What they do:
Made the first men's wristwatch.
Inspiration:
There was a time when men carried pocket watches, and women wore bracelet watches. That prejudice was weakened during World War I, when armies gave men “wrist watches” to take into battle. A year later, in 1919, watchmaker Joseph Bulova introduced the first line of consumer wristwatches for men.
About the business:
Bulova was an innovative entrepreneur who made high quality clocks that sold in unprecedented numbers. But his wristwatches for men initially bombed. That is, until Charles Lindberg strapped on a Bulova. Lindberg wanted his plane as light as possible when he took his 1927 flight to Paris. He didn’t even want a clock in his cockpit – instead, he wore a Bulova wristwatch. When Lindberg wore it, Bulova told the world about it, and sales for Bulova’s Lone Eagle watch soared to incredible heights. Today Bulova remains a manufacturer of high quality time pieces.
It was 1999. Aspiring screenwriter John Brozek was poking around a new website called eBay, and what he found surprised him: Counterfeit Rolex Watches. Lots of them.
Sure, it only takes one company or product to revolutionize an industry, but selling people something they’ve never seen before isn’t easy. The general public tends to shy away from cutting edge technologies and trends, waiting for them to become more commonplace before adapting them. Your job is to change their minds. But how? Luckily, many before us have made bold, world-changing moves that have dramatically shifted the courses of industries, and made the people behind the companies filthy rich. One such example is Apple Computers.
Why would anyone just let people use their product… for free? Well, for Connecticut clockmaker Eli Terry, it was a matter of getting his product into the hands of people who might not have realized they wanted it.
It’s probably the most popular carbonated beverage in the world, but it wasn’t always an easy sell. Enter Asa Griggs Candler, the man who would take Coca-cola from drug-store remedy to a brand recognized around the world.
I was trying to decide which invention to cover in today’s blog post. Honestly, I was blanking.
So I started poking around the Why Didn’t I Think of That? site, and I ended up in the Inspiration Hall of Fame.