Bizstartup.ie - NewsUnlikely success stories

Ben & Jerry’s

After taking a correspondence course in ice cream making, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield put their savings of US$8,000 together, got a loan of US$4,000, and leased an old gas station in Burlington, Vermont in 1978 to start making their own ice creams. Thanks to unique flavours and names such as Cherry Garcia, Karamel Sutra and Phish Food, along with their mix of environmental activism and unique marketing initiatives like ‘free cone day’, Ben & Jerry’s is today one of the most successful ice cream brands in the world. The duo sold the company to Unilever in 2000 for an estimated US$326m.

Juicy Couture

In 1994, Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor, wife of Duran Duran’s John Taylor, wanted to start a clothing business but didn’t want to take on debt. So with a reported US$200 and a revolving line of credit, the two ladies started a designer t-shirt company. In the late Nineties came the product that is still their signature item today – the now ubiquitous ‘Juicy’ tracksuit in comfy materials such as velour and cashmere. Clever marketing ploys – such as offering free clothes to Hollywood A-listers – has seen the brand rise to be sold at Saks and Bloomingdales and, of course, Brown Thomas! In 2003, the ladies sold the business to Liz Claiborne Inc. in a multimillion-dollar deal.

Google


Larry Page and Sergey Brin met while in the PhD programme in computer science at Stanford University, and together they developed Google, which began operating in 1998. Many questioned the wisdom of creating an online brand that was basically a blank page, a Google logo and a box in which you typed your search word – Yahoo! and MSN had busy home pages with an array of subject choices. It proved to be a stroke of genius, with Google quickly winning the search-engine wars. Its meteoric rise saw it go from zero to US$1.3bn annual revenue in five years, resulting in the biggest initial public offering [IPO] in Silicon Valley.

Egg.com

Mike Harris, founder of Egg.com, set out in the Nineties with a vision to change the way the world of banking worked by introducing a model where people would no longer go to bank branches. Initially established as a division of UK life assurance company Prudential, in 1998 Egg relaunched as the UK's and then the world’s first internet bank. The service gained in popularity and soon the bank had more than two million customers. In 2007, Citigroup bought Egg from Prudential for £546m sterling. Egg continues to maintain its position as the UK’s leading internet bank.

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg founded social-networking phenomenon Facebook with his college roommates and fellow computer science students while he was a student at Harvard University in 2003. Initially called ‘Facemash’, the website’s membership was limited to its founders and Harvard students, but was then expanded to other colleges. It later branched out further to include (potentially) any university student, then high-school students, and, finally, anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 400 million active users worldwide. A January 2009 study ranked Facebook as the most-used social network by worldwide monthly active users.

Ballygowan

Founder of Ballygowan Geoff Read was laughed at on RTE’s ‘The Late Late Show’ in the early Eighties, with people asking who on earth would pay for bottled water. Twenty-seven years later Ballygowan had unveiled its two billionth bottle and is now a top-five employer in Newcastle West, Co Limerick, producing 60 million litres of bottled water a year. A joint-venture partnership for the production of Ballygowan was negotiated with Richard Nash and Co, one of Ireland’s long-established soft-drinks manufacturers, in 1984. Various acquisitions and deals followed, and today the Ballygowan brand is managed by Britvic Ireland.