20 Famous Brands That Started Out Selling Something Totally Different

Marcus Samuel Sr. was a merchant who sold exotic seashells from the Far East, imported for use as decorations on Victorian trinket boxes, from a small shop in the East End of London in the 1830s. When he died in 1870, his sons Marcus Jr. and Sam went into the business of shipping cargoes between Britain and the Far East, and in 1892 built the Murex, the world’s first purpose-built oil tanker. They continued to name their ships after shells and, in 1897, founded Shell Transport and Trading, which still uses the shell logo today.

In 1865, Fredrik Idestam, a Finnish mining engineer, started a wood-pulp paper mill in the Finnish city of Tampere to address the rising demand for newsprint. Idestam established Nokia Ab in 1871 near a second paper mill. The site later attracted a rubber boot factory and a telegraph cable manufacturer, which together with Idestam’s mills formed Nokia Corporation in 1967. Eventually, Nokia spun off the paper, rubber, and cable businesses, devoting itself exclusively to mobile phones.

In 1889, after Japan lifted its ban on card gambling, Fusajiro Yamauchi, a craft artisan in Kyoto, Japan, set up shop under the name Nintendo to make hanafuda, handcrafted playing cards cut out of mulberry bark. Yamauchi’s cards became a hit with families and gamblers in gambling parlors run by the Yakuza, a Japanese organized-crime syndicate. Nintendo stuck to cards and tabletop games for more than 80 years. It licensed Disney characters in 1959, got into plastic toys and arcade machines, and finally entered home video game consoles in the 1980s.

In the early 1880s, David H. McConnell sold books door-to-door in New York, and with help from a local pharmacist, he began handing out free vials of rose-scented perfume to encourage women to let him into the house and pitch his books. But instead of buying the books, customers asked for more perfume. In 1886, McConnell abandoned selling books entirely and launched the California Perfume Company, which was renamed Avon Products in 1939, after Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace.

In 1891, William Wrigley Jr. came to Chicago with $32 to sell scouring soap made by his father. He offered free baking powder as a bonus to induce merchants to carry his product. When they asked for more baking powder than soap, he switched to selling only baking powder and included two packs of chewing gum in every can. The gum started beating out the baking powder too, so in 1893 Wrigley pivoted again by teaming up with outside makers before launching his own Juicy Fruit and Spearmint.

In 1837, Charles Lewis Tiffany and partner John B. Young opened a tiny shop in Manhattan to sell fine stationery, writing utensils, and imported Asian trinkets. The pair sold only $4.98 worth of merchandise on the first day. In the 1840s, the shop shifted toward silverware and European gems, and Tiffany bought diamonds at a discount from wealthy Europeans who had fled their native countries during political upheaval. In 1853, Tiffany took over and changed the name to Tiffany & Co. after his partner left.

William Colgate, an English immigrant, opened a soap and candle factory in New York City in 1806, making laundry soap, bath soap, and tallow candles from animal fat for decades before his sons carried on the business after his death. It wasn’t until the 1870s, decades after the company started, that Colgate introduced its first toothpaste, sold in glass jars. A couple of decades later came the collapsible metal tube, and toothpaste became the company’s signature product.

In 1911, financier Charles R. Flint combined four independent producers of business equipment into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. CTR’s output included motorized meat-slicers, butcher-shop scales, employee time clocks, and early punch-card tabulating machines. In 1914, Thomas J. Watson Sr. became its general manager and refocused CTR’s product line around data-processing contracts from businesses and government agencies. In 1924, Watson changed the company name to International Business Machines and eventually sold off the meat-slicer and scale businesses.

Ferruccio Lamborghini was an Italian Air Force mechanic who set up Lamborghini Trattori, a company that built farm tractors from leftover military trucks and tanks, in 1948 after World War II left Italy in desperate need of such vehicles. His company quickly became one of Italy’s largest tractor producers. Lamborghini, who had become a wealthy industrialist, purchased a number of Ferraris but was unhappy with their clutches, and after Enzo Ferrari, the carmaker’s founder, ignored his comments on the matter, Lamborghini established his own automobile company in 1963.

BMW was created in 1922 from two firms in Munich, which had built aircraft engines for Germany’s warplanes during World War I. After the Treaty of Versailles prohibited German businesses from manufacturing military aircraft engines, the two firms started making industrial air brakes, agricultural equipment, and light marine engines. In 1923, designer Max Friz produced the company’s inaugural motorbike, the R32, and BMW wouldn’t build its first automobile until 1929, having acquired a car plant a year earlier.

In 1938, Lee Byung-chul opened Samsung Sanghoe, a tiny trading shop, in Daegu, Korea. The company exported vegetables, homemade noodles, and dried fish to Beijing and Manchuria, and for many years it remained a humble trading concern. After the Korean War, Lee put his profits into sugar refining and wool textiles. Samsung Electronics wasn’t created until 1969, more than 30 years after the company had started, and its initial product was a black-and-white television set.

In 1689, Sweden’s King Karl XI commanded the construction of a royal weapons factory near the Huskvarna River in Huskvarna. The factory used water from the river’s waterfall to power machines that drilled the musket barrels for the Swedish Army. In 1757, the factory was sold into private ownership, becoming Husqvarna. When military contracts dwindled in the late 1800s, the company began turning out civilian products using its metalworking capabilities, including sewing machines, cast-iron stoves, motorcycles, lawnmowers, and eventually chainsaws in 1959. The company’s current logo features the front sight of a musket barrel.

Sakichi Toyoda, an inventor, founded Toyoda Automatic Loom Works in Japan in 1926. The company built a loom that would stop automatically when the thread broke. Sakichi sold the rights to the loom outside of Japan to British firm Platt Brothers for £100,000, then gave that money directly to his son, Kiichiro Toyoda, for car research. A few years later, an auto department was established, and Toyota Motor Company (the car business adopted the slightly altered spelling) became its own business before the decade was over.

In 1909, Michio Suzuki, an inventor, opened up Suzuki Loom Works in Japan to build looms for Japan’s silk and cotton weaving industry. The company remained solely in the textile machinery business for over 40 years until 1951, when the international cotton market crashed, severely cutting demand for looms. Suzuki responded the next year with a small engine that could be attached to a bicycle. Its success caused the company to branch out into motorcycles and eventually automobiles, and it was renamed Suzuki Motor Co. in 1954.

In 1930, geophysicists J. Clarence Karcher and Eugene McDermott formed Geophysical Service Inc. in Dallas to help oil companies map underground rock formations with dynamite blasts and sound receivers, a method called reflection seismology. In World War II, the firm converted its technology to make anti-submarine detection and radar for the Navy. In 1951, it was reorganized as Texas Instruments, which manufactured the first commercial silicon transistor in 1954. A few years later, one of its engineers co-invented the integrated circuit.

Masaru Ibuka began a research institute out of a bombed-out Tokyo department store, and Akio Morita came along shortly after. Together they built what would eventually become Sony. With electricity readily available during the evening in postwar Japan, Ibuka constructed a very primitive electric rice cooker consisting of aluminum electrodes sitting in a wooden bucket. There was no thermostat, so it either kept burning the rice or barely cooked it, and it never reached the market. Instead, they made their money repairing radios until their tape recorders and transistor radios caught on.

Cleo and Joseph McVicker ran a Cincinnati soap and chemical company called Kutol Products that made a non-toxic dough used to scrub coal soot off of wallpaper. After World War II, when most homes converted to gas or electric heat, the soot-cleaner business failed. Kay Zufall, a nursery school teacher and Joseph’s sister-in-law, experimented with the leftover dough in her class and convinced Joseph to remove the detergent, add color and scent, and sell it as Play-Doh.

In 1902, five Minnesota businessmen created the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, with the intention of extracting corundum from the ground. Corundum is a very hard mineral used in the production of grinding wheels. The men drilled their first shaft only to find that the deposit was not corundum but a soft and worthless rock. They ceased mining operations within three years and relocated to Duluth, where they began producing sandpaper. From sandpaper came waterproof sandpaper, followed by masking tape, Scotch tape, and eventually Post-it Notes.

In 1810, brothers Jean-Pierre and Jean-Frédéric Peugeot converted their family’s grain mill in eastern France into a steel foundry. By 1874, the high-grade steel was going into saw blades, umbrella frames, coffee grinders, and tabletop pepper mills. Descendant Armand Peugeot moved the company into bicycles in 1882, and in 1889 he built its first motor vehicle, a steam-powered three-wheeler. Peugeot never dropped the kitchenware, and still sells pepper mills today right along with its cars.

In 1852, brothers Henry and Clement Studebaker opened a blacksmith and wagon shop in South Bend, Indiana, as settlers pushing westward created a huge demand for wooden transport wagons. The company supplied the Union Army in the Civil War and soon became the world’s largest manufacturer of horse-drawn vehicles, turning out more than 100,000 wagons a year. Studebaker entered the automobile business 50 years after its founding with electric cars, built with the aid of Thomas Edison, and finally quit wagon production in 1920.

This content was created with the help of AI.