Sega
It’s fascinating how a firm can begin in one place and then expand to another, where it can thrive and become the industry’s king for some time. That is exactly what happened to Sega, a well-known video gaming company. In the year 1940, a guy named Martin Bromley founded Standard Games in Honolulu, Hawaii. Initially, the company produced slot machines and music boxes for military posts throughout the Pacific.
As the war came to a close, the company began to deteriorate. The United States government outlawed slot machines in 1952. Bromley’s major goal was to sell slot machines in Japan, where they were in strong demand at the time. The export was a success, but it was never a moneymaker. Bromley sold the company to a Japanese entrepreneur in 1965, who renamed it SEGA.
SEGA turned its attention to hardware components, and in the 1980s to video games that made them famous and incredibly successful.
Twitter
From the demise of the ancient podcasting platform known as Oden, Twitter emerged. Before iTunes, Oden was the most common option. Oden’s founder, Jack Dorsey, left the company and started working on a different project.
The idea was simple: build a social media network that allowed users to send short messages, similar to SMS, but entirely online. Despite their reservations about the idea’s chances of success, the old Oden crew had faith in the founder and decided to go ahead with it.
Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has steadily grown to become one of the most popular social media networks on the planet, with few like it.
Samsung
Samsung is one of the largest electronics corporations in the world, employing over 500,000 people across the country and continuing to expand. In 1938 Lee Byung-chul decided to open a small grocery shop in Seoul, South Korea. Over time the market became saturated with a lot of competitors in a small local area. Things became even more difficult as the Korean War broke out in 1950, bringing Samsung to near bankruptcy. To save the business, Lee decided to produce what was in demand at the time, which was sugar and textiles. In the 1960s, Samsung entered the electronics market and dominated it, growing the chaebol to a market cap of $407.05 Billion as of November 2021.
Adidas
In the little town of Herzogenaurach, Bavaria, Germany, the company began with humble beginnings. Adolf (Adi) Dassler learnt the skills of a shoemaker after returning from conscription in the army at the end of World War One and founded a tiny shoe repair shop in the back of his family’s home.
Adi’s interest in sports drove him to experiment with specialised footwear for athletes, and in 1924, he officially formed the company ‘Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik’ alongside his brother Rudolf (Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory). They were among the first companies to produce spiked running shoes for sportsmen.
The Dassler brothers’ business and relationship were put under immense strain through the period of World War Two. The business just about survived, but their working relationship did not. They agreed to split up ‘Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik’ in 1948 and soon after became competitors.
Adi Dassler took his stake in the company and pursued his passion for designing Dassler athletic shoes. Adi founded his new company, ‘Adolf Dassler (Adidas) Sportschuhfabrik,’ in 1949. He began designing Adidas shoes with three stripes sewed on the side to set them apart from their competition. The ‘three-stripes brand’ was formed, and Adi began utilising the three-stripes logo as the company’s trademark, a design that went on to become iconic in pop culture.
