MetLife Inc.: One of the largest global providers of insurance

MetLife, formed in 1863, is the United States’ largest life insurer. It was founded by a group of businessmen from the metropolitan district of New York.

They raised $100,000 to found the National Union Life & Limb Insurance Company. The group wanted to ensure Civil War soldiers and sailors that they would be taken care of when they got home.

That assurance would become the foundation of insurance and the ethos of newly named Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which primary sold life insurance to the middle class in its early years.

Metropolitan became a mutual company in 1915 and began offering group insurance two years later.

The founders chose the name because they had been most successful in New York City, or the Metropolitan district.

In 1991, MetLife became the largest issuer of life insurance in all of North America, with over one trillion dollars of insurance in force. In 2000 MetLife ‘demutualized’ and became a publicly traded company. The following year it was allowed to enter the retail banking business.

It acquired New Jersey-based Grand Bank and renamed it MetLife bank in August 2000.
MetLife Inc.:One of the largest global providers of insurance

Universal Studio

The oldest studio in the United States, Universal was founded in 1912 by Carl Laemmle and others. An early nickelodeon owner, in 1909 he founded the Yankee Film Company, which evolved into the Independent Moving Pictures Company, producing some of the first films in the early 20th century.

Although production was in New York City at this time, in 1915 he purchased a large area of land in the north side of Hollywood, which became a filmmaking complex known as Universal City.

In 1915, Laemmle opened the largest production facility, Universal City Studio, which became the largest studio in Hollywood for a decade.  All studio operations were moved to this location.

On August 29, 1936, Universal’s creditors took over the studio for $4.5 million. The takeover was largely due to the studio’s 1935/36 combined loss of $1.098 million and it was taken over by Standard Capital. It was renamed the New Universal Studios.

The years later, on November 12, 1946, Universal merged with International Pictures to form Universal-International. In 1952, Universal-International was taken over by Decca Records.

With TV movies, Universal became the largest supplier of network broadcast television programming, reaching a crest in 1977 by providing Roots, the most popular TV movie of its era.

Currently Universal Studios is owned b COMCAST, a division of the mega media conglomerate NBCUniversal.
Universal Studio

L-Brands

Leslie "Les" H. Wexner was born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents in 1937. Young Wexner dreamed of becoming an architect but was discouraged by his father and instead went to Ohio State University to study business and law.

In 1963, Wexner take $5000 loan from a family member, he opened his own clothing store in Columbus, Ohio, called, simply ‘The Limited’. His ambitious were modest.

Wexner saw new business opportunities by innovating specialty stores in shopping malls to compete with the former dominance of department stores in the United States in clothing retailing.

In its first year, The Limited achieved $160,000 in sales – about 60 percent more than he had expected. A year later, he opened his second store and by 1970 he had eleven stores.

After the company went public in 1969, he used some of the profit from the stock sale to further expand, and had built the chain up to 100 stores by 1976.

Two years later, Wexner opened a distribution center in Columbus the size of 20 football fields, the center shipped new products to stores consistently every few weeks, instead of at the start of every season, as had been custom at the time.

Wexner saw an opportunity in 1982 with the struggling lingerie company Victoria’s Secret. Wexner stepped in, bought it for a million dollars and embarked upon a major overhaul.

In May 2002, the company changed its name from the Limited Inc to Limited Brands Inc. in a move designed to focus attention on the company’s core of more profitable brands.
L-Brands

Victoria's Secret

Roy Raymond founded Victoria’s Secret in 1977, because he found it awkward to buy lingerie for his wife in the typical department store. He borrowed $80,000 and opened the frost Victoria’s Secret store in a Palo Alto, California.

He built the kind of store he’d like to shop in- lots of wood paneled wall’s oriental rugs, Victorian vanities, and a helpful staff. Raymond’s idea was to sell lingerie in a setting that made men not feel like they are cross-dressers, by making them feel comfortable by employing sexy and friendly sales women who were there to help men pick out the right silk slips, lacy brassieres and underwear.

Business was so good that he opened three more stores and started a mail order catalog with beautiful models tooling around in their underwear.

In 1982, just five years after opening the first Victoria’s Secret in the Stanford Shopping Center across from the university, Raymond sold out to The Limited, which adhered closely to his formula as it expanded into shopping malls across the country.

Le Wexner, who founded The Limited clothing stores, took Victoria’s Secret to new heights by expanding the stores into shopping malls throughout the world.

In the 1990s, the company began hiring some of the most popular models to pose for their catalogs and ad campaigns.

In the fall of 1995, the Limited, attempting to lure stockholders to invest in its more profitable lingerie operations, spun off Victoria’s Secret as a separate unit, retaining 83 percent ownership and offering the rest for public ownership through a stock offering.
Victoria's Secret

The birth of AT&T

AT&T can trace its root back to Alexander Graham Bell. American Telephone & Telegraph Company was founded after Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876. It was created to facilitate the growth of the long-distance telephone business.

AT&T had been established in 1885 and granted a monopoly for phone service in the United States.  The company opened its first long distance line, which connected Philadelphia and New York.

AT&T established a research lab, Bell Laboratories. Bell labs made major invention, including transistor in the 1940s.

AT &T became the parent company of the Bell System in 1899, after the company acquired the assets of American Bell Telephone, thus becoming AT&T Inc.

However, it suffered when the economy turned down after the turn of the 20th century and its debt levels mounted.

J.P Morgan and other investment bankers moved in to take control of the company, as it had with many other companies it combined during the first merger wave.
The birth of AT&T

History of Aston Martin

In 1912, when Lionel Martin and Robert Bamford set up their modest mechanical business Bamford and Martin Ltd in Henniker place, Chelsea, it was possible for tiny concerns such as theirs to operate burgeoning motor car manufacturing business. Martin and Bamford met each other while selling cars.

They decided that they wanted to quit selling cars and started making their own.  They added ‘Aston’ to the name for a hill where Lionel Martin raced car.

In 1922, Aston Martin built two cars to compete in the French Grand Prix. The Aston Martin racing team also broke ten world records in 1922. In 1932 an Aston Martin International racing model own the Biennal Cup at Le Mans.

In 1925, Aston Martin displayed its wares at the Olympia Motor Show for the first time. Bamford left soon after war’s end. Martin left in 1925, after production had begun in 1923 and around 50 road cars had been produced, along with some competition specials.

Between 1925 and the outbreak of World War II Aston Martin was kept alive by a string of individuals. Due to financial problems, in 1932, Sutherland bought the company. In 1947, David Brown Limited bought Aston Martin.

It was under David Brown Limited’s leadership that Aston Martin created the world-famous DB series.
History of Aston Martin

Perrier Sparkling water

In 1989, Perrier, one of the most distinguished names in bottle water sold one billion bottles of sparkling water, riding high on the wave of 1980s health consciousness.

Perrier, the sparkling water from Languedoc in the south France, is largely given credit for starting the current bottled water craze in the United States.

The spring, which has bubbled up 21,000 gallons an hour since then, is claimed to have slaked the thirst of Hannibal and his troops 2,200 years ago and bathed Romans in the first century. They stumbled on odd pond in southern France, where cold spring water bubbled as if it were boiling.

In the Middle Ages the French took to bathing in the water and lying in the mud around the spring.

In 1860, a Dr. Perrier bought what local had called Les Bouillens, or ‘bubbling waters’ and changed the name to Source Perrier.

Three years later, Emperor Napoleon III authorized by decree the bottling of its water.

The Perrier company, named for Dr. Louis Perrier, owned the spring for a brief period from 1898 to 1903, began selling bottled water in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century.  In 1903, A.W. St. John Harmsworth bought the spring from Perrier and formed Compagnie de la Source Perrier.

He brought over his university friend, Reginald Southwell, to build machinery which would bottle the water as it pump up from the ground at a rate nearly 100 000 liters an hour.

By the 1930s, the company was selling almost 20 million bottles per year.

The sale of bottled water began modestly enough as a trend in the 1970s, when Perrier introduced bottled sparkling water to urban professionals via small green glass bottles.

Immediately, bottled water became associated with conspicuously consumption, and unnecessary purchased designed to simply show off wealth.

Perrier first crossed the ocean in the early 1900s but wasn’t actively marketed here until 1977.

In 2002, Perrier unveiled the Perrier Fluo brand. Perrier Fluo is an innovative soft drink whose unique taste produces sensory and emotional reactions.
Perrier Sparkling water

Wall’s ice cream

In 1919, Sausage maker Thomas Wall purchased Friars Place House in Acton, London and its ground for a factory making sausages.  He concerned about the cost of having to run his factory during the summer-off season, diversified into ice cream.

In 1922, ice cream manufacturing began at the factory to make use of the spare capacity in the summer.

Ice cream was sold from tricycles, and the phrase ‘Stop me and buy one’ became very familiar to ice cream consumers. Following of Wall’s invention of the tricycles the mass production of ice cream made it the first frozen food to enter working-class diet.

Wall’s became part of Unilever in 1929. Wall’s began to supply refrigerators on hire to cinemas and sweet shops, by 1939, they supplied 15,000 shops and had a turnover or about £1.5 m.

For home consumption, the firm operated 8,500 tricycles on the streets and had 136 depots all over the country to supply them.

Wall’s then became the largest ice-cream manufacturer in the world, as it still is today, after company’s expansion into markets in Western Europe and North America.
Wall’s ice cream

The Origin of Sunkist Soda Brand

In 1905, with cooperative marketing aided to farmers California Fruit Growers was created.

The California Fruit Growers’ Exchange adopted the Sunkist name in 1908 and subsequently began wrapping individual oranges in tissue paper stamped with Sunkist label.

They later then changed the name to Sunkist Growers Inc. in 1952.

The Sunkist name, so strongly linked in consumers’ minds with fresh orange juice was just the kind of ready made brand advantage for the company.

Whenever Sunkist products communicate health, vitality and vitamin C, they are helping the Sunkist brand.

In 1977, General cinema set up a new company, Sunkist Soft Drinks, Inc.

Sunkist Growers, Inc. gave General Cinema Corporation the right to sell Sunkist orange soda.

In 1978 General Cinema took a leading position in the orange soda market with the introduction of Sunkist Orange Soda.

In the same year Sunkist entered metropolitan New York with its new range soda snatched 2 percent of the market.
The Origin of Sunkist Soda Brand

Hy-Vee

In 1930 two Iowa businessmen formed a grocery store partnership. Charles Hyde and David Vredenburg already had separately owned or managed several stores in Iowa and Missouri before starting their partnership's first store, a general retail store in Beaconsfield, Iowa, that sold groceries and dry goods such as clothing.


For a few years both founders continued to run separate stores and stores with other partners, while also running some stores together. 

However, in 1934 these general stores with such names as The Supply Stores, Hyde Service Store, and Vredenburg Grocery began selling only groceries.

In 1938 the original partnership was dissolved when Hyde & Vredenburg was incorporated. The new operation, with 15 stores in Iowa and Missouri, was owned by 16 store managers who traded ownership in local stores for corporate stock.


Thus began the company's heritage of being an employee-owned organization. The new corporation headquartered in Lamoni, Iowa, chose Dwight Vredenburg, a son of the cofounder, as its president. Its 1938 annual sales were about $1.5 million. 

In 1940 Hy-Vee found its customers were reluctant to start using 'baskets on wheels,' or grocery carts, said Dwight Vredenburg in the February 20, 2000 Des Moines Register. First introduced in its Centerville, Iowa store, the carts reminded women of baby buggies, and men felt the carts were 'for sissies whose arms weren't strong enough to carry a few groceries.' But free candy bars in each new cart soon persuaded customers to try the new contraptions.


In the 1970s Hy-Vee continued to grow by opening new stores, building more warehouse space, and adding new technology. A 1971 addition of 78,000 square feet brought the total capacity of the Chariton warehouse up to 430,000 square feet. 

In addition, in 1976 the company built a secondary warehouse/office complex in Cherokee, Iowa. Hy-Vee started stores in three additional states during the decade: South Dakota in 1975, Nebraska in 1977, and Illinois in 1979. 

Other company landmarks for the decade included the opening of the 100th store, in Keokuk, Iowa (also the first store in the chain to use electronic cash registers), and surpassing the $500 million annual sales mark, in 1978, for the first time.