Intellect PlusBrands & companies
704 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 11 of 12.
Seiko's quartz watch cost as much as a car and shook SwitzerlandOn sale in 1969, Seiko's Astron was the first quartz wristwatch anyone could buy, and it was priced about the same as a mid-sized car. Quartz soon became cheap, and the shift it b…
SBS won Korean viewers by airing the evening news an hour earlyWhen SBS arrived in 1990 as South Korea's first new private broadcaster in a decade, it needed a way to stand out. One tactic was simply timing: its flagship bulletin went out at …
Sharp takes its name from a mechanical pencil invented in 1915The electronics giant behind Aquos televisions and one of the first camera phones is named after a pencil. In 1915 Tokuji Hayakawa, a Tokyo metalworker, invented the Ever-Ready Sh…
Lehman Brothers started as an Alabama dry-goods shop paid in cottonThe bank whose collapse in September 2008 became the largest bankruptcy in American history began 158 years earlier as a small store in Montgomery, Alabama, run by three Bavarian …
Leica turned movie film sideways and made cameras pocket-sizedLeica's key trick in the 1920s was simple: turn the frame. Cinema cameras exposed 35 mm film across the strip; Leica ran the image lengthwise, getting a bigger picture from the sa…
Lenovo renamed itself because too many companies were already called LegendFor its first two decades, the Chinese computer maker now called Lenovo went by Legend in English. When it tried to expand abroad, it found the name already taken by businesses al…- Labubu, the toothy toy monster built on surprise and scarcityLabubu is a scruffy little monster with big ears and nine sharp teeth, and in June 2025 a 1.2-metre mint-green version sold for $170,000 at an auction in Beijing. Most fans pay fa…
Lamborghini was founded by a tractor maker who refused to go racingFerruccio Lamborghini already made tractors, boilers and air conditioners when he set up a car company in 1963 to take on Ferrari. Unlike Enzo Ferrari, who saw road cars mainly as…
The first Land Rovers were green because of surplus aircraft paintEarly Land Rovers came only in shades of light green, and not for style. After the war, Rover used leftover military supplies of aircraft cockpit paint. The vehicle itself was ske…
Lay's crisps began in the boot of a salesman's carHerman Lay started selling snacks in Nashville in 1932 and drove across the American South peddling potato chips from the trunk of his car. Three decades later his company merged …
Kia began with bicycle parts and was once banned from building carsKia, whose name roughly means rising from East Asia, started in 1944 making steel tubing and bicycle parts. It built South Korea's first domestic bicycle, then motorcycles and tru…- A snubbed bicycle repair letter started the company behind Škoda carsIn 1894 a young Czech bookseller named Václav Klement sent his broken German bicycle back to its maker with a letter written in Czech. The reply told him to write in a language th…
Kodak built the first digital camera prototype, then went bankrupt anywayIn the mid-1970s Kodak developed the first self-contained digital camera prototype and invented integral colour image sensors. Yet the company that taught the world to take snapsh…
The tiny hypercar maker that nearly bought Saab from General MotorsIn 2008 Koenigsegg had 45 staff and built 18 cars. Saab employed 3,400 people and made more than 93,000. Yet in June 2009 General Motors chose the little Swedish hypercar maker as…
Konami started out renting and repairing jukeboxes in OsakaOne of Japan's best-known game companies began in 1969 fixing and renting out jukeboxes. Its name blends the surnames of its three founders. When jukeboxes went into decline, Kona…
JYP Entertainment: one singer's agency that became a K-pop giantIn 1997 the singer-songwriter J.Y. Park started a small agency called Tae-Hong Planning and signed a single act. Renamed after his own stage name in 2001, it grew into one of Sout…
KAMAZ built a giant truck plant and a city on the Kama RiverWhen Soviet planners chose a small town on the Kama River for a vast truck factory in 1969, about 27,000 people lived there. The complex eventually sprawled over 57 square kilomet…
Kellogg split in two, and the snack half became KellanovaIn October 2023 the Kellogg Company broke itself apart. North American breakfast cereal went to a new firm, while the rest, from Pringles to Pop-Tarts, took an invented name: Kell…
Kering began as a Breton timber yard before owning GucciThe group behind Gucci, Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent started in 1962 as a timber business in Brittany, launched by François Pinault with a 100,000-franc bank loan. Over four …- SsangYong survived repeated bankruptcies, then changed its nameFew carmakers have changed hands as often as South Korea's SsangYong. Its owners included a chaebol, Daewoo, China's SAIC and India's Mahindra, and it went into receivership twice…
Jägermeister: a hunter's herbal digestif turned global party shotCurt Mast, a keen hunter from Wolfenbüttel, devised a herbal liqueur in 1934 using 56 herbs, fruits, roots and spices. The recipe has never changed. What did change was its image:…
John Deere's polished steel plough cut open the American prairieMidwestern soil was so rich and sticky that it clung to iron and wooden ploughs, forcing farmers to stop constantly to scrape them clean. A bankrupt Vermont blacksmith named John …
Johnson & Johnson grew out of a lecture on germs by Joseph ListerAt the 1876 Centennial Exposition, a young businessman named Robert Wood Johnson heard Joseph Lister explain how germs infect wounds. A decade later he and two brothers began maki…
JVC gave the world VHS and won the home video format warIn 1976 JVC unveiled the first VHS video recorder in Tokyo, priced at the equivalent of US$1,060. Sony's Betamax had arrived a year earlier with smaller cassettes and slightly sha…- Bridgestone is its founder's surname, Stone Bridge, flipped into EnglishShōjirō Ishibashi's family name means stone bridge in Japanese. When he launched a tyre company in 1931, he translated it and swapped the order to get Bridgestone. The business gr…
British Airways traces its roots to the world's first daily international flightsOn 25 August 1919, a small British company began flying passengers between London and Paris every day, the first regular international air service anywhere. That airline was one o…
Volkswagen revived Bugatti in Alsace and then handed it to a Croatian electric-car founderEttore Bugatti started building racing and luxury cars at Molsheim in Alsace in 1909. Nearly a century later, Volkswagen bought the name, built a new factory beside his old guest …
Buick is the car company that gave birth to General MotorsDavid Dunbar Buick would rather have kept building stationary and boat engines than cars. His chief engineer quit in frustration, and Buick himself sold out in 1906, later dying i…- Burberry dressed polar explorers and Everest climbers before it dressed the catwalkWhen Roald Amundsen raced to the South Pole and Ernest Shackleton set out to cross Antarctica, their gear came from a draper's shop founded in Basingstoke. Thomas Burberry had inv…
BP began with a 1908 oil strike in Persia and a navy switching from coalIn May 1908 British geologists struck oil at Masjed Soleyman in south-west Persia, the first commercially significant find in the Middle East. A company formed the next year to ex…
Brøndby rose from Denmark's sixth tier to the Champions League in a generationIn 1964 two village clubs west of Copenhagen merged so their municipality would build them a stadium. The new Brøndby IF started in the sixth tier of Danish football as amateurs. …
A $10 million payout after losing his job built the Bloomberg empireIn 1981 Salomon Brothers was taken over and Michael Bloomberg, one of its partners, left with a $10 million settlement. He had built computer systems for Salomon, so he used the m…
A small London publisher's gamble on a rejected manuscript changed its fortunesFor most of its early life Bloomsbury was a minor name in British publishing. Then in 1997 it took a chance on a children's fantasy series that several other publishers had alread…
Blue Origin's first rocket climbed just 285 feet before the company went bigJeff Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and then said almost nothing about it for years. Its first test vehicle, a rocket called Goddard, flew in November 2006 from a ranch in West…- The French bank that fired the first warning shot of the 2008 crisisOn 9 August 2007, BNP Paribas closed two investment funds exposed to American subprime mortgages, becoming the first major financial group to admit the damage publicly. That day i…
Boeing once owned an airline, until a 1934 law split it apartIn its early years Boeing built planes and flew them too. By 1931 its parent group had merged four small airlines into United Airlines. Then a 1934 rule demanded that aircraft man…- Bombardier went from snowmobiles to subway cars to supersonic-speed business jetsJoseph-Armand Bombardier founded his company in Valcourt, Quebec, in 1942 to sell snowmobiles. Within decades it had become one of the world's largest makers of trains and aircraf…
Borgward was liquidated in 1961, yet creditors were paid in full with money left overCarl Borgward insisted until his death in 1963 that his car company had been solvent when creditors forced it into liquidation. In a sense he was right: after every creditor was p…
A charity owns almost all of Bosch but gets no say in running itBosch, the world's largest car-parts supplier, is 94 percent owned by a charitable foundation. Yet that foundation holds no voting rights over the company and spends its income on…- Warren Buffett took over Berkshire Hathaway out of pique and later called it his worst mistakeIn 1964 the boss of a struggling Massachusetts textile firm agreed to buy back Warren Buffett's shares for 11.50 dollars each, then sent a written offer an eighth of a dollar lowe…
Germany's Bild began as a paper of pictures and became Europe's biggest sellerIn 1977 the undercover reporter Günter Wallraff joined Bild's Hanover newsroom for four months under the false name Hans Esser. His books described colleagues who showed contempt …
BioNTech built its mRNA science for cancer, then used it on COVID in monthsFor years Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci worked on a single goal: using messenger RNA to make cancer treatments tailored to each patient. In January 2020, days after the new coronavi…
The BlackBerry kept growing after the iPhone arrived, until it suddenly stoppedHeadlines called the 2007 iPhone a BlackBerry killer, yet BlackBerry kept adding users for years and still ran 43 percent of American smartphones in early 2010. Six years later it…- BlackRock began as a Blackstone side business that its partner later regretted sellingIn the late 1980s Larry Fink was still smarting from a 90 million dollar loss at First Boston, and he wanted to build a firm obsessed with risk. Blackstone gave him a credit line …
- Ben & Jerry's chunky ice cream owes its texture to a founder who cannot smellBen Cohen has severe anosmia, meaning almost no sense of smell, so he judges food by how it feels in the mouth. That preference gave Ben & Jerry's its trademark lumps of cookie, b…
- Benetton sold jumpers with billboards that rarely showed any clothesGuinness World Records once listed Benetton for the most controversial advertising campaign. The Italian knitwear firm spent years putting up billboards about race, AIDS and hatre…
Rolls-Royce secretly bought Bentley so its quiet 8-litre car would stop competingWhen Bentley went into receivership in 1931, the winning sealed bid came from a body called the British Central Equitable Trust. Not even W. O. Bentley knew who was behind it unti…
Today's Bank of America is really NationsBank of Charlotte wearing a borrowed nameWhen NationsBank bought BankAmerica in 1998, the Charlotte bank was the buyer and the legal survivor. It kept its own headquarters, stock price history and chief executive, yet ad…
Bank of China's overseas branches were divided between two headquarters after 1949When the civil war ended, the Bank of China's foreign offices did not all follow one boss. London, Singapore and Hong Kong stayed with the bank run from Beijing, while New York, T…
Japan's first central bank notes turned out to be a treat for ratsWhen Japan's new central bank put its own paper money into circulation in 1885, the notes contained konjac powder as a defence against counterfeiters. The unintended result was mo…- BASF was pushed across the Rhine by a town worried about its smokeBASF was founded in Mannheim in 1865, but the town council feared the chemical works would foul the air for residents. So the plant went up on the opposite bank of the Rhine, in L…
A coin toss decided whose name came first on Baskin-RobbinsTwo brothers-in-law in postwar Southern California bet that Americans were bored of chocolate, strawberry and vanilla. Their promise of 31 flavours, one for every day of the month…- Bayer once sold heroin as a cough remedy, named for feeling heroicFrom 1898 to 1910 Bayer marketed diacetylmorphine as a supposedly non-addictive substitute for morphine, sold over the counter for coughs and even pneumonia. Its head of pharmacol…
A famous climate scientist designed the hangar at Belgrade's first proper airportWhen Belgrade opened its international airport on the flat land across the Sava in 1927, the reinforced concrete hangar was designed by Milutin Milanković, the Serbian scientist b…- Baidu's founder ranked web pages by their links two years before Google didIn 1996, working for a Dow Jones division in New Jersey, Robin Li built RankDex, the first search engine to judge a site's quality by how many other sites linked to it. Google's P…
- Bamboo Airways ordered dozens of jets, then shrank to a single planeVietnam's Bamboo Airways launched in 2019 with talk of five-star service and multibillion-dollar orders from Airbus and Boeing. Three years later its founder was arrested, owners …
One British company inherited the Spitfire, Concorde, the Comet and Marconi's radio firmBAE Systems, formed in 1999, is the family tree of British engineering compressed into one firm. Its ancestors include Marconi's pioneering radio company, the makers of the Spitfi…- Atari took its name from Go and even secretly launched its own rivalNolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney named their 1972 company after a term from the board game Go, meaning a group of stones about to be captured. Atari went on to define early video gam…
The Canadian chipmaker behind the graphics in the GameCube, Wii and Xbox 360Founded in 1985 in Markham, Ontario, ATI Technologies grew from making graphics cards for IBM and Commodore into one of the two giants of PC graphics alongside Nvidia. It also dre…
Austria's railway had to wait years for its own initials because a Swiss line had themWhen Austria's national railway was founded in 1923, the obvious abbreviation ÖBB was already taken by a small Swiss line, the Oensingen-Balsthal-Bahn. So it called itself BBÖ ins…