What’s the most successful company to only produce a single unique product?
You might say something like GM because they make automobiles.
True but they don’t fit the question because they make many different models of automobiles.
You might say a publisher like Knopff because they make books. But no because they publish books by different authors on a wide range of subjects. see what I’m looking for?
Does the company have to market only a single brand? If not, a small company with one especially well-known brand and a stock price that rose six-fold over the past 9 years is WD-40 Company. It was founded (under another name) in 1953; beginning in 1995 it celebrated its success by acquiring some other brands.
Crocs? Spanx? Michelin? Someone will have to run the numbers.
Escort and Valentine One comes to mind.
Though at one time Escort drifted into making cordless telephones and different models of it’s original product, which I believe are the reasons why Mike Valentine left to start his own company.
IIRC Valentine only makes 1 product and the only other things it makes are accessories for that 1 product.
Does Exxon count? I’m sure they do more than gasoline, but that’s got to be 95% of their business.
Leatherman Tools, perhaps.
Zippo Manufacturing used to make only lighters, but it looks like they’ve recently branched out to other products due to a significant decrease in the lighter business.
No, no and no. Crocs come in different sizes and colors hence they are different products. Same for Spanx. Michelin makes many different types of tires, hence they don’t fit.
I’m looking for something like Ford back when all they made was the Model T with no options except for color, as long as it was black.
Valentine is close but the accessories disqualify it.
Exxon makes different grades of gasoline, hence multiple products, so no go.
as for Leatherman tools, seriously? Have you spent even 5 seconds on their http://leatherman.com website?
Not to threadshit but different sizes and colors of the same shoe count as different products now?
I think you’re going to struggle with such strict terms; a company that’s successful is going to have enough coin to have at least thrown out some variation of their main product at some point.
There’s a shop near me that sells one thing: hot pork sandwiches. They don’t offer a choice of bread or main filling, but even so you’d probably disqualify them because you can choose your own sauces and salad. I very much doubt you’ll get anything more high scale with such narrow restrictions.
Does Victorinox make anything other than Swiss Army knives? There is a range of blades though.
What about SeaGate? They only made harddrives. They improved the speed and capacity year upon year, so that sometimes last year’s was still available - cheaper - than this year’s model. But IIRC they only manufactured one model at a time.
Beyond different colors and sizes of the standard Crocs clog, the Crocs brand has a bunch of different types of footwear. Enough to fill a store.
Why wouldn’t they be different products? are they all priced the same?
How about Peabody Energy? Their single product is coal. They are the subject of John Prine’s song called Paradise which details the environmental devastation caused by their strip mining operations.
I think you’re moving the goalposts from your original question. You originally said:
Now, you’re defining it even more narrowly, saying that different colors or different sizes of the same product also don’t count. If what you meant was “exactly one product, with no variations whatsoever” (which is what it now sounds like you meant), you should have said that upfront.
I agree. Selling just yoga pants is one thing, no matter the variations in color, size, etc.
If you are wildly successful making one product, you pretty much inevitably branch our or get bought out. So I think the question would be more usefully phrased as “what company grew the largest on precisely one product before diversifying”. It’s less useful knowing who the biggest one is right this minute (because the biggest one will surely diversify soon). If you want to know “how big can a company get without diversifying?”. that’s the way to find out.
I suspect a service: Netflix-before-streaming, AOL, Yahoo, maybe. I don’t know when they moved past just an ISP/Just a search engine.
De Beers ?
How do you define “one product” in the software world? Also, how are you ranking success? By revenue? profit? market cap?
There are plenty of software companies that are valued at many hundreds of millions of dollars for single API offerings, especially in the Business Intelligence space. Stripe, for example, was for a long time valued at billions of dollars while only offering a single payments API (they’ve now branched into a few more things), do they count?
Does a company like Snapchat count for offering a single app (before they expanded into glasses and the like). What about Uber? Does offering multiple classes of cars fail the definition? Currently Spin bike is being valued at over $1B for offering a single type of scooter available for rent, does that count? WhatsApp, at the time of their acquisition by Facebook was valued at $22B and only had a single app offering (albeit on many platforms). What about Magic Leap that’s currently valued at $6B despite offering 0 products right now? At the launch of their Magic Leap One, will they count?
The Model T came in three different body styles - two, five, and seven seats -so even it doesn’t meet your requirements.
ETA: The reason for black being the only color was that only one paint - Japan black lacquer - dried fast enough. Paint was the bottleneck in the Model T assembly line.