Hard to explain in the title. What I’m looking for are commercial products very different from the types of products the manufacturer is best known for. For instance, Panasonic used to make bikes, and you can buy Goodyear garden hoses.
Perhaps my favorite is the Thiokol Snowcat, brought to you by the same company that made the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters. What can you expect from a company that started out in the synthetic rubber business and ended up building rockets?
Similar situation with Aerojet. It was a division of General Tire for many years. Their board meetings must have been interesting. “Gentlemen, in conclusion we are strongly positioned in the growing market for tractor tires. Next item on the agenda: a progress report from the boys in R&D who’ve been working on a booster engine for the Titan missile.”
In both cases the connection between rockets and rubber is that solid rocket propellant is rubberlike. But General Tire also owned some radio stations as well as the RKO movie studio. Talk about diversification.
Another one: the Frigidaire appliance brand used to be owned by GM. I vividly remember an old fridge in my uncle’s basement with a big nameplate reading “GENERAL MOTORS” vertically down the front.
Sears once sold a car called the Allstate. It was produced by Henry J. Kaiser, of the short lived auto company Kaiser-Fraser. Kaiser was a builder of ships during WWII, if my memory is correct.
Bic, the company familiar to everyone for selling pens, razors, and lighters also has a watersports division that sells surfboards, kayaks, and the like. They also used to be in the funeral products and services business, until 2010 when they sold off that division.
The Brunswick Corporation, in business in one form or another since 1845, has gone from billiard tables, to records and phonographs (and a brief fling with refrigerators), to bowling equipment and boats - with quite a few interesting ventures in between (WW2 drone aircraft?).
Nintendo originally made playing cards. The company did well selling decks of cards but figured there was no obvious place to expand that business. So they tried a variety of different areas such as taxi services, hotels, television production, and snack food. Most of these ventures failed but one of them - video games - was a big success.
Pixar started out designing medical equipment. They developed some in-house animations as part of a sales promotion for some computer monitors they were selling. The animations were very popular, so they did more, and eventually they ended up selling off their medical equipment business to go into animation fulltime.
The way I heard it was that the first M-16s had really crummy plastic stocks. The soldiers who were armed with them joked that it was the first gun made by Mattel. Granted, that isn’t necessarily a true story, either.
And when they decided to have a go at taking care of the shipyard workers’ health, that became what is now a giant HMO called Kaiser Permanente.
Ironically, some of the ships that were being built at the Kaiser yards were thrown together so quickly, they had an unfortunate tendency to break and sink, earning them the name “Kaiser Coffins.”
Western Electric is best known for making telephones, but in their early years, they also made small appliances such as desk fans and sewing machines.
We could also use a category for mega conglomerates like GE, Siemens and 3M:
[ul]
[li]GE makes everything from clock radios, light bulbs, CT and MRI scanners, medical records systems, nuclear reactors and consumer credit. [/li][li]Siemens makes mobile phones, locomotives, power generation and health care equipment.[/li][li]3M produces a wild array of adhesives, abrasives, medical products and pet treats.[/li][/ul]
