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Australia's Woolworths began in Sydney in 1924, when founders Percy Christmas, Stanley Chatterton, Cecil Scott Waine, George Creed and Ernest Williams set aside a proposed Wallworths Bazaar after Christmas dared Williams to use the Woolworths name, which was available in New South Wales and had no link to the American F.W. Woolworth chain. Its Stupendous Bargain Basement was the first variety stor...

In 1900 William C. Durant ran the largest US maker of horse-drawn vehicles and openly disliked automobiles, but after buying into Buick around 1904 he formed General Motors in 1908 as a holding company and quickly added Oldsmobile, Cadillac and Oakland. In 1909 he nearly bought Ford for $8 million, but banks refused the $2 million down payment, and by 1910 the bankers had ousted him. He came back...

In 1975 in A Coruña, Spain, Amancio Ortega and Rosalía Mera planned to call their shop Zorba, after the 1964 film, until they learned a bar two blocks away already used the name; they rearranged the sign letters with a spare A and became Zara. Starting with low-priced lookalikes of high fashion, the company borrowed just-in-time methods from carmakers around 1990 and cut design-to-shelf time from...

Yves Saint Laurent founded his house in 1962 with his partner in life and business, Pierre Bergé, and in 1963 commissioned the designer Cassandre to create the interlocking YSL monogram. Drawing on Left Bank counterculture, he brought safari jackets, thigh-high boots and leather trousers into couture, and his 1965 Mondrian dresses used near-invisible seams in heavy wool jersey to build the paintin...

Yahoo began in 1994 as Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web, a human-edited directory built by Stanford electrical engineering graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo. The founders linked the name to the Yahoos of Gulliver's Travels, though it also stood for Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle. After an April 1996 IPO, Yahoo bought RocketMail, GeoCities for $3.6 billion and Br...

The Studebaker story begins in 1736, when Peter Studebaker, a master of the German cutlers' guild from Solingen, arrived in Philadelphia and by 1740 built a home and wagon works on a Maryland tract he called Baker's Lookout, with his own timber, iron ore and water power. In 1852 his great-grandsons Henry and Clement opened a blacksmith business in South Bend, Indiana, while their brother John M. S...

In 1914 Germany suspended the gold standard and funded World War I by borrowing, expecting to annex territory and make the losers pay as it had after the Franco-Prussian War. France, by contrast, introduced an income tax. Germany lost, carrying 156 billion marks of domestic debt in 1918, while the mark slid from 4.2 to 7.9 to the dollar. The May 1921 London Schedule of Payments set reparations at...

After the French defeated the Royal Navy at Beachy Head in 1690, King William III needed about £1.5 million, but lending to monarchs was risky. Scottish trader William Paterson proposed a public fund, and William Phips's treasure from a sunken Spanish galleon set off a craze for joint stock investing. The Tonnage Act of 1694 incorporated the Bank of England, offering 8% interest and raising £1.2 m...

Wachovia came from two North Carolina banks. The original Wachovia started in Winston-Salem in 1879 alongside R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, and First Union began in 1908 as Union National Bank, a desk in a Charlotte hotel lobby run by H.M. Victor. In 2001 First Union agreed to buy Wachovia, beat a hostile bid from Atlanta's SunTrust, then took the Wachovia name and ticker. A deliberately slow two-year sy...

Before World War I, W.O. Bentley and his brother Horace sold French DFP cars in Cricklewood, North London. In 1913 an aluminum paperweight gave W.O. the idea for aluminum pistons, lighter than cast iron, and during the war his pistons went into engines of the Sopwith Camel. Convinced engines must never fail, he founded Bentley Motors in January 1919, the same day the Paris Peace Conference opened,...

Volkswagen pushed "clean diesel" cars in the U.S., where strict limits target nitrogen oxides, and diesel engines produce about 20 times the NOx of comparable gasoline engines. Around 2005 VW planned to license Mercedes-Benz's BlueTec urea system, but its tank would not fit compact cars like the Jetta and Golf, and VW dropped the deal in 2007 for a cheaper lean NOx trap. Running that trap often en...

Gianni Versace grew up in Reggio Calabria, part of ancient Magna Graecia, learning in his mother's tailor shop, and chose the Medusa as his logo to stop people in their tracks. He moved to Milan on February 5, 1972, designing for labels such as Florentine Flowers. His brother Santo, an economics graduate, joined in 1976, and with Claudio Luti they showed the first Versace collection at La Permanen...

Van Cleef & Arpels began in Paris in 1896 when Dutch diamond cutter Alfred van Cleef joined his father-in-law Salomon Arpels. After Salomon's death in 1906, brothers-in-law Charles and Julien Arpels joined, Louis followed in 1913, and the family opened at 22 Place Vendôme, opposite the Hôtel Ritz, then followed wealthy clients to Deauville, Vichy, Nice and Monte Carlo. A bracelet of ruby and d...

Donald Trump had long fixed on the corner of 56th Street and Fifth Avenue, home of the Bonwit Teller flagship beside Tiffany & Co. After years of calling owner Genesco, he bought the site for about $10 million in 1979 when a new chairman needed to sell assets. He bought the air rights over Tiffany's, traded a 50% stake in the tower to the Equitable Life Assurance Society, which owned the land,...

S. Truett Cathy, born in 1921 and raised Southern Baptist, opened the Dwarf Grill in Hapeville, Georgia, in 1946 with four tables and ten counter stools, serving workers from the nearby Ford Motor Company assembly plant. After 15 years running the diner, he found a commercial pressure fryer in 1961 that cooked a boneless chicken breast as fast as a burger. From 1964 to 1967 he licensed the sandwic...

In 1941 Norwegian businessman Thomas Olsen bought the Waterbury Clock Company and named its watches Timex, a blend of Time magazine and Kleenex. Kleenex then stood for everyday convenience found in nearly every home, and Olsen wanted a watch to be just as common, not a jewel kept in a box. Today the business is Timex Group BV, an American Dutch holding company based in Middlebury, Connecticut and...

In 1837 Charles Lewis Tiffany and partner John B. Young opened a fancy goods and stationery emporium in lower Manhattan with $1,000 from a cotton mill. Tiffany set fixed prices with no haggling and took cash only, and in 1845 launched the Blue Book, the first U.S. direct mail luxury catalog. He renamed the firm Tiffany & Co. in 1853 and moved into jewelry and silver. During the Civil War it ma...

Target traces back to George Dayton's company in Minnesota, founded in 1902, and the first Target store opened in Roseville in 1962 under John Geisse and Douglas Dayton, who cut internal costs to sell good merchandise at low margins. Wide aisles, dropped ceilings, softer lighting and sharp signage printed on cheap foam board built the "Tarjay" image, a nickname in use since 1962. The 1999 Michael...

Takeshi Takata founded his company in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, in 1933 making parachute textiles, moved into seat belts in the 1950s and built Japan's first crash test plant. In May 1995 a recall of 8.3 million vehicles followed findings that ABS plastic release buttons on its 52X and A7X belts turned brittle under UV light and jammed. Regulators fined Honda and Takata $50,000 over evidence they k...

Taipei 101 rose in a city on the Pacific Ring of Fire, about 200 meters from a major fault line and in the path of typhoons, and held the title of world's tallest building from its 2004 completion until the Burj Khalifa passed it in 2009. Its foundation uses 380 piles driven 80 meters into soft soil, some sunk 30 meters into bedrock, each about 1.5 meters wide and able to carry over 1,000 metric t...

By the late 1970s, cheap and accurate quartz watches from Seiko and Citizen, whose crystals vibrate 32,768 times a second, were crushing Switzerland's mechanical watchmakers. In the early 1980s Ernst Thomke, CEO of ETA, set engineers Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller to build a plastic watch, and marketing consultant Franz Sprecher pushed it toward fashion. The name meant "second watch," not Swiss wat...

Subway began in 1965 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, when 17-year-old Fred DeLuca borrowed $1,000 from family friend Dr. Peter Buck, a nuclear physicist, to open Pete's Drive-In Super Submarine Sandwiches and pay for medical school. Their holding company, Doctors Associates Inc., nodded to Buck's doctorate and DeLuca's ambitions. Renamed Subway in 1968, the chain turned to franchising in 1974 and grew...

The 2007 to 2010 subprime mortgage crisis grew from a housing boom built on cheap credit: the Federal Reserve cut rates to 1 percent by 2004 while foreign capital from Asia and oil exporters hunted for yield. Lenders wrote 2/28 adjustable rate mortgages with two-year teaser rates, and under the originate to distribute model brokers collected fees and sold loans to Wall Street within days. Warren B...

Stockton, California, sits where the San Joaquin Valley meets the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, land once home to the Yachicumne, who built villages on raised mounds above seasonal floods. In the 1840s German immigrant Charles Maria Weber, barred as a foreigner from a Mexican land grant, partnered with William Gulnac, who secured the eleven square league Rancho Campo de los Franceses and pas...

In 1960 Tom Monaghan and his brother Jim bought DomiNick's, a pizza shop near Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, with a $500 down payment and $900 borrowed. After eight months Jim, a full-time postman, traded his half for the Volkswagen Beetle they used for deliveries. Tom bought two more stores by 1965, but original owner Dominick DiVarti blocked use of the name, and employee Jim Kennedy s...