Apple, Macintosh
From little seeds mighty brands grow, but sometimes it’s a bit hard to separate the fruit from the hokum.
The origin of the Apple name is the stuff of multiple legends, but the core story is simple. Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs, Apple’s founders, had been high-school friends who had both gone on to work in Silicon Valley after graduation. Wozniak was especially interested in designing a new kind of computer, and when he eventually came up with what would become the Apple I, Jobs suggested that they try to market the machine. Needing a name for their partnership, the pair settled on “Apple” for several reasons: (1) Jobs had once spent a summer working at an apple farm and considered apples the perfect fruit; (2) Jobs also was a big Beatles fan and admired the group’s Apple Corp. label and marketing firm, and (3) they were in a hurry to get started and neither Jobs nor Wozniak could think of a better name.
On April 1, 1976, Apple Computer, Inc. was launched. As a tribute to the Beatles, the name must be counted as a mixed success, since Apple Computer has, since its founding, been sued three times by the Beatles’ Apple Records for trademark infringement.
The next step was to come up with a logo. A friend named Ron Wayne created the first version, featuring Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree to convey a sense of innovative inspiration.
For his help, Jobs and Wozniak gave Wayne 10 percent of the company. But Jobs didn’t really like the logo, considering it too cluttered, and soon pressed for adopting a simple apple silhouette. Unfortunately, according to Jobs, the result looked more like an orange than an apple, so the distinctive bite from the side of the fruit was added and the famous Apple logo was born.
Meanwhile, Ron Wayne was happy to own 10 percent of the young company until he realized he was liable for 10 percent of its debts as well, so he quickly sold his shares for $500, thus ensuring his place in the Bad Business Decision Hall of Fame.
The Macintosh computer line, introduced by Apple in 1984, takes its name from the popular apple breed, which in turn harks back to the Scottish surname MacIntosh, which means “Son of the Chieftain.” Apparently Jobs actually wanted to call the machine “the Apple Bicycle,” and even after his suggestion was rejected stubbornly made a point of referring to the Mac as “a bicycle for the mind.”
Levis
If Levi Strauss had stayed home, chances are we’d all be wearing corduroy and that whoosh-whoosh noise would have driven us mad years ago.
Fortunately the inventor of the modern blue jeans, born Loeb Strauss in Bavaria in 1829, was never a man to sit still. Along with his mother and two sisters, Strauss sailed for the new world in 1847 and quickly went to work in his half-brothers’ dry goods business in New York City.
Within a few years, Loeb had changed his first name to Levi, become an American citizen, and set out for San Francisco to bring the family dry goods business to the West Coast, then blossoming as a market in the heady days of the Gold Rush.
For the next twenty years, Levi sold blankets, pillows, clothing and the like all over the western U.S., and gained a reputation for honest goods and business practices. Much of the work clothing he sold was made of denim (from “serge de Nimes,” serge cloth from the town of Nimes in France), a rugged and durable cotton fabric popular among miners. (Denim pants were also known as “jeans,” due to a bit of popular confusion with “jean” cloth, a less durable cotton/wool blend named for Genoa, Italy.)
In 1872, Strauss received a letter from a Nevada tailor named Jacob Davis, who explained that he had come up with a way to strengthen the only weak points found in the denim pants he made. By adding metal rivets at stress points such as the pockets, Davis had eliminated the eventual tears that annoyed his customers, and they were ecstatic. Davis wanted to patent his invention, but lacked the funds, and proposed a business partnership with Strauss.
Levi Strauss agreed, and with the new invention and his marketing skills built the business that more than any other convinced Americans to adopt blue jeans as their national uniform.
Keds
If at first you don’t succeed, change a consonant. But be sure to pick the right consonant.
Back in the late 18th century, rubber-soled canvas shoes were becoming popular in both Europe and the U.S. Sure-footed, comfortable and nearly silent compared to leather-soled boots and shoes, rubber-soled footwear even gave us the slang term “gumshoe” from the gum-rubber soled shoes favored by detectives on the prowl for miscreants.
In 1892, nine small companies joined together to form the U.S. Rubber Company. One of the member companies, the oddly-named Goodyear Metallic Rubber Shoe Company, happened to hold the license to Charles Goodyear’s “vulcanization” process, a revolutionary technology of heat-bonding rubber to fabric that was far superior to the old-fashioned glue method.
Within a few years of their confederation, the constituent companies of U.S. Rubber were marketing rubber-soled shoes under a bewildering array of thirty different brand names, and by 1913 the need to agree on a single brand had become obvious.
The first choice for a brand name was the logical and catchy “Peds,” from the Latin “ped” meaning “foot.” Unfortunately, “Peds” was already trademarked by one of the few companies not part of U.S. Rubber, so management apparently then sang a few rounds of “The Name Song” (Pedda pedda fo fedda, me mi mo fedda…), trying out new initial consonants. After exhausting all 25 permutations of “Keds,” two candidates remained by 1916: “Veds” and “Keds.” The choice between the wispy and vaguely creepy “Veds” and the hard-consonant All-American “Keds” was a no-brainer, and soon kids were skinning their knees in Keds sneakers all over the U.S. More fashionable and fancier rubber-soled shoes may have grabbed the spotlight since then, but Keds, now manufactured by The Stride Rite Corporation, keep ticking along.