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Top 10 businesses started in
a garage
Garages can be used for a multitude of things. Car storage is the obvious
one, but Australian garages also contain everything from discarded
electronics to framed sporting memorabilia. However, the humble garage isn’t
just a storage space. It can provide the ideal space to launch a new
business, as last week’s naming of iiNet founder Michael Malone as Ernst &
Young Entrepreneur of the Year demonstrates. |
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As Malone told us last year, iiNet launched in his mother’s garage,
only moving due to the extraordinary amount of phone lines he needed
installed to the premises. I’d love to say it was a plan but in reality, we
had 300 phone lines coming to my mum’s house by then. Telstra were very
accommodating but they ran out of capacity,” he recalled. “Their
recommendation was the CBD because it was the only place they felt they
could cope with our growth.” iiNet now has more than 500,000 customers in
Australia. But the businesses rise isn’t a one-off – indeed, some of the
world’s leading brands have grown from garage beginnings.
Here are the top 10 garage start-ups. You’ll never view your garage the same
way again.
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In
1976, two technology enthusiasts, Steve Wozniack and Steve Jobs, decided
they wanted to embark upon building a personal computer. They talked a local
electronics retailer into
 stocking
50 units, which the penniless duo had to fund on credit, based on their
first purchase order. The Steves’ hand-built the 50 computers in 30 days
from Wozniack’s garage in Cupertino, California. Thus, the world’s most
valuable technology company was born.
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Twenty-two years on from Apple’s genesis, another Californian garage was
spawning a brand that is now world-famous. Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented
the garage from Susan Wojcicki, who needed help paying her mortgage. For the
next five months, the duo worked on creating the search engine, in-between
raiding Wojcicki’s fridge and relaxing in her hot tub. Within a year they
had to move to what is known as the Googleplex. In 2006, Google bought the
house where it was conceived, while Wojcicki went on to work for the
business as vice president of product management.
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In 1994, Jeff Bezos decided he wanted to exploit the fledgling online retail
space by launching his own book selling portal. From his garage in Bellvue,
Washington, Bezos launched
 Amazon,
which went on to sell its first book – Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts
and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of
Thought – in 1995. By 1999, Bezos was Time magazine’s Person of the Year,
while Amazon is now the world’s largest online retailer.
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Another Californian garage start-up, Disney came about when young animator
Walt Disney set up shop in his uncle Robert’s premises after winning a
contract to produce a series of
 cartoons
based on Alice in Wonderland.
Within a few months, Disney had shifted to a small office in downtown Los
Angeles.
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Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard graduated from Stanford University in 1935 and
decided to launch a business together. Four years later, the duo created HP
in Packard’s garage with a
 start-up
investment of $538. Although Packard won a coin toss to decide the business’
title, Hewlett’s name eventually ended up being first. HP’s first product
was an audio oscillator sold, co-incidentally, to Walt Disney.
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Formed by a combination of founders Harold “Matt” Matson and Elliot
Handler’s names, Mattel started life as a picture frame company, launching
from a garage space in 1945.
 Handler’s
wife Ruth started making doll’s houses from the wood left over from the
picture frames, a profitable sideline that convinced the founders that
switching to toys would be a good idea.
In 1901, childhood friends William Harley and Arthur Davidson began work on
a motorised bicycle from a Milwaukee garage. After realising that the engine
was hopelessly
 underpowered,
the friends built what is considered the first Harley-Davidson motorbike.
Five years later, they moved to a nearby factory space, which is the
company’s headquarters to this day.
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While vacuuming in his house in 1978, UK engineer James Dyson became
frustrated at the loss of suction power from his clogged-up Hoover. While
visiting a local sawmill, Dyson
 realised
that large industrial cyclones used to remove sawdust from the air could be
applied to vacuum cleaners. Dyson’s tinkerings were rejected by every major
manufacturer for five years, plunging him and his wife into debt. The couple
began growing their own vegetables and sewing up old clothes in order to
save money, a decision that paid off when Dyson eventually got the
breakthrough that changed the industry forever.
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Australia’s garages are also a source of start-up innovation. In 2007,
Sydney entrepreneur Matt Barrie bought a website from a Swedish man, renamed
it Freelancer.com and started
 running
the fledgling business from his garage with one employee. With a few tweaks
the site was pulling in so much traffic that it was crashing almost every
day. Barrie had to re-write the code after six months and the website was
able to grow globally, with 40% of outsourced jobs now coming from the US
compared to 5% from Australia.
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While Grabble, a tech newbie not even into its second year, cannot be
compared to the likes of Apple and Amazon, there are high hopes that the
business will follow in these illustrious
 footsteps.
Founded in a Wollongong garage by Stuart Argue and Anthony Marcar, Grabble
provides retailers a point-of-service app for purchases. Picked up by the
Startmate accelerator program, Grabble have gone from Wollongong to the US
in record time, after being acquired by retail giant Wal-Mart.
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producing
jam and selling it in the neighbourhood. He left school at the age of 16 to
fully concentrate on super jam. In 2007, he began supplying super jam to 184
Waitrose stores. Nowadays Fraser Doherty currently supplies to all major UK
stores and had sales of over 1.2 million dollars in 2011.
enough
money to form his company, Cheers and Tears. Cameron then participated in
several ventures including creating EZ mail, an email forwarding software,
surfingprice.com, an online advertising company. By fifteen years old, he
was receiving monthly cheques of up to 400,000 dollars.
from
her mother and creating a website,whateverlife.com in 2004.The website
focused on providing HTML tutorials for young people and providing free My
space layouts.
hosting
space and hosting several e-commerce sites. By the time he was 19 years old,
this British teenager was making over 10 million dollars annually.
girls,
is filled with celebrity gossip, games, quizzes and lots of feature
articles. She has also launched a line of Miss O and friends books.
2005.
The site has over 5 million users and has survived the Facebook domination.
and
internet users on how to get rid of computer viruses and how to upgrade your
home PC. Subscriptions and advertising brought in the dollars for this lucky
little man.
orders
of over 1.5 million dollars making him a millionaire at 14.