an asbestos product.
He gave it the cumbersome name "Improved Compound For Roofing And Other Purposes." He developed a new pipe covering and in 1874 asbestos was discovered on nearby Staten Island. Johns' business success spread.

He hired a travelling salesman named Reed, who before getting his first commission check had secured so many orders for asbestos roofing that he had to be recalled because the factory couldn't keep pace. For all his excellent work Reed's reward was a factory job.

Charles Manville worked in the grocery trade in Neenah, Wisconsin for most of his life. In 1878, at the age of 44, he set out for the South Dakota gold rush.
He returned to Milwaukee four years later, poorer for his troubles.

He began the manufacture of steam pipe and boiler covers. In 1886 he found a mixture of wool felt and blue clay that was a superior insulator and went into a successful business with his three sons. Manville bought Johns’ business west Ohio in 1897, one year before Johns’ death. In 1901 the two companies consolidated under the leadership of the respective founder's sons. Thomas Manville was the first president of the new Johns Manville.

Thomas Manville would introduce 1300 items made of asbestos, earning the title "Asbestos King". He ran the company as a one-man show. Fortune reported in 1913, "Manville took little advice, borrowed no money, dickered with no competitor." Manville boasted that he "never spent a nickel on laboratories or chemists." But he sold the heck out of asbestos, increasing sales to $40,000,000 a year when he died suddenly of heart disease in 1925. His father outlived him by two years, dying at age 93 in 1927, and his success lives on even longer. Johns Manville is still the undisputed leader in the asbestos industry.

Jacuzzi

2007-02-09T12:42:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Candido Jacuzzi

Listen to the podcast http://oscarmeyerpodcast.podbus.com/Jacuzzi.mp3

It must be the name. Candido Jacuzzi did not set out to make his name synomous with laid-back California luxury. Jacuzzi did not invent the whirlpool; it was others that made his soothing-sounding name generic. His business roots were much less romantic.

Candido Jacuzzi was born in northern Italy in 1903 and emigrated with his family, fifteen strong, to the United States early in the century. The family settled in Berkeley, California, becoming machinists. Candido, the youngest of seven brothers, would never complete grammar school.

The first Jacuzzi Brothers, Inc. product was an airplane propeller known as the Jacuzzi “toothpick.” America’s first military planes sported the specialized propeller in World War I. After the war the brothers designed the Jacuzzi J-7, a cabin-style monoplane. There followed a breakthrough development of submersible pumps that opened markets worldwide to Jacuzzi. Factories sprouted in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Italy. More than 50 industrial patents are held by the Jacuzzis.

In 1943 Candido’s 15-month old son contracted rheumatoid arthritis, leaving the boy crippled and distorted with pain. The boy received regular hydrotherapy treatments at local hospitals but Candido could not stand to see his son suffering between visits. He realized that the water pumps Jacuzzi Brothers was making could be adapted to give his son whirlpool treatments at home.

In 1948 Jacuzzi designed an aerating pump that could be used in a bathtub. The unit sat right in the water and could be moved from one bathtub to another. Over the years other sufferers heard about the home relief provided by the portable whirlpool and Jacuzzi manufactured some for special orders.

In 1955 the firm decided to market the Jacuzzi whirlpool bath as a therapeutic aid, selling it in drugstores and bath supply shops. To generate a little publicity for the unknown product portable Jacuzzis were included in the gifts showered on contestants on TV’s Queen for a Day. It was pitched as relief for the worn-down housewife but when Hollywood stars like Randolph Scott and Jayne Mansfield, who were decidedly not worn-down, began offering testimonials the Jacuzzi started to acquire its legendary allure.

The Jacuzzi became a symbol of the sybaritic lifestyle. Hundreds of thousands of Jacuzzi portables were installed, both indoors and outdoors, at recreation centers and private homes. But the whirlpool bath was still mostly a sidelight at Jacuzzi Brothers. By far the bulk of their revenues came from sales of water pumps, marine jets and swimming pool equipment.

Candido Jacuzzi, who had worked his way up as sales manager and general manager, was forced to resign as president of the firm in 1969 when he was indicted on five counts of income tax invasion, triggering a series of hardships that clouded the final years of his life.

Rather than face trial, although protesting his innocence, Jacuzzi fled the country, splitting his time between Italy and Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. In 1975 he suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed. He was able to return home to Scottsdale, Arizona but before his death in 1986 Jacuzzi was dealt the cruelest blow of all - the sale of Jacuzzi Brothers in 1979, prompted by family squabbling.

Hoover

2007-02-09T12:39:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
William Hoover

Listen to the Podcast http://oscarmeyerpodcast.podbus.com/Hoover.mp3

In 1908 William Henry Hoover operated a harness and leather goods factory in New Berlin (now North Canton), Ohio. The infant auto business was seriously threatening the future of Hoover's horse collars and he was looking to expand his company. On a hot summer day Hoover met with James Murray Spangler on his front porch to discuss a cleaning contraption Spangler had sold his cousin, Hoover’s wife.

Vacuum cleaners were a boon to sanitation and health in the early 1900s but they were cumbersome and required two people to operate. Spangler was an aging, sometime inventor working as a janitor to clear debts. He developed a portable cleaning device to minimize dust that rose from the carpets he cleaned every night - dust that aggravated his asthma.

Spangler attached a creaking electric fan motor atop a soap box and sealed the cracks with adhesive tape. A pillow case billowing out the back served as a dust bag. Hoover and his wife were both impressed with the new machine but not many homes had electricity in 1908.

Hoover bought the patents anyway and started the Electric Suction Sweeper Company. He set aside a corner of his leather goods factory for the production of suction sweepers, turning out six cleaners a day. James Spangler, his debts now relieved, became Hoover's superintendent of production.

The first Hoover advertisement appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on December 5, 1908. The ad described the simple premise of the suction sweeper: "A rapidly revolving brush loosens the dust which is sucked back into the dirt bag." The ad went on to further state that "Repairs and adjustments are never necessary." Finally, readers were offered a free ten-day trial at home.

Hundreds of homemakers took Hoover up on his offer. He shipped the suction sweepers through local dealers who received a commission if the cleaner was purchased. If not, the dealer could keep the vacuum cleaner for in-store demonstrations. Thus began the national network of loyal Hoover dealers.

Hoover then organized an army of door-to-door demonstrators. The sales power of the skilled demonstration was Hoover's secret weapon. No one could deny that his portable vacuum cleaner, which embodied all the basic principles of today's vacuums, was effective and time-saving. Research and innovation followed. In 1926 Hoover patented an agitator bar which beat the carpet before brushing it. When he died in 1932 the horse and William Hoover’s leather fittings were long since departed from the American scene but Hoover vacuums were established as the American standard for cleaning.

Glidden

2007-02-09T12:38:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Francis Glidden

In 1875 a group of middle-aged men banded together to form a varnish-making business in Cleveland. Glidden, Brackett & Co. brought together the talents of Francis Harrington Glidden, Levi Brackett and Thomas Bolles. That the Glidden name survived is a testament to his outlasting his partners, becoming The Glidden Varnish Company in 1894.

In the early days the partners produced 1,000 gallons of varnish each week and delivered it to customers across Cleveland in a horse and wagon. For the first twenty years of the business only industrial varnishes were manufactured, coating furniture, pianos and carriages. In 1895, with his partners retired, Glidden took off after the growing, new consumer market for varnishes and paints. The company introduced Jap-A-Lac in 16 colors for use in the home.

Glidden was one of the first manufacturers of the consumer age to realize the influence of women, traditionally the commanders of the home, in the purchasing process. He advertised in Ladies’ Home Journal and Housekeeping Magazine, with depictions of women finishing chairs and tables and window casings. Glidden’s aggressive advertising propelled his varnish beyond Cleveland into New York and Chicago and even Canada.

Francis Glidden had built a $2 million business when he sold the company in 1917 at the age of 85. The new owners pushed Jap-A-Lac into the best-known varnish in the company and when the Glidden Company introduced the first water-based paint in 1949 the prominence of the Glidden name was assured.

Fuller

2007-02-09T12:36:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Alfred Fuller

The man whose name meant successful selling in the 20th century was self-described as “devoid of a salesman’s personality.” He never had a practiced line of sales patter and, hailing from Nova Scotia, his speech was peppered with “oots” and “aboots” rather than “outs” and “abouts.”

Alfred Carl Fuller came to selling brushes because no one else would hire him. After leaving the family farm in 1903 for Boston the 18-year old Fuller struggled to find his place in the world. He moved in with his sister and her husband and was a most undesirable boarder: he brought with him $75, no discernible skills and no prospects.

Fuller landed a job as a trolley conductor but after 18 months, eager to prove he could be a motorman he commandeered a trolley, failed to negotiate a switch and was fired. He tried life as a gardener and groom but was dismissed in short time. A stint as a deliveryman for his brother-in-law ended after two months. Fuller had demonstrated a knack for forgetting pick-ups and leaving packages at the wrong address.

He came to brushes because it seemed so simple. A brother had peddled household brushes before he contracted tuberculosis and died. Six days before his 20th birthday Fuller went to his brother’s former partner to ask for a chance to sell brushes. He sold $6 worth on his first day and was off.

Although brushes were constantly used nobody seemed to be paying much attention to their manufacture. Fuller’s customers made suggestions for new brushes but neither his employer or other suppliers would deviate from their traditional line of top-sellers. Fuller soon realized that these specialized brushes could “be made in fifteen minutes out of a few cents worth of materials and sold for fifty cents.”

In 1906, after only a year in the brush trade, Fuller used $375 in saved capital and pieced together a small workshop in his sister’s basement. He planned to sell from samples for future delivery, making only what he had already sold on his tiny hand-operated wire-twisting brush machine.

The formula, simplicity itself, was parlayed to success by Fuller’s indefatigable ways. To Fuller selling was merely a mathematical proposition. Ring enough doorbells and you will eventually have more orders than you can handle. Fuller possessed an honest, unsophisticated approach, a neat appearance and an unassuming attitude. But he learned early on that a quality product - and its demonstration - sold itself. His first week out he cleared $42.15 in profits.

Soon Fuller was in Hartford, Connecticut with its long avenues of big, old Victorian residences filled with dust-catching grillwork, steam radiators and elaborate woodwork. His Capitol Brush Company, soon to be renamed Fuller Brush, now featured one laborer and one salesman - and a backlog of orders.

In 1908 Fuller brought home a wife, a Nova Scotia girl he had courted over the glove counter at a Boston department store. There was no time for a honeymoon and the couple briskly expanded the business. A chance newspaper ad in 1910 for agents brought a flood of orders and soon Fuller had a national network of 260 dealers, most of whom he had never met.

Each dealer paid for his sample kit and advanced the money for his first order. When he delivered the order, he collected the amount due and sent the proceeds to Hartford less his commission of 50%. Fuller delivered nothing until he had received cash. Within ten years sales vaulted from $30,000 a year to over a million.

In 1922 the Saturday Evening Post coined the phrase “Fuller Brush Man,” and launched the army of Fuller representatives into the popular lexicon. A veritable gold mine of free publicity in editorials, cartoons and jokes followed. In 1948 Columbia Pictures released a paean to Fuller Brush with the release of The Fuller Brush Man starring Red Skeleton. Skeleton prepared for the part by taking a sample kit and making some calls. Unrecognized, the Hollywood star rang up four sales to the ten housewives he called on.

The star of Fuller Brush was always the free sample. “Without the free sample I couldn’t possibly make a living. It’s the best merchandising device ever uncovered,” said one Fuller Brush dealer. Fuller Brush men were revered for their professional ability to gain access to a home. One salesman persuaded the household staff of the presidential residence at Hyde Park to admit him inside. Franklin Roosevelt bought $13 worth of brushes.

Fuller became affectionately known as “Dad” throughout his company but his own family life was not as successful. He was divorced in 1930. Remarried two years later Fuller began to indulge in the arts and music and wound down his business activities. He retired in 1943, turning the door-to-door business over to his son Howard.

Under Howard’s aggressive leadership the company flourished in expanding suburbia, topping $100,000,000 in sales by 1960. But times were changing. When Alfred Fuller died in 1973, one month short of his 89th birthday, strangers were no longer welcome in the home, two-income houses were deserted during the day and the Fuller Brush Man, now 75% women, were Fuller Brush representatives.

Culligan

2007-02-09T12:33:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Emmett Culligan

For much of this century the water that flowed through America’s taps was hard - containing calcium and magnesium which formed an insoluble residue that clung to soap and created unsightly spots on clothes and dishes.

Many inventors were experimenting with ways of softening water by removing the minerals. Emmett Culligan wasn’t one of them. In his hometown of Porter, Minnesota Culligan had been tabbed “Gold Dust” for his knack at converting unwanted prairie land into profitable real estate. Before he turned 30, Culligan’s landholdings totaled over $250,000.

A severe downturn in farm prices in 1921 sent Culligan reeling into bankruptcy. He moved his family back to St. Paul. A friend showed him a “conditioning machine” using zeolite, a natural sand, that filtered calcium and magnesium from tap water.

Intrigued with the principal Culligan borrowed a bag of zeolite and began his own tests. By 1924 he was back in business with the Twin City Water Softener Company in St. Paul. His filtering machines sold for the steep price of $200 but sales were brisk. However the Depression forced Culligan out of business once again.

He accepted a position with National Aluminate Corporation in La Grange, Illinois. During this period he conceived the idea of marketing soft water on a service basis through franchised dealers. He immediately started looking for a location for his new business, and found the deserted streets of a vacant subdivision in Northbrook, Illinois. Zeolite required solar drying and the miles of empty streets accommodated this need perfectly.

In 1936 Culligan used the sole $50 in his pocket to establish credit and gradually rebuild his business. He began by buying some discarded hot water tanks from a junkyard, and cut and welded them to form new softeners. Shortly afterward, the first franchise dealership was established and others quickly followed. By the start of World War II, the company had 150 franchised dealers.

The desire for soft water was enough to keep the company growing but with the advent of a clever advertising campaign, people around the world came to know the Culligan name. “Hey Culligan Man” became synonymous with high quality water and water treatment products.

In 1961 the company’s first European distributor was named and the company celebrated its 25th anniversary. For one day all the signs leading into Northbrook read “Culliganville.”

Colt

2007-02-09T12:31:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Samuel Colt

It was not unusual for boys in frontier America in the 19th century to be entranced with firearms; Samuel Colt happened to be more precocious than most. Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1814 Colt was discovered at the age of seven dismantling and assembling a gun. At 15 he was excused from Amherst Academy in Massachusetts when a Fourth of July demonstration of an underwater mine he built went awry and inundated invited guests with muck rather than destroying a raft.

Colt returned to Ware, Massachusetts to toil in his father’s silk mill but he soon talked his way onto a merchant ship, working as a hand, bound for India. By the time he returned home a year later the 16-year old Colt had fashioned a white-pine model of a multi-barreled, repeating pistol. He handed his wooden gun to a Hartford gunsmith named Anson Chase whom he hired to create a handgun capable of firing several bullets in succession - the dream of gunmakers for over 200 years.

Colt raised money for his venture by travelling the country side giving demonstrations of nitrous oxide, calling himself “the celebrated Dr. S. Coult of London and Calcutta.” The most famous six-shooter in history was financed by laughing gas. Chase was hired to build one pistol and one rifle. The first pistol exploded; the second wouldn’t fire at all. Colt fine-tuned his design and by 1836 had secured French, English and American patents. He was 22.

Colt and several investors went into business in Paterson, New Jersey as the Patent Arms Manufacturing Co. making rifles, carbines, shotguns and muskets.
As chief salesman Colt won a demonstration for a repeating musket for the U.S. Army but won no converts. Undaunted he left for Florida, the site of the only ongoing United States military action in 1837 as army troops battled the Seminole Indians. The men in the field proved more receptive to Colt’s rifles than the brass back in Washington. Although he sold several hundred weapons over the next few years Colt was never able to land a contract with the United States Army and the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company went bankrupt in 1842.

Colt drifted back into underwater mines. In 1843 he laid the first submarine cable connecting Coney Island and Manhattan. The following year the entire Congress adjourned to watch Colt blow up a 500-ton ship. But his missionary work in Florida for his repeating firearms was about to pay dividends. When General Zachary Taylor headed west to lead the United States Army against Mexico in 1846 he ordered 1,000 repeating pistols from Colt. He had become converted while serving in the Seminole wars in Florida.

Colt, no longer owning a factory, was forced to subcontract the work out.
In fact, he had no inventory left from his earlier venture and owned no models of his revolver. He redesigned a new pistol from memory, adding a sixth barrel on the suggestion of American war hero Captain Samuel Walker, a friend and believer in Colt’s revolver. The new .44 calibre revolvers were known as Walker Colts but the captain lanced in the Battle of Juamantla shortly after the start of the war and his name disappeared from the gun.

Colt supervised the manufacture of each of his pistols and eventually moved into his own sprawling factory on the banks of the Connecticut River in Hartford. The brick armory was designed in the shape of an “H” and was topped by a stunning blue dome, encrusted with gold stars. By 1851 he had supplied the United States Army with 6,000 revolvers. That year he also won a patent lawsuit that ensured no other company could make repeating firearms based on his designs. When Colt traveled to London to display his revolvers at the great Crystal Palace Exhibition he opened an armory in London, the first American manufacturer to do so.

In 1855 Colt’s Patent Arms Manufacturing Company was incorporated with 10,000 shares of stock with a par value of $100 each. Colt owned 9,996 of the shares. He lived highly, at one time buying $5000 worth of Havana cigars to bring back with him from Cuba. He built the monarchial Armstear, one of the most spectacular private estates in America but his maniacal work pace left him little time to enjoy it.

Colt was typically up at five, checking on the farm and his brick works.
After breakfast he was in the armory overseeing every aspect of his 1500-man operation. When the Civil War began Colt was running the largest private armory in the world. Colt’s Patent Arms Manufacturing Co. would turn out nearly 400,000 revolvers for the Union Army from 1861 to 1865 but Samuel Colt did not live to see the impact of his invention on America. He died suddenly of a massive stroke in January of 1862. He was only 48, and with a personal estate valued at $15,000,000 he was one of the wealthiest men ever to live in the United States to that time.

Carrier

2007-02-09T12:29:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Willis Carrier

Willis H. Carrier grew up on a farm in Angola, New York, a boy of mechanical bent. He graduated from Angola Academy in 1894 but lacked the money and entrance requirements to pursue an advanced education at nearby Cornell University. He continued studying however and in 1896 he won a scholarship contest that paid for Cornell tuition.

Carrier was still only halfway home to his dream. He now borrowed money for a tutoring school to prepare for competition exams to win a university scholarship for board, room, and books. Carrier won the necessary extra money but his years studying electrical engineering in Ithaca were fraught with money worries.

After graduation in 1901 Carrier began work with Buffalo Forge, earning $10 a week working with fans, heaters, and temperature control. He studied water content in the air and devised a system for dehumidifying the air using an ammonia compressor. On a foggy day in Pittsburgh, where he waited on a railway platform on his way to a business appointment, Carrier conceived the methods of affecting air temperature by changing its moisture content. His idea of "dewpoint control" became the basis for the air conditioning industry.

In 1904 Carrier was ready to patent his process. His "Apparatus For Treating Air", a method of dehumidifying air by adding water, was such an advanced concept that his first few sales were not for temperature reduction but for cleaning air in ventilating systems. Meanwhile Carrier was promoted to the head of engineering and research at Buffalo Forge at the age of 29.

Carrier Air Conditioning Company of America, owned by Buffalo Forge, was established in 1907 with J. Irvine Lyle as sales manager. Lyle introduced cooling systems into industry after industry. By 1914 Carrier had installed over 300 air conditioning systems in factories across the country. But with the advent of World War I Buffalo Forge decided to confine its operations to traditional manufacturing activities. Carrier Air Conditioning was shut down.

On June 26, 1915 Carrier and Lyle and five other young engineers formed the Carrier Engineering Company. Despite limited capital the new firm closed more than 40 contracts in the last six months of the year. Willis Carrier was kept busy in the field selling, advising, and supervising. He had time to file only two patents in 1915, his smallest output in years.

To grow Carrier needed to find a simple refrigerating system to run warm water through a pipe and turn it cold. By 1923 he introduced centrifugal refrigerating machines to do just that. Comfort air conditioning was at hand. Carrier's first installation of the new process was in Hudson's Department store in Detroit but his big breakthrough in comfort advertising came in movie theaters. Successful air conditioning systems were installed in Texas and spread to Broadway. No longer did entertainment emporiums had to shut down on excessively hot days.

Carrier continued to improve the efficiency of his air conditioning systems.
In 1928 he introduced the residential "Weathermaker" and sold his first individual units to small retailers. In 1930, after many aborted tries, Carrier began air conditioning railroad cars. In 1932 Carrier introduced The Atmospheric Cabinet, the world's first room air conditioner and finally in 1939 Willis Carrier cooled the last remaining hot spot in America - the skyscraper.

America's massive military output in World War II was made possible in part by Carrier Air Conditioning. Irvine Lyle died in 1942 at the age of 68 while Willis Carrier devoted himself to what he later referred to as his greatest engineering achievement - a wind tunnel simulating freezing high altitude conditions to test prototype planes.

After the war Carrier suffered a heart ailment that left him bedridden.
He remained as Chairman Emeritus and a constant consultant to Carrier
engineers until his death in 1950 at the age of 74.

Braun

2007-02-09T12:27:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Max Braun

In his apartment in Frankfurt, Germany in 1921 Max Braun began turning out small electronic components which bore his name. But while all of Braun’s creations disappeared anonymously into the assemblies of bigger machines he had a dream for a consumer product - an electric foil shaver.

Braun carried a prototype shaver with him constantly, making subtle alterations for years until he had a product which met even his demanding standards. Braun put his revolutionary electric foil shaver, the world’s first, on the market in 1949. It ushered in the popularity of electric shaving around the world.

Max Braun died unexpectedly in 1951, leaving the business to his sons, Arthur and Erwin. To the founder “form always followed function” and in 1955 when Dieter Rams came on board as chief designer he elevated the credo to an art form. Today more than 40 Eurostyle Braun appliances are maintained in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Black and Decker

2007-02-09T12:25:00.000-08:00

And the men behind the brands are...
S. Duncan Black and Alonzo Decker

The names Black and Decker are instantly recognized by any homeowner who ever built his own workshop. But consider the products that S. Duncan Black and Alonzo G. Decker set out to make when they pooled $1200 in 1910: a milk bottle cap machine, a vest-pocket adding machine, machinery for the United States Mint,
and a cotton picker.

The two partners opened a small machine shop in Baltimore in 1910 to make these specialty machines. The next year their first ads for the Black & Decker Manufacturing Company began appearing in Manufacturers Record & Horseless Age. But the course of their company was soon to change forever.

After much tinkering Black and Decker patented a pistol-grip drill with a trigger switch and universal motor and in 1916 introduced the first portable 1/2" electric drill. In 1918 the company opened product service centers in Boston and New York and added sales representatives in Russia, Japan, Europe and Australia. Sales passed one million dollars.

Black & Decker expanded their line to add other power tools with the unique pistol grip. An electric screwdriver was introduced in 1922 and an electric hammer in 1936. Black & Decker was an innovator in consumer education to teach the public about their new power tools.

They purchased two Pierce Arrow buses to use as classrooms on wheels.
In 1929 a specially outfitted 6-passenger Travel Air monoplane was used as a flying showroom. And in 1932 one of the first industrial movies, a 60-minute sound production, was used to sell Black & Decker tools.

Black served as president of the firm until 1951 and Decker succeeded him for the next five years. The two men had taught the world about power tools, selling more portable machine tools than anyone else. But why stop there? In 1971 a Black & Decker Lunar Surface Drill removed core samples from the moon on Apollo 15.

Bissell

2007-02-09T12:23:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Melville Bissell

Is it more improbable that the Bissell name is known at all or that it is still known today? There were carpet sweepers patented 200 years before Melville Bissell brought his first mechanical sweeper on the market in 1876 and his sweeper itself should have been swept away with the popularization of the vacuum cleaner fifty years later. But people are still “Bisselling,” just as they did a century ago.

Melville and Anna Bissell sold crockery in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The fragile glass and china arrived in their shop packed tightly in sawdust stuffed in crates. Invariably the dust would spill on the floors and rugs, irritating the Bissells’ allergies. Among the many carpet sweepers available at the time Melville Bissell selected the “Welcome” to pull the allergy-inflaming dust from his rugs.

A lifelong tinkerer, Bissell found his new carpet sweeper lacking and set out to make a few improvements on his own. His model used floor wheels and angled bristles to fling debris up into a removable compartment. He was quite satisfied with his new invention and when several patrons inquired about the device, the now clear-eyed Bissell converted the second floor of the crockery store into a carpet sweeper assembly area.

The timing was right in America. New scientific research into the dangers of germs and filth spurred a new devotion to housecleaning. Still, the spread of the Bissell name from a small crockery store in Grand Rapids to every household in America was not achieved without dedicated missionary work, mostly performed by Anna Bissell. While her husband supervised the shop as its capacity grew to 30 machines a day Anna Bissell visited shopkeepers, many over and over, until she was able to win in-store demonstrations and displays for the Bissell sweeper across Michigan.

Early product information stressed the mechanical marvels of the Bissell sweeper, touting product innovations to homemakers who just wanted clean rugs. When a young company bookkeeper persuaded the Bissells to emphasize the cases constructed of “golden maple, opulent walnut and rich mahogany” sales soared. When Bissell introduced a limited edition sweeper crafted from rare vermilion wood from the jungles of India the advertising emphasized how the wood was dragged by elephants to the banks of the Ganges River. Bissell sold more sweepers in six weeks than it had the previous year.

In 1883 the Bissells moved into a new five-story brick factory which was gutted by fire almost immediately. Melville Bissell mortgaged his entire personal fortune, including a team of prized harness horses, to rebuild and meet orders. The rushed production resulted in defective sweepers which Bissell recalled at an astronomical loss of $35,000. But the revolution in American housecleaning was in full force, women were happily “Bisselling,” as carpet sweeping came to be known, and the firm withstood these reversals.

In 1889 Melville Bissell contracted pneumonia and died at the age of 45.
Anna Bissell assumed the presidency, becoming one of America’s first female corporate executives. She had been deeply involved with the company from the start and now she aggressively set out to make Bissell an international phenomenon, not just an American institution. As the Bissell carpet sweeper colonized the world it even received a product endorsement from Queen Victoria and the Bissell rolled across the rugs in Buckingham Palace.

Anna Bissell guided the company into the 1920s, leading the fight against the insurgency of the new electric vacuum cleaners. No longer was the mechanical sweeper the only convenience in the closet. But the Bissell has survived, dodging obsolescence as a quick-cleaning adjunct to its more powerful neighbor for use on small messes.

Armstrong

2007-02-09T12:21:00.000-08:00

And the man behind the brand is...
Thomas Armstrong

By 1860 24-year old Thomas Armstrong had saved up $300 from his job as a clerk in a Pittsburgh glass factory. He was due to be wed that year and it seemed a fine stake upon which to start a married life. But instead Armstrong took the money and invested in a one-room shop run by John D. Glass who cut out cork bottle stoppers. He did, however, hold on to his day job, stopping by the cork shop in the evenings to cut cork by hand.

Each piece of cork sold by John D. Glass & Co. had to be cut and shaped by hand. It was tedious and slow and impossible to deliver cork of uniform quality to customers. In 1862, again with the support of his wife, Armstrong invested $1000 in an unproven machine that cut cork. He quit his clerk’s job and jumped into the cork business full-time.

Armstrong now needed to expand his market greatly to recoup such a large investment. Cork was the only way to plug the bottle of the day, more and more of which were containing the new pharmaceuticals and alcoholic beverages that were appearing everywhere on the market. But at the time cork was sold locally so buyers were able to inspect and choose the cork they wanted. It was a policy of “buyer beware.”

Armstrong knew that to ship his cork to distant markets he needed a way to insure its quality. In 1864 John Glass died and Armstrong brought his brother into the firm as partner. He pioneered brand-name recognition in the cork industry by stamping “Armstrong” on all his bags of cork. The name carried with it a money-back guarantee.

During the Civil War Armstrong made bottle stoppers for the Union Army.
He was singled out for praise for fulfilling contracts at the agreed price with top-grade corks. The favorable publicity and Armstrong’s groundwork for national distribution led to a large drug contract after which the company leapt forward.

In 1878 Armstrong stopped buying cork from importers and set up direct purchasing lines with cork suppliers in Spain and around the Mediterranean.
By 1890 Armstrong was the world’s largest cork manufacturer with 750 employees, all of whom Thomas Armstrong could address by name.

Into the 20th Century Armstrong’s only raw material was cork. But cork harvesting was a seasonal activity and the fluctuations in supply led to fluctuations in price and profit for Armstrong. More ominously there was a growing fervor in America to ban the sale of all alcohol - and the elimination of one of Armstrong’s biggest markets.

The product line in the early 1900s included insulation, cork board, gaskets and flexible coverings. But the year 1908 simultaneously saw a death and birth for the company. Thomas Armstrong died in Pittsburgh, ending the founder’s reign and the company’s ties to the city.

Meanwhile in Lancaster, Pennsylvania the Armstrong Cork Company produced its first linoleum flooring. Linoleum, made from cork flour, mineral fillers and linseed oil pressed onto a burlap backing at high temperatures, was not a new product. But Armstrong was the first to look past its utilitarian uses and add colors suitable for every room in a house. Future generations of Americans would never see an Armstrong cork.