The crowning glory (2002)

Brand names are ingrained more deeply into our language than we realize. Yet we know little about it. Brand names are not in dictionaries or encyclopedias. Why would they? They only refer to themselves, to the product they stand for. Or not quite? Thousands of brand names have been given the name of their founder. Global brands were once created by one person. As the brand spread around the world, their person fell into oblivion. Who were they? Why were they so successful? Were they consciously striving for expansion or did it happen more or less by accident?

Neckermann

Why were there always coins in Josef Neckermann's right jacket pocket? Because he used to give a mark to every employee with a good idea as a ritual. His two sons, for example, did not like this. They could count on getting a job in their father's company, but they had absolutely no chance to step out of his shadow. The anecdote typifies the self-made entrepreneur Neckermann, who on his death in 1992 was hailed as a "symbol of the German economic miracle." Neckermann macht es möglich had been his most famous advertising slogan.

Mac (Maurice) and his younger brother Dick (Richard) McDonald were both in their 20s when they left the US state of New Hampshire in 1930 to try their luck on the West Coast. They were reluctant to follow in the footsteps of their father, who had worked his entire life as a foreman in a shoe factory and had become unemployed in 1929 when the economic crisis broke out. One shoe after another wool factory in and around New Hampshire closed, magical California offered the opportunity to start a new life. They settled where they thought they had the best opportunities: in Hollywood. They were able to work as stagehands, mainly in one-man shows and slapsticks in which Ben Turpin played the lead. The emerging film industry gave them the idea of opening a cinema in neighboring Glendale.

Forrest Mars Sr. was born in 1904 in Tacoma, Washington, as the only son of Frank C. Mars, a candy salesman who struggled to survive. When Forrest was six his father remarried and the boy moved to his grandparents in Canada. Here he got the idea to make his fortune with coal and began to study mining in California. After his studies it turned out that his father had already gone bankrupt twice. And his new company, called Mar-0-Bar, was just as promising.

For months, the pastry shops of Nantes kept the change to the 108-year-old recipe secret. On June 24, 1994, it leaked out through the French daily newspaper Libération: the famous petit stock exchange biscuit from the company lu no longer contained 12, but 13.5% butter since February. The violation took place without any prior warning. A consumer survey had shown that the biscuit for today's consumer might be a bit too pâteux (floury, doughy) and too little serial (flaky, flaky).

Lipton is one of the rare companies to permanently remind consumers that their name once stood for a human of flesh and blood. You can see the portrait of the old Lipton printed on almost all packaging, including hanging mustache, sailor hat and bow tie. You will also find one or more sailing ships and Sir Thomas' sustainable advertising slogan: Direct from the tea garden in the teapot. Each of the more than 1.3 billion bags that leave the factory in Forest, Belgium every year, has his signature. Even more than sixty years after his death, the man himself still vouches for quality, the signature suggests. This also touched upon three important elements from Lipton's life.

Levi Strauss was born Loeb Strauss in 1829 in the Bavarian village of Buttenheim, between Bamberg and Erlangen. In 1847, shortly after the death of his father, an itinerant trader, he traveled to New York where two of his stepbrothers ran a textile business. He worked for his brothers for two years. Gold was discovered in California in early 1848. Believing that the Wild West pioneers needed a lot of canvas for their tents and covered wagons, he traveled by ship a year later - overland the journey would have taken eight months! - to San Francisco.

The earliest photograph of René Lacoste ever published dates from 1911. He is then 7. Wearing an aviator's hat on his head, he peeks from behind the man-sized radiator of a Hispano Suiza, a large automobile from his father's Paris factory, at the photographer. Little René's health is so weak that his parents, French Basques of origin, decide to move to the countryside. He grew up in a country house in Courbevoie, among a whole series of servants.

“The old way of selling cheese in bulk meets the same fate as the flour and oat barrel,” said a Kraft ad in 1920. “Here's a better, more tasty cheese, sold in airtight, hygienic, and inexpensive cans. Canned cheese packaging is one of the most important steps forward in the science of hygienic food distribution. The cans can be stored in any climate.

"Some can't give up anything," reads the photo caption in the ad. 'For example, Jack Daniel's also has its own sawmill. Why on earth, many visitors ask us. Well, the freshly distilled Jack Daniel's is purified by a layer of charcoal. Drop after drop. This gives Jack Daniel's its mild flavor. And because we don't want to be dependent on anyone for the quality of our whiskey, we have our own sawmill. Here the maple wood is stored, sawn into pieces and burned to the purest charcoal. That way we can't blame anyone else for making our whiskey taste that way. '

David Packard, of the electronics group Hewlett-Packard, was born in 1912 in Pueblo, Colorado. His father was a lawyer, his mother a teacher. In his 1995 book The HP Way, he recounts how Pueblo in his childhood breathed the atmosphere of the Far West rather than that of an agricultural state in the Midwest. It was a rough place with many guest workers who were attracted by a steel factory and metal foundries. It had its bars, brothels, and gangsters. Street fights and shootings were part of everyday life. The Packard family lived on the outskirts of town, against the prairie. The young Packard could go on endless wanderings with his friends.

Neckermann

McDonald's

Mars

LU

Lipton

Levi's

Lacoste

Kraft

Jack Daniel's

Hewlett-Packard