Halo Top was started by an ex-lawyer who, in his own words, “just wanted to eat an entire pint of ice cream and not hate himself for it.”
Business & Brands
They were the most successful industrialists of the 20th century, but their philosophies were poles apart. For Ford the car was everything: a means of improving welfare and achieving global peace. For Sloan it was merely a product: “the primary object of the General Motors corporation is to make money, not just to make motor cars.”
Originally positioned as a meal replacement solution for time pressed gymgoers, Huel has increased revenue by extending its range; it now includes hot and savoury meals, such as pasta bolognese and curries, and snack bars. According to CEO James McMaster, “it widens our ability in the future to go into more markets, where maybe it’s less about the pace of life and more about a need for great nutrition.”
Although we think of Ikea as a furniture seller, it’s mission is much broader: to create a better everyday life for the many. Need a helping hand with odd jobs round the house? Ikea acquired TaskRabbit in 2017. Need affordable financial services? Ikea acquired Ikano Bank in 2024.
At Ikea, you have to walk through the entire maze-like store to get to the checkout, and if you buy something, you have to assemble it all yourself. Hardly easy, but nowadays how many other stores are people genuinely excited to visit?
The food delivery business is slowly becoming an advertising business: a quarter of its revenue comes from brands promoting on its website.
Apple raises the price of its phones with each new model, and yet consumers continue to buy them. But to be fair this is also driven by the addition of new product features, and not just price.
Itsu started out as a sushi restaurant, but it’s morphing into a supermarket range: close to half of its revenue now comes from grocery products.
When the biscuit was losing out to competitor biscuit brands in supermarkets, its owners made a clever change: they moved it to the cake section. Suddenly the comparative set changed – shoppers realised they could get a box of 6 Jacobs Mallows for the same price as 2 cakes – and sales rebounded.
When the retailer eliminated coupons in favour of “fair and square prices”, and sales tanked, it learnt an important lesson: a discount feels much more attractive than fixed price, even if the total cost is exactly the same.
Booking site Kayak shows customers each airline it searches for. It takes more time, but it signals the effort that is going into the search.
In America KFC is a fast food chain, but in Japan it represents a sacred Christmas tradition. Restaurant sales are 10x higher than normal on Christmas Eve, any many customers now pre-order their chicken dinners months in advance to avoid hours of waiting in line.
KFC, the beloved American brand, generates 85% of its revenue from outside the US One third of it comes from China.
Since the 1930s, English toymaker Hilary Fisher Page had been selling a system of ‘self-locking building bricks’ called Kiddicraft – which was the main inspiration for Lego (as the company will readily admit).
Lidl owner Schwarz Group has a standalone unit that offers cloud computing to corporate customers. This unit, which generated €1.9bn in annual sales in 2023, has signed up clients including Germany’s biggest software group SAP and the country’s most successful football club Bayern Munich and the port of Hamburg.