There are brands that you use, wear, enjoy and are a part of your daily living making your life convenient. Have you ever wondered about the founders behind the world’s most famous and successful companies? Why these brands were founded, started, established and are living for years serving its consumers. Some founders are famous and are easily seen on magazine covers. But there are a few who are less talked about.
The first Starbucks opened in Seattle, Washington, in 1971 by three partners who met while they were students at University of San Francisco. English teacher Jerry Baldwin, History teacher Zev Siegi and writer Gordon Bowker took to selling high quality coffee after entrepreneur Alfred Peet taught them his style of roasting coffee beans. Their company took the name of the chief mate in the book Moby-Dick: Starbuck as the founders considered words beginning with ‘st’ powerful.
In 1987, the original owners sold Starbucks chain of six stores to former manager Howard Schultz who quickly began to expand Starbucks. By 1989, 46 stores existed and at the time of its IPO in 1992 on the stock market 140 outlets were operating with a revenue of US $73.5 million up from US $1.3 million 1987. As of now Starbucks is present in 75 countries and territories of 6 continents.
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Michele Ferrero’s parents transformed a pastry shop into a factory and were the first Italian manufacturer of confectionery in 40’s. Because of World War II chocolate was rationed so they mixed hazelnuts to produce more products. Nutella became the world’s leading chocolate-nut spread brand. The company now produces 365,000 tons of Nutella every year an amount that weighs as much as Empire State Building. In 1957, Michele inherited the family business which grew rapidly under him. After battling with months of illness he died at the age of 89 years. According to Forbes, he was the richest candy man on the planet with a wealth at $23.4 billion.
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The first Hard Rock Café opened in 1971 at Piccadilly, London founded by two Americans Isaac Tigrett and Peter Morton. Initially it had electric décor but in 1979 the café began covering its walls with rock and roll memorabilia. The restaurant combined rock music, memorabilia related to rock ‘n’ roll and American cuisine. This Café-music-museum concept became popular and opened in different parts of the world as the first theme restaurant chain in the world. It was in 1973 when Sir Paul and the band made an impromptu appearance at The Hard Rock Café, the first of what’s now 15,000 live performances that the café hosts every year. With over 175 venues in 53 countries around the world Hard Rock has become a global phenomenon.
Tigrett belonged to a well-to-do business family. He was expelled from his boarding school in Tennessee later completed his graduation from another school. Morton was the son of Morton’s Steakhouse president Arnie Morton.
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Listed as the 28th richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of US$30 billion by Forbes, philanthropist, Phil Knight ran tracks under coach Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon, with whom he co-founded Nike. The Bill Bowerman was looking for ways to enhance his student’s performance and tried improving their shoes in his free time. He tried various combinations but they were not successful. Phil Knight then studying in Stanford University imported shoes from Japan and tried selling them to his coach Bowerman. But as Bowerman was interested to join him they founded the company Blue Ribbon Sports in 1964 later renamed as Nike, the Greek Goddess of victory, in 1971.
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Travis Kalanick, an American businessman, was unable to find a taxi while in Paris to get to a conference. Realizing that this could be an issue faced by countless travelers around the world, he along with Garrett Camp, a Canadian businessman who invented the idea, launched Uber Cabs in 2009. Uber is a ridesharing, food delivery and transportation network company headquartered in California operating in 633 cities worldwide. Uber comes from a German word meaning “above”.
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Ole Kirk Christiansen was a simple Danish village carpenter who turned his love of whittling and playing with wood into business in 1916 where he produced ladders, iron boards, stools etc. Tragedy hit him and he took a hard decision to use wood to create inexpensive goods that might sell, among them were cheap toys. His love for toys pushed the company ahead even when he limped. He renamed it to reflect its new direction leg godt or ‘play well’ as LEGO in 1934. The Lego began making its famous plastic interlocking blocks in 1949.
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Larry page was considering Stanford for Graduation school and Sergey Brin was assigned to show him around. Very soon they stuck a partnership and built a search engine from their dark rooms that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on World Wide Web. They named it Backrub which was renamed Google and it caught attention of not only the academic community but Silicon Valley investors. In 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim offered Larry and Sergey $100,000 and Google inc. was born.
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Kevin Systrom’s mother was early to technology and Systrom was influenced by his mother. His love for photography plus technology led to creation of a photo sharing app named Burbn. But this app was complicated and not successful. He paid attention to how people were using it and along with another programmer Mike Krieger redesigned it. In the year 2010 released a simple photo sharing app renamed as Instagram. He had never thought that he would be selling a company to Facebook for $1 billion.
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In 1945 brother-in-laws Burton Baskin and Irvine Robbins opened their ice cream parlors namely Burton’s and Snowbird in California. Irv spent most of his time innovating unusual ice cream flavors and created 31 flavors in three years that gained international fame. In 1948, the five snowbird and three Burton’s shops combined into single enterprise which was renamed as Baskin-Robbins, deciding the order of their names with a coin toss in 1953. At a factory in Burbank they made hundreds of new ice creams a year but only 8 to 9 would make it to the market. Baskin Robbins claims to have created more than 1000 flavors of ice creams. When it became difficult for both to manage number of shops they started selling them to managers which gave birth to their franchise business model. Today it has more than 5,800 franchises worldwide.
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Lacoste is a French clothing brand not founded by some fashion designer but by tennis player Rene Lacoste and Andre Gillier, the owner of the largest knitwear manufacturing firm in 1933. In 1920’s people played tennis in long sleeved shirts but Rene Lacoste sewed a short sleeved shirt for himself. He was known as ‘alligator’ because he always destroyed his competitors if they made a mistake. This is how they began to produce tennis shirts Lacoste, designed with a crocodile logo embroidered on the chest. It was the first example of a brand name appearing on the outside of clothing. Its popularity increased due to contracts between Lacoste and young tennis players to wear it.
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Pandora gained global attention with its popular charm bracelet line. The charm bracelet allows women to create a unique accessory from hundreds of charms to choose from to express themselves and honor special moments in their lives. Pandora was founded by Danish goldsmith Per Enevoldsen and his wife Winnie, when they opened a small jewelry shop in 1982. Their shop featured many items imported from Thailand. In 1987 Pandora began designing its own pieces. Today Pandora jewelry is sold in more than 100 countries across six continents.
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Last year the founder of Zara, Spanish fashion tycoon, Amancio Ortega, knocked out Bill Gates briefly to become the richest person in the world. Ortega never graduated from high school. He worked as a boy for a tailor and set out on his own in his 20’s selling lingerie and bathrobes with his first wife Rosalia Mera in their first Zara in 1975. The company decided to follow the concept of instant fashion where new and trendy clothes appeared in stores every 2 weeks. Ortega worked 25 years without a vacation, visits the same coffee shop each day and eats his lunch at company’s cafeteria.
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