[HN Gopher] The Larkin Soap Company
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       The Larkin Soap Company
        
       Author : samclemens
       Score  : 17 points
       Date   : 2024-10-13 03:41 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
        
       | iwaztomack wrote:
       | What's the catch? Why post this?
        
         | ars wrote:
         | I 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 wrote:
           | A startup from ... the 1800's? Thanks for the context, I
           | guess.
        
         | sfblah wrote:
         | Yeah! What's this have to do with Elon Musk? I demand more Musk
         | content!
        
         | teruakohatu wrote:
         | > 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
        
       | FrustratedMonky wrote:
       | A 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 wrote:
         | What 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 wrote:
           | Everything 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.
        
       | JSDevOps wrote:
       | Shame no wonder They didn't make it. They didn't pivot to AI soap
        
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       (page generated 2024-10-14 23:01 UTC)