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2014-01-20 13:09:08
By Angela Henshall
Hell hath no fury like a consumer or rival scorned.
Grumbling, grizzling and general indignation over everything from poor customer
service to impossible clothes sizing has you all riled. You aren t alone. There
is a lot of exasperation out there.
Maybe you should put some of that aggression to good use? Frustration has
clearly sparked some brilliant entrepreneurial business solutions.
BBC Capital wanted to dig a little deeper in to the mindset of the grumpy
innovator so we went to online question-and-answer site Quora to find out which
successful businesses have started solely in angry reaction to another
business? Here are some that stood out to Quora users.
Sparking innovation through rivalry
Rivalry among inventors has long-fuelled some of the best creations of the
modern age. Shriharsha Kumar Konda suggested Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.
And also added: Do the names Rudolph and Adolph Dassler ring any bells? They
re two brothers who started companies in their small town of Herzogenaurach,
Germany. They began working together in their mother s laundry room in the
1920s before suffering from a huge falling out and moving their separate ways.
Konda said: If the Dassler brothers don t sound familiar to you, maybe the
names of their companies do. How about Puma and Adidas? That s right, the two
athletic giants were started by the brothers.
Gaurav Harode nominated entrepreneur Reed Hastings who started Netflix because
he had to pay $40 for a movie he rented from Blockbuster and was late in
returning it. The movie was Apollo 13.
Retail rage
Shopping for sharp tailoring can prove an irritating task, particularly for
those with unusual measurements, wrote Aaron Ellis. Donald Fisher (who went on
to found the Gap clothing chain) once couldn't find a store in the San
Francisco Bay Area that sold Levi's jeans in his size and all stores refused to
accommodate him, Ellis wrote.
Citing Fisher s story on the Gap website, Ellis described Fisher s numerous
hurdles when he tried to return some ill-fitting jeans he d ordered. Fisher
needed a 34-inch waist, 31-inch length leg and yet every pair he tried in a
particular store was 30-inches long. The salesman suggested taking the pants to
a city department store, instead.
Fisher took him up on the idea, and asked his wife and business partner, Doris,
to visit a department store in San Francisco. She found a Levi s display table
in the basement and cringed at the mess. But she sorted through the items and
reported back that they carried only even sizes. He tried another floor. Same
problem. He tried another department store. Again, no luck.
Ellis wrote: So Fisher thought what if someone put together all the styles,
colours and sizes Levi Strauss had to offer in one store? The Gap clothing
empire was born.
Meanwhile Fred Landis offered the success of FedEx versus the US Postal Service
(USPS) as a further example. Originally the postal service had a legal
monopoly on the delivery of documents. The medical, banking, and legal
professions were angry with this situation, Landis wrote. FedEx came up with
an overnight document delivery system that exploited a loophole in the law
giving USPS a monopoly. Because FedEx had access to its own planes the business
did not have to wait for the documents to be placed on passenger airlines, he
added.