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The Larkin Soap Company
- iwaztomack 2y agoWhat's the catch? Why post this?
- ars 2y agoI assume it's because it's (it was) a startup, and HN likes reading about those, and what they did different to ensure success.
- iwaztomack 2y agoA startup from ... the 1800's? Thanks for the context, I guess.
- sfblah 2y ago[flagged]
- teruakohatu 2y ago> What's the catch? Why post this? If you are a new user, I suggest reading the guidelines [1]. > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- iwaztomack 2y agoBeen here for 10 years. :) I think there should be a higher standard than just posting random links without context. How about a single line of text explaining why it is interesting to them?
- infecto 2y agoYour comments in this post are low quality and add nothing to the discussion. Ironic considering your complaining about peopling posting links that get voted on.
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoA cautionary tale maybe. Any company can fold rather quickly. Just some strife, some headwinds, etc... How stable is Boeing right now? "Internal struggles among the next generation of Larkin executives and the loss of key executives, precipitated the demise of the company. Sales fell from a high of $28.6 million in 1920 to $2 million by 1939.[2] The company was sold in 1941, liquidated in 1942,[6] and the new owners continued a mail-order business until 1962.[3]"
- silisili 2y agoWhat fascinated me was that a driver for their demise was the rise of the department store and automobile hurting their mail order business. Nearly 100 years later, the department store has demised because of the rise of a slightly faster form of mail order business.
- labster 2y agoEverything old is new again. Had Sears gone back to focus on mail order instead of spending their waning years trying to save retail, they could have got Amazon's business before it was started. But instead they killed the catalog in 1993, one year before Amazon was founded.
- paulcole 2y ago> Had Sears gone back to focus on mail order instead of spending their waning years trying to save retail, they could have got Amazon's business before it was started I strongly disagree with this speculation. Amazon’s benefit wasn’t just being there first. It was being there first and being Amazon. Sears was fucked because they were 100+ years old and hadn’t innovated in decades and were entering a period that would be defined by innovation. They just didn’t have it in them. Sure maybe they stave off failure by a few more years and then maybe they get a series of increasingly lucky breaks afterwards and then they do keep Amazon from becoming Amazon. But it’s far far far far from a sure thing that would result from simply pivoting back to mail order.
- JSDevOps 2y agoShame no wonder They didn’t make it. They didn’t pivot to AI soap