BREW LEGENDS
Coffee History, Brands, Gadgets, Places, and more.
The Patience Of Amber Glass
Aesop was sold to L'Oreal in April 2023 for US$2.525 billion. The business that commanded that price began as a side project inside a Melbourne hairdressing salon, where a hairdresser named Dennis Paphitis started blending aromatic plant oils into his clients' treatments in 1987. Nothing about the thirty-six years in between was fast, and almost nothing about it followed the beauty industry's standard playbook. Start with what the company...
The Crocodile Ate Itself
The standard retelling of Lacoste's near-death and recovery is a story about fashion cycles. Preppy went out, preppy came back, the crocodile was rediscovered by a new generation, and everyone made money. It is a tidy narrative and it is almost entirely wrong, because it puts the cause outside the company. What was killing Lacoste was Lacoste's own licensing structure, and fixing it required a decade of unglamorous contractual and distribution...
Nothing Over Two And Six
The Coles story is usually told as a flash of entrepreneurial insight: a young man walks into a variety store, sees the future of retail, goes home and builds an empire. The part that gets skipped is the decade and a half of counter work, stock buying and sibling labour that sat between the insight and anything resembling an empire. George James Coles opened his variety store in Collingwood in 1914. The float came in 1927. Thirteen years is a...
The Company That Sold The Blades
Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2012. By then the company had been building digital imaging technology for nearly four decades, including the prototype digital camera that one of its own engineers, Steven Sasson, assembled in 1975. The usual moral drawn from this is that Kodak failed to see the future. It saw the future with unusual clarity. What it could not do was survive it, and the reason sits in the shape of the...
The Empire Built On Borrowed Time
Christopher Skase began in business journalism and then in the stockbroking world, which is a useful training if your eventual method is the acquisition of assets using other people's money. Through the 1970s and 1980s he assembled Qintex into a group holding regional television stations, metropolitan broadcast assets, and resort property on the Queensland coast. In 1989 it collapsed. He was later charged over the collapse, left Australia, and...