Companies That Make Only Two Wildly Different Products
As a business, diversifying your product line is a surefire way to grow your customer base, but it’s usually a bad idea for, say, a coffee shop to start selling auto parts. You either stick with what you know, like a T-shirt company expanding to hats, or go the Amazon route and just sell everything. Some companies, however, decide that they do two things. Two things only. Two wildly different things only.
Guinness
It’s not just a coincidence of nomenclature — the Guinness Book of World Records is the same Guinness that produces the world’s carbiest beer. In the 1950s, Hugh Beaver was working as the managing director of Guinness Brewery and presumably putting up with lots of jokes when he noticed that bar patrons often got into arguments about the biggest, fastest or hairiest things, so he wrote a book about it, which is definitely not the record for the farthest a barkeep has gone to shut their customers up.
Coors
Yep, the company that makes beer as cold as the Rockies is also involved in the production of high-tech ceramics. In the early 20th century, Adolph Coors happened to lease a building to the Herold China and Pottery Company, and it turned out the pottery was so good that Coors made increasingly bigger investments until he finally just bought the founder out. It was a good thing, too, because when Prohibition happened, they had the clay to fall back on.
Yamaha
The customers for Yamaha keyboards and motorcycles couldn’t be more different, and technically, they’re not the same company. In 1897, Torakusu Yamaha started Nippon Gakki as a manufacturer of upright pianos, but in the ‘50s, the company’s president started a new company to take advantage of Japan’s abandoned wartime factories to make motorcycles. He named the company Yamaha, and 30 years later, those left at Nippon Gakki were like, “Ooh, good call, we’re Yamaha now, too.”
Bridgestone
Bridgestone is another Japanese company that successfully divided itself, not out of prudent business sense but for the love of the game — literally. Tire tycoon Shojiro Ishibashi just really loved golf and became determined to apply the engineering know-how that put him on top of the wheel world to perfecting the golf ball. It could have been a disaster, but Ishibashi knew his stuff, so Bridgestone soon became Japan’s number-one producer of golf balls.
Michelin
Speaking of tires, it’s often said that the Michelin tire company created their restaurant rating system to get people to drive more and wear down their tires faster, but it’s a little more complicated than that. In 1900, people had to be convinced to buy and drive cars at all, so Michelin began publishing car-specific travel guides that included where to get gas, what time the sun set at different times of year (because there were no street lights), and yes, the best hotels and restaurants. Specifically, the hotels they could convince to adopt car-friendly policies like free parking and the restaurants that were “worth the trip.”
Now you know, once our car-centric society has destroyed the planet and global warming kills us all, you can blame the French.
