Every company has an origin story. While some businesses start with a million-dollar investor and a stroke of luck, many more start from humble beginnings.
The American Express Business Class Masterclass — Ideas to income: how to start and expand your business — explored how successful businesses generally start with a great idea and a relentless attitude. It’s not about where your business starts or the resources you initially have on hand; it’s about building a great brand and strategy that wins people to your cause.
Some of the world’s biggest companies and most recognisable brands started in the smallest of ways. They went from tiny, rented garages to multibillion-dollar global campuses, proving that great ideas are still great ideas, no matter where they start.
Here are some fascinating origin stories of companies that began as ideas in a garage.
Apple
For decades, Apple’s products have been winning over the hearts of consumers. The iPhone, which was introduced in 2007, is still one of the world’s most successful products. By 2018, the popularity and ubiquity of the iPhone helped Apple become a trillion-dollar company. Today, it has a market cap of almost US$2.8 trillion.
But at one time, the company was called Apple Computer, Inc. and focused solely on computers. It was founded on April 1, 1976, by two college dropouts, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, alongside businessman Ronald Wayne. They wanted to design computers small enough for consumers to have them in their homes and offices. As the legend goes, the first Apple computers were made in their family's garage in California.
One of their first big orders was from a local retailer who ordered 50 computers at $500 each. Although they had already abandoned the business, they successfully reached their goal in just 30 days.
In 1980, sales jumped to US$117 million and Apple went public. That garage is now listed as one of the city's historic properties.
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Co. is one of the world’s most successful companies that started in a garage. In 1939, two Stanford electrical engineering graduates started their company in a one-car, 12-by-18-foot garage in the back of a house they were renting.
The company’s first product was an audio oscillator and its first customer was Walt Disney Productions, which bought eight audio oscillators to use for certifying the surround sound systems installed in theatres for its first full-length film, Fantasia (1940).
The garage was used as a research lab, development workshop, and manufacturing facility for nearly a year before the partners outgrew it and expanded to a bigger space. The company was incorporated in 1947 and 10 years later became a public company.
That humble garage is now a historical landmark in California and has been restored to what it was like in 1939.
Amazon
In 1994, just four years after being named the youngest vice president of a successful New York hedge fund, Jeff Bezos quit his job and drove to Bellevue in the U.S. state of Washington. He rented a house and began developing software for what he believed was an untapped online retailing opportunity in the book industry. He spent a year programming the site, Amazon.com, which went live in July 1995.
Amazon started in a garage, and because Bezos couldn’t have meetings there, he met people at a nearby bookstore, where most of Amazon's first contracts were negotiated. Two years after the company started, Amazon went public. Today, the company sells a lot more than just books; it's the world's largest online retailer.
In the mid-1990s, Larry Page and Sergey Brin created a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web (originally dubbed Backrub). Realising its incredible potential, the pair started Google in the late 90s. Despite starting in a 2,000-foot garage in California, Google rose to become one of the world’s biggest companies and changed the internet forever.
Within a year, Google outgrew the garage and moved to an office in Palo Alto with its eight employees. In early 2020, Alphabet, which owns Google, became the third American tech company to reach a trillion-dollar valuation – joining Apple and Microsoft.
The Walt Disney Co.
Did Disney start in a garage? Technically, the Cartoon Studio did in 1923. A few years prior, they formed Laugh-O-Gram Studio, making live-action animation. After a bad business deal, Disney had to file for bankruptcy in 1921.
In the summer of 1923, Walt Disney was living in a one-car garage that belonged to his uncle. He set up Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio and the company filmed the Alice Comedies, which would later inspire Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland.
A few months later, the company moved to a bigger space close to his uncle's house, which is where it signed a deal with Universal Studios to distribute the Alice Comedies.
The garage was located about 45 minutes from today's Disneyland Park in California. Disneyland opened in 1955, and Walt Disney World opened in Florida in 1971.
Mattel
Before Mattel became synonymous with the Barbie doll, the company’s founders were making picture frames in a Southern California garage in 1945.
From the scraps of the picture frames, which were made of Lucite and flocked wood, they started making dollhouse furniture. One of the owners, Ruth Handler, worked at Paramount Pictures and is said to have landed her the business’s first order by bringing a suitcase full of the dollhouse furniture to a store on Wilshire Boulevard. The success of the dollhouse furniture pushed them to focus solely on manufacturing toys.
In 1959, the Barbie doll was invented. In the over 60 years since, the company has reinvented Barbie time and again; she has been a flight attendant, an astronaut, a president, a surgeon, and more. It’s success has permeated through the years, with the recently released Barbie movie making over $US1.4 billion at the box office.
The takeaway
The world was a very different place when Mattel and many of the other companies above started from garages. But one thing is constant: where you make something happen isn’t as important as making it happen.
Whether it’s a food business or another home-based venture, you can turn nothing but an idea into something limitless.