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True stories, checkedThey started small too
A garage, a kitchen table, a market stall, a van. Most of the names you know began with one person and very little money, and plenty of the people behind them started late or were turned down first.
Short stories first, then longer ones about people, a few minutes each. We tell each one as far as the record goes. Inspirational stories are full of invented details, so where a famous version is a myth we say so.
188 short stories: where companies began · 27 longer stories about people
Where they began
Hewlett-Packard
1939
Bill Hewlett and David Packard started in a rented garage behind a house in Palo Alto, California, with $538. Their first big customer was Walt Disney, for sound equipment used on Fantasia. The garage is now a California historic landmark, called the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
Disney
1923
Walt Disney and his brother Roy began making cartoons in their uncle Robert's garage in Los Angeles, before renting a real office a few months later.
Apple
1976
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak used the Jobs family home in Los Altos, California, as their first base, and the garage there is where early Apple I computers were finished and tested. Wozniak has said since that the garage part of the story is a little exaggerated: most of the design work happened elsewhere.
Amazon
1994
Jeff Bezos started Amazon as an online bookshop from the garage of a rented house in Bellevue, near Seattle. The first desks were doors on legs, and the door-desk is still a company symbol.
1998
Larry Page and Sergey Brin moved their search engine out of Stanford University into a garage they rented from Susan Wojcicki in Menlo Park, California. She later became one of Google's first employees and ran YouTube.
Microsoft (not a garage)
1975
Often listed as a garage start, but it was not one. Bill Gates and Paul Allen began in rented office space in Albuquerque, New Mexico, writing software for one of the first home computers. The lesson is the same: small, rented, and started before it was ready.
YouTube (not a garage either)
2005
Also often called a garage start. The founders worked from a small office above a pizza restaurant in San Mateo, California. Small beginnings do not need a garage.
JCB
1945, Uttoxeter, England · garage
In October 1945 Joseph Cyril Bamford rented a lock-up garage in Uttoxeter, 12 feet by 15, and bought a second-hand welding set for £1. His first product was a tipping trailer built from war-surplus materials, which he sold at the local market for £45 and an old farm cart. JCB is now one of the world's best known makers of diggers, based at Rocester in Staffordshire.
Marks & Spencer
1884, Leeds, England · market stall
Michael Marks, a refugee from the Russian Empire, borrowed £5 from a Leeds wholesaler named Isaac Dewhirst and opened a penny bazaar on Kirkgate Market. Everything on his stall cost a penny, and his sign said so: "Don't ask the price, it's a penny." In 1894 he took on Dewhirst's cashier, Thomas Spencer, as a partner, and the stall became one of the best known shops on every British high street.
Tesco
1919, Hackney, London, England · market stall
After serving in the Royal Flying Corps, Jack Cohen used his £30 demob money to buy surplus food and sell it from a stall at Well Street Market in Hackney. The name came later, from the initials of his tea supplier, T.E. Stockwell, joined to the first letters of Cohen. Tesco is now the biggest supermarket chain in Britain.
Morrisons
1899, Bradford, England · market stall
William Morrison started out in 1899 as an egg and butter merchant with a stall in Rawson Market, Bradford. His son Ken took over the business in 1952, at 21, when it was still a handful of market stalls and shops. Morrisons is now one of the big supermarket chains in Britain, and it is still run from Bradford.
Sainsbury's
1869, London, England · other
John James Sainsbury and his wife Mary Ann opened a small dairy shop at 173 Drury Lane in Covent Garden, selling fresh food such as butter, milk and eggs. The sign promised "Quality perfect, prices lower". From that one shop came one of Britain's largest supermarket chains, still carrying the family name.
Boots
1849, Nottingham, England · other
John Boot opened a herbal medicine shop in Nottingham in 1849. He died in 1860, and his widow Mary kept the shop going with their son Jesse, who was 10 and helped behind the counter. Jesse later built it into a national chain of chemists, and Boots is now on almost every high street in the country.
Cadbury
1824, Birmingham, England · other
On 4 March 1824 John Cadbury, a young Quaker, began selling tea, coffee and drinking chocolate from a shop in Bull Street, Birmingham. The family later built the Bournville factory and village outside the city in 1879, and the factory still makes chocolate there today, under the Cadbury name.
Greggs
1939, Newcastle upon Tyne, England · other
John Gregg started in 1939 by delivering fresh eggs and yeast to homes around Newcastle on a bicycle. His first shop, with a bakery at the back, did not open until 1951, on Gosforth High Street. His sons took over after he died in 1964, and Greggs now has more than two thousand shops across Britain.
Gymshark
2012, Solihull, England · garage
Ben Francis was 19, studying at Aston University and delivering pizzas for £5 an hour, when he started Gymshark with school friend Lewis Morgan. He bought a sewing machine and a screen printer with about £1,000 of savings and made gym wear in his parents' garage in Solihull, only once it had been ordered. Gymshark now sells around the world and is still based in Solihull.
Dyson
1979, Bath, England · shed or workshop
Often told as an overnight invention, it was the opposite. Between 1979 and 1984 James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes of a bagless vacuum cleaner in a workshop behind his home near Bath. No British maker would take it, so the first version was sold in Japan. His own company followed in the early 1990s and its first machine, the DC01, became the UK's best selling vacuum cleaner.
The Body Shop
1976, Brighton, England · other
Anita Roddick opened her first shop in Brighton in March 1976 to make a living for herself and her two daughters. She started with about 25 products with handwritten labels. She bought plastic urine sample bottles from a hospital to fill, did not have enough, and asked customers to bring them back for refills. The refill idea became part of what the brand stood for.
Innocent
1998, London, England · market stall
Three friends, Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jon Wright, spent £500 on fruit and sold smoothies from a stall at a small music festival in west London. Over the stall a sign asked whether they should give up their jobs to make smoothies, with one bin marked YES and one marked NO for the empty bottles. The YES bin filled up, and they resigned the next day. Innocent is now owned by Coca-Cola.
Superdry
1985, Cheltenham, England · market stall
At 19, Julian Dunkerton started selling clothes from a stall in Cheltenham with a friend, Ian Hibbs, and a £2,000 loan. He noticed things he could buy in London were not on sale locally, so he bought in bulk and brought them home. That business, Cult Clothing, grew to around 25 shops and led to Superdry, which he launched with James Holder in 2003 and still runs.
BrewDog
2007, Fraserburgh, Scotland · shed or workshop
James Watt and Martin Dickie were both 24 when they started brewing in a small industrial unit in Fraserburgh, with their savings and a loan through a local council scheme. They filled bottles by hand and sold beer at local markets from an old van. The business grew very large, then went into administration in March 2026 and was sold to a new owner: a reminder that growth is not the same as staying power.
Rolls-Royce
1884, Manchester, England · shed or workshop
Henry Royce, who had sold newspapers as a boy, put £20 of savings into a workshop in Cooke Street, Manchester, with his friend Ernest Claremont, who put in £50. They made electric bell sets and light fittings, then dynamos and electric cranes. Royce built his first car in 1904, met Charles Rolls the same year, and the two names went together on the bonnet.
Morris Motors
1893, Oxford, England · shed or workshop
William Morris left school at 15, worked briefly for a bicycle dealer, then set up on his own repairing bicycles from his parents' house at 16 James Street, Oxford, with £4 of borrowed capital. He moved on to building bicycles, then motorcycles, then cars: the first Morris Oxford appeared in 1913. He later became Lord Nuffield and gave much of his money to hospitals and to Oxford.
Raspberry Pi
2012, Cambridge, England · other
Eben Upton and a small group of colleagues wanted a cheap computer that would get children into programming. When it went on sale in February 2012, Upton later said that 10,000 sold in total would have been a great outcome. Demand on the first day took down the sellers' websites, and the Raspberry Pi has since sold tens of millions of units.
Arm
1990, Cambridge, England · other
Not a garage start: a barn. In November 1990, 12 engineers from Acorn Computers set up Advanced RISC Machines, a joint venture with Apple and VLSI Technology, in a barn near Cambridge. Instead of making chips, they designed them and licensed the designs to others. Arm designs now run inside nearly every smartphone in the world.
Dr. Martens
1960, Wollaston, England · shed or workshop
The air-cushioned sole was not British at first. Klaus Märtens, a German army doctor, designed it after hurting his ankle skiing in 1945. The Griggs family, bootmakers in the Northamptonshire village of Wollaston, bought the rights, added the yellow stitching and made the first eight-eyelet 1460 boot on 1 April 1960. It became the boot of factory workers, postmen and then musicians.
Reebok
1895, Bolton, England · spare room
Joseph William Foster was a teenager when he started making spiked running shoes in his bedroom above his father's sweet shop in Bolton. His firm, later J.W. Foster and Sons, made shoes for many of the top runners of the 1920s. In 1958 two of his grandsons started a new company and named it Reebok, after an African antelope.
Warburtons
1876, Bolton, England · kitchen
Thomas and Ellen Warburton ran a small grocer's shop in Bolton, and by the mid 1870s trade was poor. Ellen baked some loaves at the back of the shop to help, and they sold out within an hour. Within weeks the grocer's had become a bakery. Warburtons is still a family business, still based in Bolton.
Lush
1995, Poole, England · late start
Mark Constantine, a hairdresser, and Liz Weir, a beauty therapist, made products that The Body Shop sold for years. Their next venture, a mail order business, failed. In 1995 they and a few colleagues tried again with one shop on the High Street in Poole, making products by hand from fresh fruit and vegetables. The name came from a customer competition, and Lush is still based in Poole.
Pret A Manger
1986, London, England · other
Often told as the founders' own idea, but the first Pret opened in 1983 under someone else and went into liquidation. Two university friends, Julian Metcalfe and Sinclair Beecham, bought the name from the liquidator and opened their first shop at 75b Victoria Street in July 1986, making sandwiches fresh in the shop's own kitchen.
Richer Sounds
1978, London, England · other
Julian Richer had been buying and selling hi-fi since his school days. At 19 he opened a small shop at London Bridge Walk. It was so busy for its size that it set a world record for the highest sales per square foot of any shop. In 2019 he passed most of the company to an employee ownership trust, so the staff now own it.
Timpson
1865, Manchester, England · other
William Timpson came to Manchester from Northamptonshire as a boy and in 1865 opened a shoe shop on Oldham Street with his sister's husband. A few years later he went it alone. Shoe repairs came in 1903, and keys, watches and more followed. Timpson is still a family business and is known for training and hiring people leaving prison.
JD Sports
1981, Bury, England · other
John Wardle and David Makin, who was 18, opened a single sports shop in Bury in 1981 with money from both families. When they opened their second shop, in Manchester's Arndale Centre in 1983, they named the business after their first names: John and David. JD Sports now trades in many countries.
Jaguar
1922, Blackpool, England · garage
William Lyons and William Walmsley, two motorcycle fans, began making sidecars in Walmsley's parents' garage in Blackpool and named their firm the Swallow Sidecar Company. They moved on to building car bodies and in 1928 moved to Coventry. The name Jaguar was first used on a car in 1935 and became the company's name in 1945.
McLaren
1963, Feltham, England · shed or workshop
Bruce McLaren, a New Zealander driving for another team, set up his own racing team in 1963 when his boss would not let him use the engines he wanted for a winter series. The team started in Feltham, near London, and moved to Colnbrook two years later. McLaren was killed testing a car in 1970, but the team carried on and is now based in Woking.
Williams
1977, Didcot, England · shed or workshop
Frank Williams had run a racing team before, without much luck. In 1977 he and engineer Patrick Head set up Williams Grand Prix Engineering in an empty carpet warehouse in Didcot, Oxfordshire. In their first season they raced a car bought from another maker. Within a few years their own cars were winning world championships.
Twinings
1706, London, England · other
Thomas Twining bought Tom's Coffee House on the Strand in 1706 and began selling tea there, at a time when tea was a luxury. The company has been at the same address, 216 Strand, ever since, and the shop is still open. Its logo, first used in 1787, is said to be the oldest in continuous use anywhere.
Clarks
1825, Street, England · shed or workshop
Cyrus Clark started making sheepskin rugs in the Somerset village of Street in 1825. His younger brother James joined as an apprentice and began using the offcuts that were too short for rugs to make slippers, sold as Brown Petersburgs. The slippers outgrew the rugs, and Clarks shoes are still designed in Street.
Guinness
1759, Dublin, Ireland · other
On 31 December 1759 Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000 year lease on a small, unused brewery at St James's Gate in Dublin, for £45 a year. He had brewed ale before, and ale was what he made there at first; the dark porter that made the name famous came later. More than 260 years later, Guinness is still brewed at St James's Gate.
Ryanair
1985, Waterford, Ireland · other
Ryanair's first route, in July 1985, was from Waterford to London Gatwick, flown by a single turboprop plane with 15 seats. The cabin was so small that crew had to be no taller than 5 feet 2 inches. In that first year it carried about 5,000 passengers. It is now one of the biggest airlines in Europe.
Primark (Penneys)
1969, Dublin, Ireland · other
Arthur Ryan and his business partner Micaela Mitchell opened the first shop, called Penneys, at 47 Mary Street in Dublin in June 1969, backed by the Weston family. In Ireland it is still called Penneys, and that first shop is still trading. Elsewhere it trades as Primark and has hundreds of shops across Europe and the United States.
Moonpig
2000, London, England · other
Nick Jenkins started a website for personalised greeting cards and named it after his school nickname, Moonpig. It launched in the summer of 2000, just as the dot-com bubble burst, and money was hard to find. It took until 2005 to make a profit, helped by broadband and digital cameras arriving in ordinary homes.
Deliveroo
2013, London, England · other
Will Shu, an American who had moved to London, could not find good restaurant food delivered near his office, so in 2013 he set up a delivery service with Greg Orlowski. In the early days Shu did many of the deliveries himself. The business grew across several countries and was bought by DoorDash in 2025.
Tyrrells
2002, Leominster, England · other
William Chase was a potato farmer in Herefordshire who struggled to sell to the big supermarkets, which were buying cheaper produce from abroad. In 2002 he started frying his own potatoes into crisps on the farm and selling them to delis and farm shops. Tyrrells has changed hands several times since and is now owned by KP Snacks.
Walkers
1948, Leicester, England · other
Walkers did not invent the crisp, and it did not start as a crisp maker. Henry Walker ran a butcher's shop in Leicester from the 1880s. After the war, meat rationing left the business short of work, so in 1948 it started slicing and frying potatoes by hand, sold at threepence a bag. Walkers crisps are still made in Leicester.
Tunnock's
1890, Uddingston, Scotland · other
Thomas Tunnock bought a baker's shop in Uddingston, Lanarkshire, in 1890 for £80. For decades it was simply a local family bakery, run by Thomas and then by his son. The caramel wafer arrived in 1952 and the teacake a few years later. Tunnock's is still family owned and still bakes in Uddingston.
Irn-Bru (A.G. Barr)
1875, Falkirk, Scotland · other
Robert Barr started a small business in Falkirk in 1875 that went on to make fizzy drinks for local people. The family firm launched a drink called Iron Brew in 1901, later renamed Irn-Bru. The company, A.G. Barr, is still based in Scotland, and Irn-Bru is still its best known drink.
Baxters
1868, Fochabers, Scotland · kitchen
George Baxter was a 25 year old gardener on the Gordon Estate in Moray when he borrowed £100 from relatives and opened a grocer's shop in Fochabers. In the back shop his wife Margaret made jams and jellies from local fruit, and those became the business. Baxters still makes soup and preserves in Fochabers.
Thorntons
1911, Sheffield, England · other
Joseph William Thornton opened a sweet shop at 159 Norfolk Street in Sheffield in 1911 and handed the keys to his son Norman, who was 15. Two years later a second shop added a kitchen where the family began making its own chocolates and toffee. The shops closed in 2021, but the brand lives on in supermarkets.
Hovis
1886, Stone, England · other
Richard "Stoney" Smith, a miller in Stone, Staffordshire, worked out a way of keeping the wheat germ in flour without it going off, and patented it in 1887. The bread had no name until 1890, when a national competition was won by a London student, Herbert Grime, with Hovis: short for the Latin hominis vis, "strength of man".
Lea & Perrins
1837, Worcester, England · other
John Lea and William Perrins were chemists in Worcester who began selling Worcestershire sauce in 1837. The company's own story says a nobleman back from Bengal brought them the recipe, but historians have found no Lord Sandys who ever governed Bengal or even visited India. What is on the record: two chemists, one shop, and a sauce still made in Worcester.
Colman's
1814, Norwich, England · other
Jeremiah Colman, a flour miller, took over a mustard business at a water mill at Stoke Holy Cross, four miles south of Norwich, in 1814. The firm later moved to a large works at Carrow in Norwich, where mustard was made for over 150 years. The brand is now owned by Unilever, and the yellow tin has hardly changed.
Burberry
1856, Basingstoke, England · other
Thomas Burberry had been a draper's apprentice. At 21 he opened his own outfitter's shop in Basingstoke, Hampshire. In 1879 he came up with gabardine, a hard-wearing cloth that kept rain out but let air through, and the trench coat followed. Burberry is now a luxury fashion house, still based in London.
Barbour
1894, South Shields, England · other
John Barbour came from Galloway in Scotland and set up in South Shields in 1894 selling oilskins and oilcloth to the sailors, fishermen and dockers of the North East coast. His waxed jackets became a country staple. The company is still owned by the Barbour family and still based in South Shields.
Mulberry
1971, Somerset, England · kitchen
Roger Saul started Mulberry in 1971 with £500 from his mother, making leather belts and chokers at the family kitchen table in Somerset. His first big break was a snakeskin choker sold to the London shop Biba. Mulberry is now a well known leather goods brand and still makes bags at its factories in Somerset.
Brompton
1975, London, England · spare room
Andrew Ritchie designed a folding bicycle in the bedroom of his flat in South Kensington, which looked out over the Brompton Oratory, and named the bike after it. He spent years building them by hand in a small rented workshop, one order at a time. Brompton bikes are still made in London.
Aston Martin
1913, London, England · shed or workshop
Lionel Martin and Robert Bamford set up in Callow Street, London, in January 1913, selling and servicing other makers' cars. Martin raced at Aston Hill, near Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire, and they put the hill and his surname together for the cars they began to build. Their first car was finished in 1915.
Lotus
1948, London, England · garage
Colin Chapman built his first car by rebuilding an old Austin Seven in a lock-up garage in north London, rented from his girlfriend's father. In 1952 he formed Lotus Engineering and moved into the old stables behind the Railway Hotel in Hornsey, the pub his father ran. Lotus became a world champion racing team and a maker of sports cars.
Hargreaves Lansdown
1981, Bristol, England · spare room
Peter Hargreaves and Stephen Lansdown started their investment business on 1 July 1981 from a bedroom in Hargreaves' home in Clifton, Bristol. They began by sending out newsletters and information to private savers. The company grew to look after the savings of more than a million people and is still based in Bristol.
Wetherspoon
1979, London, England · other
Tim Martin opened his first pub on Colney Hatch Lane in Muswell Hill, north London, in December 1979. He named the company after one of his teachers in New Zealand, a Mr Wetherspoon, who could not control his class, because Martin felt he could not control his pub either. There are now hundreds of Wetherspoon pubs.
Specsavers
1984, Guernsey · spare room
Doug and Mary Perkins, both opticians, started Specsavers in 1984 on a ping-pong table in the spare room of their home in Guernsey. A change in the rules that year let opticians advertise for the first time, and they saw the chance. Specsavers is still owned by the family and has stores in many countries.
Eddie Stobart
1970, Hesket Newmarket, England · van
Eddie Stobart grew up on the family farm at Hesket Newmarket in Cumbria and became an agricultural contractor, buying his first lorry, a second-hand one, in 1960. The haulage company was set up in 1970, and his son Edward took it over in his early twenties. The first lorries were named after Twiggy, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton and Suzi Quatro, and the tradition stuck.
Dunelm
1979, Leicester, England · market stall
Bill and Jean Adderley bought a batch of curtains, including seconds, and sold them from a stall on Leicester Market in 1979. By the early 1980s they had their first shop. The company is named after the house the family lived in when they started on the market, Dunelm, the old name for Durham. Dunelm is now Britain's largest homewares retailer.
Iceland
1970, Oswestry, England · other
Malcolm Walker and Peter Hinchcliffe were trainee managers at Woolworths when they put up £60 between them for a month's rent on a small shop in Leg Street, Oswestry, selling frozen food. When Woolworths found out about their side business, they lost their jobs. Iceland grew into a national chain of around a thousand shops.
Paul Smith
1970, Nottingham, England · rented room
Paul Smith opened his first shop on Byard Lane in Nottingham in 1970. It measured about three metres by three, and at first it opened only a few days a week while he built up the business. He kept it going with a lot of patience, and he is still at the head of the company more than fifty years later. The shop is still there, and his clothes are now sold around the world.
Laura Ashley
1953, London, England · kitchen
Laura and Bernard Ashley began printing fabrics by hand on the kitchen table of their small flat in Pimlico, with about £10 spent on wood for a screen, dyes and some linen. Their first products included printed headscarves and tea towels. Within a few decades the floral prints were sold in shops around the world.
Brooke Bond
1869, Manchester, England · other
Arthur Brooke opened his first shop in Manchester in 1869, selling tea, coffee and sugar. People often ask who Mr Bond was. There was no Mr Bond: Brooke simply liked the sound of the name. The firm grew into one of Britain's biggest tea companies and is best known today for PG Tips.
Dunnes Stores
1944, Cork, Ireland · other
On 31 March 1944 Ben Dunne opened a drapery shop on St Patrick's Street in Cork, across the road from a bigger, established store, promising better value by selling at pre-war prices. Dunnes Stores is still owned by the Dunne family, trades in both parts of Ireland, and is one of the country's biggest retailers.
Raleigh
1885, Nottingham, England · shed or workshop
Richard Woodhead and Paul Angois set up a small bicycle workshop on Raleigh Street, Nottingham, in 1885. A few years later a businessman, Frank Bowden, who had taken up cycling for his health, bought into the firm and built it into one of the biggest bicycle makers in the world. The name came from the street.
Halfords
1892, Birmingham, England · other
Frederick Rushbrooke started a wholesale ironmongery business in Birmingham in 1892. In 1902 he opened a shop on Halford Street in Leicester and began selling cycling goods there. The business took its name from that street, and Halfords now has hundreds of shops and garages across Britain.
Burton
1903, Chesterfield, England · other
Meshe Osinsky came to Britain alone in 1900, as a teenager, escaping the pogroms in the Russian Empire. Around three years later, at about 18, he opened a shop in Chesterfield selling ready-made suits. As Montague Burton he grew it into one of the biggest tailoring businesses in the world, with hundreds of shops by 1929.
Bettys
1919, Harrogate, England · other
Frederick Belmont, a Swiss confectioner, came to England speaking little English and opened the first Bettys tea room in Harrogate in 1919. Nobody knows for sure who Betty was. There are three competing stories, and even the company does not claim to know which is true. Bettys is still a family business in Yorkshire.
Hotel Chocolat
1990, Hertfordshire, England · other
Angus Thirlwell and Peter Harris started out in 1990 selling mints to businesses, then moved into chocolate sold by mail order. They did not open a shop until 2003, in the centre of Watford, after more than a decade of selling by post and then online, by which time they already had a long list of loyal customers. The company was bought by Mars in 2024.
Card Factory
1997, Wakefield, England · van
Dean Hoyle and his wife Janet started in 1993 by buying greetings cards wholesale and selling them from the back of their van at car boot sales and open air markets. They did that for four years before opening their first shop, in Wakefield, in 1997. Card Factory now has around a thousand shops across Britain.
Matalan
1985, Preston, England · other
John Hargreaves opened the first Matalan store at Bamber Bridge, near Preston, in 1985. The idea was simple: big out of town sheds selling clothes and homewares at low prices, at a time when most clothes shops were on the high street. Customers at first had to sign up as members to shop there. Matalan now has more than two hundred stores.
B&M
1978, Cleveleys, England · other
Malcolm Billington and Brian Mayman opened their first shop in Cleveleys, on the Lancashire coast, in 1978, and called it Billington & Mayman. The name was soon shortened to B&M. Brothers Simon and Bobby Arora bought it in 2004, when it was still a regional chain, and grew it into a national one.
Fever-Tree
2004, London, England · other
Charles Rolls and Tim Warrillow thought most tonic water was not good enough for good gin. They spent months researching ingredients, including a trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to find quinine, and launched their first tonic in 2005. The name comes from what the cinchona tree, the source of quinine, was called in India.
Reggae Reggae Sauce
2006, London, England · market stall
Levi Roots sold his jerk barbecue sauce from his own stall at the Notting Hill Carnival, about 4,000 bottles in 2006. The recipe was his own, cooked at home. He took it on Dragons' Den in February 2007 and came away with £50,000 for 40% of the business. Soon afterwards Sainsbury's put it in 600 stores.
Trunki
2006, Bristol, England · other
Rob Law designed a ride-on suitcase for children. When he took it on Dragons' Den in 2006, a strap on his sample came off in one dragon's hands, and the panel was not impressed. He turned down the one offer he got and kept going. By 2016 Trunki had sold more than three million cases in over 100 countries.
Joules
1989, Market Harborough, England · market stall
Tom Joule's father ran a business selling clothing at country and horse shows from a stand. Tom took it over in 1989 and ordered 100 pairs of pink wellies, which sold out almost at once. Joules opened its first shop next to his father's café in Market Harborough in 2000 and became a national clothing brand.
Lever Brothers
1884, Warrington, England · other
William Lever worked in his father's grocery business in Bolton before he and his brother James bought a small soap works in Warrington in 1884. Their Sunlight soap was sold in wrapped bars at a time when soap was cut from big blocks. They later built a factory and a whole village for workers at Port Sunlight, and the firm became part of Unilever.
Barry's Tea
1901, Cork, Ireland · other
James J. Barry started selling tea from a shop on Prince's Street in Cork in 1901. Until the 1960s the tea was sold from that shop; only then did the family start wholesaling it to shops across Ireland. It is still a family business, still based in Cork, and still blends its tea there.
Rowntree's
1862, York, England · other
Henry Isaac Rowntree bought a small cocoa business on Castlegate in York in 1862. By 1869 he was in money trouble and his brother Joseph joined as a partner to help save it. The firm survived, grew into one of the great York employers, and launched the Kit Kat and Aero in the 1930s. Kit Kats are still made in York.
Wedgwood
1759, Burslem, England · shed or workshop
Josiah Wedgwood was a potter's son who had a leg weakened by smallpox as a child. In 1759 he set up on his own in a works called the Ivy House in Burslem, leased from relatives. He went on to change how pottery was made and sold, and the Wedgwood name is still in use more than 260 years later.
Mary Quant
1955, London, England · other
Mary Quant opened a small shop called Bazaar on the King's Road with Alexander Plunket Greene and Archie McNair. At first she sold clothes bought from wholesalers, then made her own. She is often credited with inventing the miniskirt, though that is disputed: some say the designer John Bates got there first. Quant said her customers kept asking for shorter.
Poundland
1990, Burton upon Trent, England · other
Steve Smith, whose father had run a discount business, set up Poundland with Dave Dodd in 1990 with £50,000 and a small office in Sedgley, near Dudley. The first shop opened in Burton upon Trent that December and took £13,000 on its first day. By the end of the year they had a few shops and a profit of just £6,000.
Tangle Teezer
2007, London, England · other
Shaun Pulfrey had been a hair colourist since 1978 when he designed a brush that did not pull. In 2007 he asked the Dragons' Den panel for £80,000 and was turned down, with one dragon calling it a waste of time. When the episode aired his website crashed under the orders. Boots took the brush the next year.
ASOS
2000, London, England · other
ASOS began in 2000 as As Seen On Screen, selling copies of clothes and items that people had seen in films and on television. Its founders included Nick Robertson and Quentin Griffiths. The idea did not last, but the online shop did: it moved to selling fashion in its own right and is now one of the biggest online clothing sellers in Britain.
Jacob's
1851, Waterford, Ireland · other
William Beale Jacob ran a small bakery in Waterford making bread and ships' biscuits. His brother Robert joined him in 1851, and a year later they moved to premises on Peter's Row in Dublin and opened a steam biscuit factory. Jacob's is best known for its cream crackers, still sold across Ireland and Britain.
Pukka Pies
1963, Leicestershire, England · kitchen
Trevor and Valerie Storer started in 1963 as Trevor Storer's Home Made Pies, a small family operation in Leicestershire. A year later they renamed it Pukka Pies. It is still a family business, and the bakery in Syston now makes around 180,000 pies and pasties a day, many of them sold in chip shops and at football grounds.
Harley-Davidson
1903, Milwaukee, United States · shed or workshop
William Harley and Arthur Davidson built their first motorcycle in a small wooden shed in the Davidson family's back garden in Milwaukee, with the company name painted roughly on the door. Arthur's brothers Walter and William soon joined them. The company still has its headquarters in Milwaukee, a few miles from where the shed stood.
Ford
1896, Detroit, United States · shed or workshop
Henry Ford built his first car, the Quadricycle, in a brick shed behind his rented home on Bagley Avenue in Detroit while working as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company. When it was finished in June 1896 it was too wide for the shed door, so he broke out part of the wall to get it onto the street. Ford Motor Company followed in 1903.
Mattel
1945, Los Angeles, United States · garage
Harold Matson and Elliot Handler, with Elliot's wife Ruth, started out in a garage workshop in Los Angeles making picture frames. Elliot began turning the offcuts into dolls' house furniture, which sold better than the frames, and the name came from MATson and ELliot. Ruth Handler later created the Barbie doll, launched in 1959.
Dell
1984, Austin, Texas, United States · rented room
Michael Dell started selling upgraded personal computers from his room in a University of Texas hall of residence, with about $1,000. Business grew fast enough that he left university to run it full time. The idea was simple: build to order and sell direct, without a shop in between. Dell Technologies is now based in Round Rock, just outside Austin.
2004, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States · rented room
Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook in February 2004 from his student room at Harvard, helped by fellow students. At first only Harvard students could join, then other universities, and only later anyone over 13. The company renamed itself Meta in 2021, but the student room start is well recorded.
Nike
1964, Oregon, United States · other
Phil Knight and his former running coach Bill Bowerman put in $500 each to start Blue Ribbon Sports, importing Onitsuka Tiger running shoes from Japan. Knight sold them from the boot of his car at athletics meetings around the Pacific Northwest. The company took the name Nike in 1971, with a swoosh logo that a design student, Carolyn Davidson, drew for $35.
Levi Strauss & Co.
1853, San Francisco, United States · other
Often told as a man who sewed tent canvas into trousers for gold miners, but that is not quite it. Levi Strauss ran a wholesale dry goods business in San Francisco. The riveted work trousers were the idea of Jacob Davis, a tailor in Reno, who could not afford the patent alone; the two took it out together in 1873.
Coca-Cola
1886, Atlanta, United States · other
John Pemberton, an Atlanta pharmacist, mixed a syrup that was first sold at the soda fountain of Jacobs' Pharmacy in May 1886, at five cents a glass. The company says sales in that first year averaged about nine glasses a day. His bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, came up with the name and wrote it in the flowing script still used today.
Pepsi
1893, New Bern, North Carolina, United States · other
Caleb Bradham, a pharmacist, mixed a drink at his own shop in New Bern and called it Brad's Drink. He renamed it Pepsi-Cola in 1898. The first company did not survive: it went bankrupt in 1923 after losing heavily on sugar prices that swung wildly after the First World War. The brand was bought, revived, and carried on.
Heinz
1869, Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania, United States · kitchen
As a boy Henry John Heinz sold surplus vegetables from his mother's garden. At 25 he began bottling horseradish in clear glass so buyers could see there was no filler. That first firm went bankrupt in 1875, and he started again the next year. The '57 varieties' slogan of 1896 was picked for luck: the company already sold more than 60 products.
Wrigley
1891, Chicago, United States · other
William Wrigley Jr. arrived in Chicago aged 29 with $32, selling his father's soap. He gave away baking powder as a free extra with the soap, then began selling the baking powder and gave away chewing gum with that. The gum turned out to be what people wanted, so he dropped the rest and sold gum alone.
Hershey
1894, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, United States · other
Milton Hershey's first sweet shop in Philadelphia failed, and so did a later one in New York. His caramel business in Lancaster finally worked. At the 1893 Chicago World's Fair he saw German chocolate making machines, bought them, and began making chocolate. He sold the caramel firm in 1900 to concentrate on chocolate, and built a factory town that still bears his name.
Kellogg's
1906, Battle Creek, Michigan, United States · late start
Will Keith Kellogg spent years as a clerk and manager at the sanitarium run by his brother John in Battle Creek. Their flaked cereal came out of kitchen experiments there in the 1890s, when cooked wheat was left standing and then rolled into flakes. Will started his own corn flakes company in 1906, when he was 46.
UPS
1907, Seattle, United States · rented room
Jim Casey, aged 19, and Claude Ryan started the American Messenger Company in Seattle on $100 of borrowed money. Messengers ran errands and delivered parcels on foot and by bicycle, taking orders by telephone from a small basement office. Parcel delivery for shops became the main work, and the business grew into United Parcel Service.
Hallmark
1910, Kansas City, United States · rented room
Joyce Hall arrived in Kansas City at 18 with two shoeboxes of picture postcards. He rented a small room at the YMCA, which served as his home, office and stockroom, and sold postcards by post to shops. His brother Rollie joined him and, as postcards went out of fashion, they moved into greeting cards sent in envelopes.
John Deere
1837, Grand Detour, Illinois, United States · shed or workshop
John Deere was a blacksmith from Vermont who moved west to Illinois. Farmers there struggled because the sticky prairie soil clung to iron ploughs. In his forge he shaped a plough from a broken steel saw blade, polished so the soil slid off. He sold ploughs one at a time at first; the company still carries his name.
Boeing
1916, Seattle, United States · shed or workshop
William Boeing was a timber merchant who became interested in flying. In 1916 he and a navy engineer, Conrad Westervelt, built a two-seat seaplane, and he set up the Pacific Aero Products Company. Its early factory was a red, barn-like former boatyard building on the Duwamish River. The Red Barn was later moved and is now part of Seattle's Museum of Flight.
Walmart
1950, Bentonville, Arkansas, United States · other
Sam Walton ran a variety store franchise in Newport, Arkansas, from 1945, then lost it when his landlord would not renew the lease. He started again with Walton's 5 and 10 on the square in Bentonville in 1950. The first Walmart store opened in nearby Rogers in 1962, and the old Bentonville shop is now the company's museum.
McDonald's
1940, San Bernardino, California, United States · other
Often told as Ray Kroc's company from the start, but it was not. Richard and Maurice McDonald opened a drive-in in San Bernardino in 1940, and in 1948 cut the menu down to a few items made on a fast, simple production line. Kroc was a 52 year old milkshake machine salesman who came to see them in 1954 and took on the franchising.
KFC
1930, Corbin, Kentucky, United States · late start
Harland Sanders ran a roadside service station in Corbin, Kentucky, and began cooking meals for travellers, at first serving them in the station itself. He was in his sixties when he started franchising, with the first deal in Salt Lake City in 1952. The popular claim that he was turned down 1,009 times has no reliable record behind it.
Subway
1965, Bridgeport, Connecticut, United States · other
Fred DeLuca was 17 and hoping to pay for university when a family friend, Peter Buck, lent him $1,000 to open a sandwich shop. It opened in Bridgeport as Pete's Super Submarines. The early shops struggled, and the pair kept opening new ones to stay visible. The chain later took the name Subway and spread worldwide through franchising.
Domino's
1960, Ypsilanti, Michigan, United States · other
Tom Monaghan and his brother James bought a small pizza shop called DomiNick's in Ypsilanti with $500 down and $900 borrowed. Within a year James swapped his half of the business for the Volkswagen Beetle they used for deliveries. The shop was renamed Domino's in 1965, after an employee suggested the name.
Starbucks
1971, Seattle, United States · other
Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker opened one shop near Pike Place Market selling roasted coffee beans, not drinks to take away. The shop often called the first Starbucks, at 1912 Pike Place, is actually its second home: the original was at 2000 Western Avenue until 1976. Howard Schultz joined in 1982 and pushed it towards the coffee bar.
Ben & Jerry's
1978, Burlington, Vermont, United States · other
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, school friends from New York, took a correspondence course in ice cream making from Penn State University. With $12,000 they opened a scoop shop in a renovated petrol station in Burlington, Vermont. They celebrated their first anniversary by giving away free cones, which the company still does on a free cone day.
Patagonia
1957, Burbank, California, United States · shed or workshop
Yvon Chouinard, a young climber, taught himself blacksmithing and forged reusable steel pitons in his parents' back garden in Burbank. He sold them for $1.50 each from the back of his car. Chouinard Equipment grew from that, and the clothing side, Patagonia, followed in the early 1970s. In 2022 he transferred ownership to a trust and a nonprofit.
Yankee Candle
1969, South Hadley, Massachusetts, United States · kitchen
Mike Kittredge was 16 and short of money for a Christmas present, so he melted crayons at home to make a candle for his mother. A neighbour saw it and persuaded him to sell it to her. With that money he bought wax for two more: one for his mother and one to sell. The business he built became one of the best known candle makers in the United States.
Burt's Bees
1984, Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, United States · market stall
Roxanne Quimby met Burt Shavitz, a beekeeper in rural Maine, and began making candles from his leftover beeswax. They took about $200 at their first craft fair. The first headquarters was a disused one-room schoolhouse rented from a friend for $150 a year. Recipes in an old beekeeping book later led them into lip balm and skin care.
Mary Kay
1963, Dallas, United States · late start
Mary Kay Ash spent about 25 years in direct sales before she quit, frustrated at watching men she had trained being promoted over her. At 45 she put her $5,000 of savings into a small shopfront in Dallas, helped by her 20 year old son Richard. Her husband died weeks before the opening, and she went ahead anyway.
Spanx
2000, Atlanta, United States · spare room
Sara Blakely was selling fax machines door to door when she cut the feet off a pair of tights to wear under trousers. She put $5,000 of her savings into the idea, wrote much of the patent application herself to save on legal fees, and ran the business from her flat in Atlanta while keeping her sales job at first.
Under Armour
1996, Washington, D.C., United States · spare room
Kevin Plank, a former University of Maryland American football player, was tired of the cotton shirts under his kit getting soaked with sweat. At 24 he started making moisture wicking shirts from his grandmother's basement in Georgetown, and drove up and down the East Coast selling them from his car. By 1998 the business had moved to Baltimore.
Hasbro
1923, Providence, Rhode Island, United States · other
Brothers Henry, Hillel and Herman Hassenfeld started out in Providence selling leftover textile remnants. They moved into covering pencil boxes with the cloth, then into school supplies, and then into toys. The family firm, shortened from Hassenfeld Brothers to Hasbro, went on to make Mr. Potato Head, the first toy advertised on American television.
Crocs
2002, Boulder, Colorado, United States · market stall
Three friends from Boulder, Scott Seamans, Lyndon Hanson and George Boedecker Jr., came across a foam clog made by a Canadian company and thought sailors would like it. They first showed it as a boat shoe at the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show in Florida in 2002, where all 200 pairs they had made sold out.
Airbnb
2007, San Francisco, United States · spare room
Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia could not cover the rent on their San Francisco flat, so during a busy design conference they put three air mattresses on the floor and charged guests for a bed and breakfast. Nathan Blecharczyk joined them. Short of money in 2008, they kept going by selling election themed boxes of breakfast cereal.
Netflix
1997, Scotts Valley, California, United States · other
Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph started by renting DVDs by post. To test whether a disc would survive the post, they first mailed a CD to Hastings' house. Often told as starting with a $40 late fee on a film Hastings returned late, but Randolph has called that story a convenient fiction: the early Netflix even charged late fees itself.
FedEx
1971, Little Rock, Arkansas, United States · other
Fred Smith did write a university paper at Yale in the 1960s about moving parcels overnight through one central hub. The popular version says his professor gave it a C because the idea would never work, but Smith said himself he did not remember the grade, only that it was probably his usual C. He founded the company in 1971 and flights began from Memphis in 1973.
Pixar
1986, San Rafael, California, United States · other
Pixar began as the small computer graphics group inside Lucasfilm. When Steve Jobs bought it in 1986 it was meant to be a hardware company selling an expensive image computer, and the animators made short films mainly to show what the machine could do. The computer never sold well. The short films led to Toy Story in 1995.
Lego
1932, Billund, Denmark · shed or workshop
Ole Kirk Christiansen was a carpenter in Billund who, with building work drying up in the Depression, began making wooden toys in his workshop. In 1934 he named the business Lego, from the Danish 'leg godt', meaning 'play well'. Plastic bricks came in 1949 and the stud and tube brick was patented in 1958. The company is still based in Billund.
IKEA
1943, Agunnaryd, Sweden · other
Ingvar Kamprad registered IKEA at 17, selling pens, wallets and picture frames by post. The name is his initials plus Elmtaryd, the family farm, and Agunnaryd, the nearby village. Furniture came in 1948, and the first IKEA store opened in Almhult in 1958. Flat packs came out of a simple problem: a table that would not fit in a car.
H&M
1947, Vasteras, Sweden · other
Erling Persson opened a single women's clothing shop called Hennes, Swedish for 'hers', in the town of Vasteras. In 1968 he bought Mauritz Widforss, a shop selling hunting and fishing gear, which brought men's clothing into the range and the M into the name. The company is still controlled from Stockholm by the Persson family.
Ericsson
1876, Stockholm, Sweden · kitchen
Lars Magnus Ericsson opened a workshop for repairing telegraph instruments in a rented kitchen in central Stockholm, no more than 13 square metres, with a partner and an errand boy and two foot powered lathes. The first customer was the Stockholm fire brigade, which paid two kronor for a repair. The workshop moved to bigger rooms before the year was out.
Nokia
1865, Tampere, Finland · other
Fredrik Idestam, a mining engineer, opened a wood pulp mill on the rapids at Tampere. A few years later he built a second mill by the Nokianvirta river, and the town that grew up there gave the company its name. Over the next century Nokia made paper, rubber boots and cables before it ever made a telephone.
Skype
2003, Tallinn, Estonia · other
Niklas Zennstrom from Sweden and Janus Friis from Denmark started Skype, but the software was written by three Estonian developers, Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn, working in Tallinn. Free calls over the internet made it a household name. Microsoft bought it in 2011 and closed the service in May 2025.
Adidas and Puma
1924, Herzogenaurach, Germany · other
Adi Dassler started making shoes after the First World War and was joined by his brother Rudolf. Their firm, Gebruder Dassler, worked out of a former washroom in the family home in Herzogenaurach turned into a small workshop. Jesse Owens wore their shoes at the 1936 Olympics. The brothers fell out and split in 1948: Adi founded Adidas and Rudolf founded Puma.
Daimler (Mercedes-Benz)
1882, Cannstatt, Germany · shed or workshop
Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach turned the greenhouse in Daimler's garden at Cannstatt into an experimental workshop and worked late into the night with the windows covered. The gardener heard hammering and suspected forgery, so the police raided it and found only engine parts. The Mercedes name came later, from the daughter of a customer, Emil Jellinek.
Benz
1886, Mannheim, Germany · shed or workshop
Karl Benz patented his three wheeled motor car in 1886, but it was hardly selling. In 1888 his wife Bertha, who had put her own money into the business, took it with their two teenage sons on a trip of about 100 kilometres from Mannheim to her mother's home in Pforzheim, fixing problems on the way. The trip proved the car worked.
Bosch
1886, Stuttgart, Germany · shed or workshop
Robert Bosch opened a 'workshop for precision mechanics and electrical engineering' in Stuttgart with one mechanic and an apprentice. Early work was fitting and repairing telephones and other electrical equipment. The breakthrough was a magneto ignition for engines. The company is still largely owned by a charitable foundation he set up.
Haribo
1920, Bonn, Germany · kitchen
Hans Riegel started making sweets in a back kitchen in Bonn with a sack of sugar, a copper pot, a marble slab, a stool, a stove and a roller. His wife Gertrud became the first employee. In 1922 he made a gummy 'dancing bear', ancestor of the gold bear. The name is HAns RIegel BOnn.
Melitta
1908, Dresden, Germany · kitchen
Melitta Bentz, a Dresden housewife, was tired of bitter coffee full of grounds. She punched holes in the bottom of a brass pot and lined it with blotting paper from her son's school exercise book. She registered the design in 1908 and started the company that December with 73 pfennigs of capital. The family business still makes coffee filters.
Steiff
1880, Giengen, Germany · spare room
Margarete Steiff had polio as a child and used a wheelchair, but trained as a seamstress and opened a felt clothing business in Giengen. In 1880 she sewed a small felt elephant from a magazine pattern as a pincushion, and children took it for a toy. Her nephew Richard designed one of the first jointed teddy bears in 1902.
Dr. Oetker
1891, Bielefeld, Germany · other
August Oetker was a pharmacist who bought a chemist's shop in Bielefeld. He worked on a baking powder that kept well and sold it in small packets, each enough for one pound of flour, so home bakers got the same result every time. The packets sold so well that the shop became a food company, still family owned.
Miele
1899, Herzebrock, Germany · shed or workshop
Carl Miele and Reinhard Zinkann set up in Herzebrock with eleven workers, making cream separators. Butter churns and then washing machines followed. They chose 'Immer besser', 'forever better', as the company's motto. More than a hundred years on, the business is still owned by the two founding families.
Porsche
1948, Gmund, Austria · shed or workshop
Ferdinand Porsche ran a design office in Stuttgart from 1931, working for other carmakers. After the war the business moved to an old sawmill in Gmund, Austria, where his son Ferry and a small team hand built the first cars carrying the Porsche name, the 356, beating aluminium body panels over wooden forms. The company returned to Stuttgart in 1950.
Red Bull
1984, Fuschl am See, Austria · late start
Dietrich Mateschitz was a marketing manager for a toothpaste brand when, on trips to Thailand, he found a local energy drink, Krating Daeng. At about 40 he went into partnership with its maker, Chaleo Yoovidhya, to adapt it for Europe. Getting approval and the recipe right took three years: Red Bull went on sale in Austria in 1987.
Victorinox
1884, Ibach, Switzerland · shed or workshop
Karl Elsener opened a cutlery workshop in Ibach in the canton of Schwyz. When the Swiss army wanted a folding knife for its soldiers, it bought from a German maker at first; Elsener set out to make one in Switzerland, delivering in 1891. The name combines his mother Victoria's name with 'inox', for stainless steel.
Nestle
1867, Vevey, Switzerland · other
Henri Nestle was a German born pharmacist working in Vevey on Lake Geneva. He developed a baby food from milk, wheat flour and sugar for infants who could not be breastfed, and sold it as 'farine lactee'. His logo, a bird's nest, was a play on his surname, which means 'little nest' in his Swabian dialect.
Michelin
1889, Clermont-Ferrand, France · shed or workshop
Brothers Andre and Edouard Michelin took over a struggling family rubber works in Clermont-Ferrand. A cyclist came in with a punctured tyre that was glued to the rim and took hours to fix, which set them working on a tyre that could be taken off quickly; they patented it in 1891. They also gave away a free guide for motorists from 1900.
L'Oreal
1909, Paris, France · spare room
Eugene Schueller, a young chemist, developed a hair dye that was safer than those on sale. He made it in his small Paris flat, working on it at night, and sold it to hairdressers himself during the day. The company he founded in 1909 was named after one of those dyes, and L'Oreal is still based near Paris.
Philips
1891, Eindhoven, Netherlands · other
Gerard Philips, an engineer, and his father Frederik, a banker, bought a small building in Eindhoven to make electric light bulbs. Gerard's younger brother Anton joined as a salesman and the business took off. For years it was simply a light bulb maker in a small town; Eindhoven grew up around it.
Bata
1894, Zlin, Czech Republic · shed or workshop
Tomas Bata came from a family of cobblers. With his brother Antonin and sister Anna, and money inherited from their mother, he set up a shoemaking business in Zlin with ten workers on regular weekly wages instead of the old single cobbler's workshop. Bata grew into one of the world's largest shoemakers and still sells shoes worldwide.
Ferrero
1946, Alba, Italy · kitchen
Pietro Ferrero ran a pastry shop in Alba, in a part of Piedmont known for hazelnuts. After the war cocoa was scarce and expensive, so he stretched it with hazelnuts and made a sweet paste called Giandujot, sold in blocks to slice onto bread. Its spreadable descendant, Nutella, came out in 1964. Ferrero is still family owned.
Barilla
1877, Parma, Italy · market stall
Pietro Barilla opened a shop in Parma selling bread and pasta that he made himself. For decades it stayed a family bakery business. Over the following century, the family turned it into one of the world's biggest pasta makers, and the company is still run by the Barilla family from Parma.
Benetton
1955, Treviso, Italy · spare room
Luciano Benetton was a clothing shop assistant whose sister Giuliana knitted brightly coloured jumpers for friends. They went into business together, he selling and she knitting. Family legend says they paid for their first knitting machine by selling Luciano's accordion and their younger brother's bicycle. The first factory opened in 1965.
Ferrari
1929, Modena, Italy · shed or workshop
Enzo Ferrari started Scuderia Ferrari in Modena as a racing team that prepared and raced Alfa Romeo cars for wealthy amateur drivers. He did not build a car under his own name until 1947, the 125 S, at Maranello. For nearly twenty years the business was really a team and a workshop.
Lamborghini
1948, Cento, Italy · shed or workshop
Ferruccio Lamborghini started making tractors from surplus military vehicles left over from the war. He moved into sports cars in the early 1960s. The famous story that Enzo Ferrari told him to stick to tractors comes from Lamborghini's own later interviews; nobody else on the record heard it, so treat it as his version.
Zara
1963, A Coruna, Spain · shed or workshop
Amancio Ortega left school at 14 and worked as a shop hand for a shirtmaker in A Coruna, learning to make clothes by hand. In 1963 he set up his own small firm making quilted dressing gowns. The first Zara shop opened in A Coruna in 1975, and the group, Inditex, is still based nearby.
Toyota
1926, Kariya, Japan · shed or workshop
Sakichi Toyoda, a carpenter's son, spent decades inventing looms. His automatic loom company was set up in 1926, and in 1929 the overseas rights were sold to Platt Brothers of Oldham, England. His son Kiichiro used that money to start building cars in a department of the loom company, which became Toyota Motor in 1937.
Honda
1946, Hamamatsu, Japan · shed or workshop
Soichiro Honda, a former mechanic, set up a small research workshop in a wooden shack in Hamamatsu after the war. His first product was a bicycle with a small engine clipped on, using surplus army radio generator engines. When those ran out he designed his own. Honda Motor Company was founded in 1948.
Sony
1946, Tokyo, Japan · rented room
Masaru Ibuka started a radio repair shop in 1945 in the bomb damaged Shirokiya department store in Tokyo. One early product, an electric rice cooker, was a failure. With Akio Morita he founded Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo in 1946 and made Japan's first tape recorder. The name Sony came in 1958, chosen because it was easy to say abroad.
Nintendo
1889, Kyoto, Japan · shed or workshop
Fusajiro Yamauchi opened a small shop in Kyoto making hanafuda, Japanese playing cards, painted by hand. For most of its life Nintendo was a card company. It tried taxis, instant rice and love hotels in the 1960s before moving into electronic toys and then video games. It is still based in Kyoto.
Panasonic
1918, Osaka, Japan · spare room
Konosuke Matsushita was 23 when he started making electric plug adapters at home in Osaka. The staff was three people: Konosuke, his wife Mumeno, and her 15 year old brother Toshio Iue, who later founded Sanyo. The first product reused sockets from old light bulbs to keep the price down. The company now trades as Panasonic.
Yamaha
1887, Hamamatsu, Japan · shed or workshop
Torakusu Yamaha repaired medical equipment. A school in Hamamatsu asked him to fix its imported reed organ, and he decided he could build one. He and a helper carried their first organ on a pole over the Hakone mountains to the music institute in Tokyo for an expert opinion. Told the tuning was poor, he studied music there and tried again.
Mikimoto
1893, Toba, Japan · other
Kokichi Mikimoto was the son of a noodle seller in Toba. He spent years trying to persuade oysters to grow pearls around an implanted bead, losing whole crops to red tides along the way. In 1893 he produced his first semi-round cultured pearl, and his family firm went on to make cultured pearls widely affordable.
Uniqlo
1984, Hiroshima, Japan · other
Tadashi Yanai took over his father's men's clothing shop in Ube, in western Japan. In 1984 he opened a casual clothing shop in Hiroshima called Unique Clothing Warehouse, shortened to Uniqlo. Yanai later wrote a book about the business called One Win, Nine Losses, a frank count of how many of his ideas failed.
Samsung
1938, Daegu, South Korea · market stall
Lee Byung-chul started a small trading company in Daegu selling dried fish, local groceries and noodles. The name means 'three stars'. The headquarters moved to Seoul in 1947, and the electronics business that it is now known for did not start until 1969, more than thirty years later.
Hyundai
1940, Seoul, South Korea · garage
Chung Ju-yung left his farming family as a teenager and found work delivering rice in Seoul. He took over the shop, then lost it when the colonial government restricted rice trading. In 1940 he opened a car repair garage that finished overhauls in three days when rivals took ten. Hyundai grew from that garage into shipbuilding, construction and cars.
Lenovo
1984, Beijing, China · other
Liu Chuanzhi and ten colleagues from a computing institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences started the company with 200,000 yuan of the institute's money. Their first meetings were held in a small guardhouse on the academy grounds. Early work included reselling imported computers. The company took the name Lenovo in 2003.
Alibaba
1999, Hangzhou, China · spare room
Jack Ma, a former English teacher, gathered 17 friends and former students in his flat in Hangzhou to start an online marketplace connecting small Chinese manufacturers with buyers abroad. The founders worked from the flat in the early months, and the company is still based in Hangzhou.
Flipkart
2007, Bangalore, India · spare room
Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (not related) started an online bookshop from a two-room flat in the Koramangala area of Bangalore with about 4 lakh rupees. Their first order was a copy of John Wood's Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, which they had to hunt down in local shops. Walmart bought most of the company in 2018.
Infosys
1981, Pune, India · spare room
N. R. Narayana Murthy and six fellow engineers started Infosys in Pune with 10,000 rupees from the savings of his wife, Sudha Murty. The first registered office was at a co-founder's house. The company moved to Bangalore in 1983 and grew into one of India's largest software firms.
Tata
1868, Mumbai, India · other
Jamsetji Tata started a trading company in what was then Bombay with 21,000 rupees. He moved into cotton mills, then planned the steelworks and hydroelectric schemes his sons completed. The group is still largely owned by charitable trusts, which hold most of the shares in the holding company.
Haldiram's
1937, Bikaner, India · market stall
Ganga Bishan Agarwal, known as Haldiram, learned to make bhujia, a savoury snack, in his father's shop in Bikaner. Using his aunt's recipe with moth bean flour, he made it finer and crisper and opened his own small shop. The family business is now sold in many countries but still makes the snack he started with.
Amul
1946, Anand, India · other
Dairy farmers in the Kaira district of Gujarat, many with only a cow or two, were selling milk on bad terms to a single private dairy. Led by Tribhuvandas Patel, they formed their own co-operative in Anand. Verghese Kurien joined as an engineer in 1949 and helped it grow. Amul is still owned by the farmers who supply it.
Jollibee
1975, Quezon City, Philippines · other
Tony Tan Caktiong and his family opened an ice cream parlour franchise in Cubao, Quezon City. Customers kept asking for hot meals and sandwiches, which turned out to sell better than the ice cream. In 1978 the family dropped the franchise and turned the parlours into a burger chain called Jollibee.
Grab
2012, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia · other
Anthony Tan and Tan Hooi Ling worked up the idea while studying at Harvard Business School: a safer way to book taxis in Southeast Asia. They launched it in Kuala Lumpur in 2012 as MyTeksi, a small taxi booking app. It later became Grab, moved its headquarters to Singapore and added food delivery and payments.
Nando's
1987, Johannesburg, South Africa · other
Fernando Duarte took his friend Robert Brozin to lunch at Chickenland, a Portuguese Mozambican takeaway in Rosettenville, Johannesburg. Brozin liked the flame grilled peri peri chicken so much that the two bought into the restaurant together and renamed it after Fernando's son, Nando. Within two years there were four restaurants.
Dangote
1977, Lagos, Nigeria · other
Aliko Dangote was about 20 when he started trading in Lagos with a loan from his uncle, importing goods such as sugar, rice and cement and selling them on. By 1981 he had formed the Dangote Group, which later moved from trading into making cement and other goods in Nigeria itself.
M-Pesa
2007, Nairobi, Kenya · other
Mobile money in Kenya started as a small trial. Safaricom and Vodafone tested it from 2005 with about 500 people and a handful of agent shops, helping customers of a microfinance lender repay loans by phone. People started using it to send money to family, so the full service launched in 2007 built around that.
soleRebels
2005, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia · shed or workshop
Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu grew up in Zenebework, a poor neighbourhood of Addis Ababa. After university she started a footwear business in a workshop on her grandmother's land, using local craft skills and soles made from recycled car tyres, like traditional Ethiopian tyre soled sandals. It went on to sell in many countries.
Mercado Libre
1999, Buenos Aires, Argentina · garage
Marcos Galperin wrote the business plan for an online marketplace while studying at Stanford. Back in Buenos Aires, he and his team set up makeshift desks in a garage beneath his father's leather business in the Saavedra district. Mercado Libre is now one of the largest online marketplaces in Latin America.
Natura
1969, Sao Paulo, Brazil · other
Antonio Luiz Seabra had managed a small cosmetics laboratory in Sao Paulo before opening his own small shop and lab on Rua Oscar Freire in 1969. He gave customers advice himself on how to use the creams. Natura later moved to selling through independent consultants and became one of Brazil's best known cosmetics companies.
Nubank
2013, Sao Paulo, Brazil · rented room
David Velez, a Colombian, with Cristina Junqueira and Edward Wible, started a digital bank in Brazil from a small rented house on Rua California in the Brooklin district of Sao Paulo. Their first product was a credit card with no annual fee, managed by phone. The street name later went on Velez's holding company.
Grupo Bimbo
1945, Mexico City, Mexico · other
Lorenzo Servitje and his partners opened a bakery in Mexico City with 34 workers and 10 delivery vans. Their plan was simple: most bread was sold unwrapped and went stale fast, so they baked sliced loaves, wrapped them, and delivered them to shops themselves. Bimbo is now one of the largest bakers in the world.
Canva
2007, Perth, Australia · spare room
Melanie Perkins was teaching design software at university in Perth when she saw how hard students found it. With Cliff Obrecht she started Fusion Books, a school yearbook design tool, run from her mother's living room. That was the testing ground for a simpler design tool, Canva, which launched in 2013.
Atlassian
2002, Sydney, Australia · spare room
Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar met at university in Sydney and started a software company with about $10,000 of credit card debt rather than outside investors. Their first big product, Jira, was a tool for tracking software bugs, built partly out of their own frustration with existing ones.
Hills Hoist
1945, Adelaide, Australia · shed or workshop
Lance Hill's wife needed a new washing line because her lemon tree was taking over the old one. Hill, back from the war and looking for work, built her a rotary clothes line from metal tubing in his back garden in Adelaide. Neighbours wanted one too, and he began making and selling them from home with his brother-in-law.
Victa
1952, Sydney, Australia · shed or workshop
Mervyn Victor Richardson built a rotary lawnmower from scrap in his shed in the Sydney suburb of Concord, using an old fruit tin as the fuel tank. He sold the first mowers from home. Demand was strong enough by 1953 that he gave up his job to run Victa Mowers, and the original 'peach tin' prototype is in a Sydney museum.
Billabong
1973, Gold Coast, Australia · kitchen
Gordon Merchant and his wife Rena designed and cut boardshorts on the kitchen table of their rented flat on the Gold Coast, then took them round local surf shops to sell. Gordon used triple stitching so they lasted. Shops kept asking for more, and in 1974 the shorts got a name and a label: Billabong, an Australian word for a waterhole.
Cotton On
1988, Geelong, Australia · market stall
Nigel Austin started selling denim jackets from the boot of his car at a market in Geelong. On his first day he sold one. The next week he cut the price and sold all 20. He opened the first Cotton On shop in 1991, and the company, still privately owned, is still based in Geelong.
Longer stories: the people
Late starters, people who began on the shop floor, people rejected again and again. Press any story to read it, a few minutes each.
Harland Sanders
Took his chicken recipe on the road in his sixties
He worked as a farmhand, railway fireman, insurance seller and petrol station owner before the chicken. The franchise idea came when he was past sixty and his roadside cafe was failing.
Late starter · 2 min readRay Kroc
A milkshake machine salesman in his fifties
He spent decades selling paper cups and milkshake mixers. In his fifties he visited one small restaurant that bought eight of his machines and saw a system worth copying.
Late starter · 2 min readJulia Child
Learned to cook properly at 37, on television at 50
She could barely cook when she married. She enrolled in a Paris cooking school at 37, spent nearly ten years on one book, and was turned down by the first publisher.
Second career · 2 min readVera Wang
Missed the Olympic team, then designed her first dress at 40
A competitive figure skater who did not make the Olympic team, she spent 17 years at a fashion magazine before opening her own bridal shop at 40.
Late starter · 2 min readMomofuku Ando
Lost almost everything, then invented instant noodles at 48
After a credit union he chaired collapsed in 1957, he worked alone in a shed behind his house in Osaka for a year. The result, Chicken Ramen, went on sale when he was 48.
Late starter · 2 min readLaura Ingalls Wilder
Farm wife and local columnist, first book at 65
She was teaching in a prairie school at 15 and farming for decades. Her first book, Little House in the Big Woods, came out in 1932, when she was 65.
Late starter · 2 min readGrandma Moses
Started painting in her seventies, first solo show at 80
Anna Mary Robertson Moses worked as a hired girl from childhood and as a farm wife for decades. When arthritis stopped her embroidery she took up painting, and was first shown in New York at 80.
Rejected first · 2 min readHenry Ford
Two car companies failed before the third worked
A farm boy turned machinist, he lost backers twice before founding Ford Motor Company at 39. The moving assembly line came ten years after that.
Rejected first · 2 min readWalt Disney
His first studio went bankrupt, then he lost his star character
His Kansas City studio went bankrupt in 1923. Five years later he lost the rights to his popular rabbit cartoon, and started again with a mouse.
Rejected first · 2 min readSoichiro Honda
Toyota rejected his piston rings, so he went back to school
A garage apprentice at 15, he started making piston rings and saw only three in fifty pass Toyota's inspection. He studied engineering part time and came back with rings that worked.
Rejected first · 2 min readOprah Winfrey
Taken off the evening news, given a talk show instead
Hired to co-anchor the evening news in Baltimore at 22, she was taken off it within eight months. The station moved her to a morning talk show, which turned out to be her real work.
Rejected first · 2 min readHoward Schultz
From a Brooklyn housing project, through 217 noes
He grew up in public housing in Brooklyn and sold office equipment door to door. When he wanted to open Italian style coffee bars, he says 217 of the 242 investors he asked turned him down.
Rejected first · 2 min readSam Walton
Lost his first shop's lease, started again in a small town
A management trainee on $75 a month, he built up a variety store in Arkansas only for the landlord to refuse to renew the lease. He started over and opened the first Walmart at 44.
Against the odds · 2 min readChris Gardner
A trainee stockbroker who was homeless with his son
With no degree, he won a trainee place at a San Francisco brokerage in 1981. For about a year he worked by day and spent nights in shelters with his toddler son.
From the bottom · 2 min readUrsula Burns
From summer intern to chief executive of the same firm
Raised by a single mother on a housing estate in Manhattan, she joined Xerox as a summer engineering intern in 1980. In 2009 she became its chief executive.
From the bottom · 2 min readJan Koum
Swept a shop floor at 16, built a messaging app at 33
He arrived in California from Ukraine at 16, his family relying on food stamps while he swept floors in a grocery shop. Years of steady work as a tester came before WhatsApp.
Rejected first · 2 min readSara Blakely
Seven years selling fax machines door to door
She did not get into law school, so she sold office equipment door to door for seven years. Her first product idea was turned down by hosiery mills until one manager said yes.
From the bottom · 2 min readMadam C. J. Walker
A washerwoman on $1.50 a day who built a business
Born Sarah Breedlove to formerly enslaved parents, she was orphaned at 7 and washed clothes for a living. She built a hair care business that trained thousands of Black women as sales agents.
From the bottom · 2 min readBooker T. Washington
Swept a classroom as his entrance exam
Born enslaved, he worked in salt furnaces and a coal mine as a boy. He walked much of the way to a college in Virginia, where his entrance test was to sweep a room.
Against the odds · 2 min readFrederick Douglass
A shipyard caulker who had to hand over his wages
Enslaved in Maryland, he learned a skilled trade in the Baltimore shipyards but had to give his pay to the man who claimed to own him. He escaped in 1838 and became one of the great speakers of his age.
Rejected first · 2 min readAbraham Lincoln
A failed shop, years of debt and a self taught trade
Before politics he split rails, ran a shop that failed and spent years paying off its debt. He taught himself law from borrowed books.
Rejected first · 2 min readThomas Edison
His first patent was an invention nobody wanted
A railway newsboy and travelling telegraph operator, he patented an electric vote counter that no one would buy. After that he only worked on things people needed.
Rejected first · 2 min readStephen King
A laundry worker whose first novel was pulled from the bin
He washed hotel linen and taught English while collecting rejection slips on a nail. He threw away the opening of Carrie; his wife took it out of the bin.
Rejected first · 2 min readSylvester Stallone
Wrote himself the lead part nobody would give him
A struggling actor with small parts, he wrote Rocky after watching an underdog boxer go the distance. He refused to sell the script unless he could play the lead.
From the bottom · 2 min readJim Carrey
Factory cleaning shifts at 15, then years in comedy clubs
When his father lost his job, the teenage Jim Carrey worked cleaning shifts in a factory with his family. Years of stand up followed before film work came.
Rejected first · 2 min readMichael Jordan
Not picked for the senior school team, so he trained harder
At 15 he was left on his school's junior team while a taller classmate went up. He used it as fuel for a year of practice.
Rejected first · 2 min readKurt Warner
Stacked shelves on nights, then won the Super Bowl
Released by a professional team after a few weeks, he stacked supermarket shelves overnight for $5.50 an hour. Five years later he was the Super Bowl's most valuable player.
And this board
HIRING UK was started by one person in Birmingham who still drives for a living, built in the evenings after long shifts. Small, and started before it was ready. Our story.