30+ Little-Known Facts About Brands That Might Surprise Even the Biggest Shopaholics

Very often, when we buy some product, we don’t even think about the history behind the company that produces it. And many brands have amazing facts in their biographies that make them really different from others.

We at Bright Side were really curious about the outstanding facts we learned about some famous companies and we decided to share them with you.

M.A.C.

• The first M.A.C. products were literally made in a kitchen. 2 friends were making the products at home and selling them at salons.
• The main clients of the company were professional photographers and makeup artists because the beauty products were really resilient. Soon, all the products that were made for fashion runways became accessible to any woman.
• M.A.C. became truly successful in 1990 when Madonna asked the brand to create a red lipstick that would be good for several hours on stage. Especially for the singer, they made the famous Russian Red, which is still iconic today.

Hermès Birkin

• One of the most famous bags in the world is the Hermès Birkin. According to a study, buying this accessory may be a better investment than buying gold because the price of gold might fluctuate, but the price of a Birkin continues to grow at a rate of about 14.2% a year.
• Today, this bag is very popular among collectors, for example, Victoria Beckham has over 100 of them.
• This legendary accessory happened in the air, on a plane, where Jean-Louis Dumas, one of the heads of Hermès, and actress Jane Birkin were sitting. After Jane complained about the fact that there was no comfortable handbag for everyday use, Jean-Louis decided to create this bag.
• Soon after that, Jane was invited to the head office of Hermès, where she was asked to choose the best draft. One year later, the company made a big bag that was a great choice for short trips. Its main advantage was its comfortable pockets. The accessory was then named after the famous English actress.
• Over time, the Hermès Birkin has become a true legend, and despite its high price, a lot of people want to buy it.
• When it first went on the market in 1984, the bag cost around $2,000, today, the price starts at $11,000.

Tefal

• The story of the famous Tefal frying pans started in 1954 when the French engineer and fisherman, Marc Grégoire, tried to make his rod more comfortable, So, he decided to cover the aluminum surface with polytetrafluoroethylene.
• Soon after that, Marc Grégoire’s wife asked him to try the material on her pans. The result was amazing because they created a surface that nothing would stick to. It was a great thing for hundreds of thousands of women.
• 2 years later, the company Tefal was set up that made cooking pans with this non-stick surface. The name was made from 2 words: TEFlon and ALuminium. By the end of 1956, the company was making 100 frying pans a day and by the end of 1961, they were producing about one million pans a month.
• Once the Tefal pans were being sold all around the world, Grégoire decided to give control to more experienced managers and he continued to concentrate on inventions. For example, Tefal was the first company to come up with the wireless iron.

Louis Vuitton

• The famous Louis Vuitton bag was made in 1930. This model was called Speedy 30. The thing was that it only came in one size and was 30 centimeters in width.
• Soon, actress Audrey Hepburn, who was pretty petite, asked Louis Vuitton to make a smaller version of the Speedy for her, so she could not only use it on trips but also every day. The company listened to the actress and released the Speedy 25, which is a classic today.
• Now there are 5 sizes in this line: nano, 25, 30, 35, and 40.
• Throughout its whole history, Louis Vuitton has never done any sales. At the end of each year, the company burns the products that didn’t sell in order to keep the brand exclusive.

Louboutin

• The founder of the company, Christian Louboutin, was born in Paris into a poor family with many children and he was always interested in fashion. According to him, he got interested in shoes in 1976 when he visited the National Museum of Arts of Africa and Oceania. There, he saw a sign that prohibited women from entering the building wearing high heels because they could damage the wooden floor. “I wanted to defy that,” Louboutin said. “I wanted to create something that broke rules and made women feel confident and empowered.”
• He founded the Christian Louboutin company in 1991. The first person who bought his shoes was Caroline, the Princess of Hanover. She was the first to create desire around this shoe brand.
• The famous red soles appeared in 1993. When the designer actually saw his projects in real life, he didn’t like the shoes, he said it was as if they lacked energy. In order to make the design more lively, he took red nail polish and painted the soles. Later, he said he knew it would be a huge success.
• Louboutin shoes are often counterfeited. Christian himself filed a lot of lawsuits, for example, against another famous brand — Yves Saint Laurent. So, the court decided that Louboutin had the exclusive right to make shoes with red soles if the top color was different and Yves Saint Laurent could make shoes with red soles only if the top was the same color.

Chupa Chups

• Confectioner Enric Bernat invented the famous candy on a stick in 1958. As the legend goes, he saw a mother that was getting angry at a child for getting his hands dirty with melted candy. Then, Enric decided to make a candy especially for kids.
• At first, Bernat decided to name his product “Gol,” meaning ball, but then he decided that it wasn’t a very memorable name.
• In the end, it was named Chupa Chups. The name of the brand comes from the Spanish verb chupar, meaning “to suck.”
• To sell the products better, Enric Bernat told the owners of stores to put them next to the cash registers, where kids could reach them.
• In the beginning, the sticks in Chupa Chups were made of wood.
• In 1980, the company started an anti-tobacco campaign with the posters where cowboys had Chupa Chups sticks in their mouths.
• In the ’90s, many celebrities started to appear eating Chupa Chups. For example, Madonna, Uma Thurman, and Michael Jackson. This is how Chupa Chups made their segue into no longer being just for children.

Nutella

• In 1946, Italian confectioner Pietro Ferrero made the first batch of this cocoa flavored spread. It wasn’t sold in jars, but it looked like blocks sold in tin foil. Then the confectioner realized he didn’t have enough chocolate — it was hard to come by at the time. So, Ferrero decided to add hazelnut.
• The business was taken over by his son and in the ’60s he released the spread in glass jars. It was called Nutella. According to the classic recipe, every 400-gram jar contains 52 hazelnuts, almost a glass of milk, and a bit of cocoa.
• Global production in 2013 was about 350,000 tonnes.
• The slogan of the brand sounds like this, “Che mondo sarebbe senza Nutella?” which can be translated as, “What would the world be like without Nutella?”

Tiffany & Co.

• This jewelry brand was founded in 1837 in New York, by Charles Tiffany and his classmate John Young. These young guys borrowed $1,000 from Charles’s father and opened a jewelry store.
• But over time, things got better, and very soon the company made their first mail-order catalog in the US known as the “Blue Book.” Since then, this special blue shade has been the signature color of the brand.
• Tiffany & Co developed the design of the modern engagement ring. Before, diamonds were very deep in rings which is why they couldn’t reflect as much light and didn’t look as sparkly. So, the experts at Tiffany decided to raise the diamond above the ring to make it more visible.
• For a long time, the company has been the official supplier of jewels for royalty in Europe.
• Thanks to the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, everyone around the world found out about the company. But people were wondering, how could someone have breakfast at a store if there was no cafe? It turned out that when Truman Capote was writing his novel, there was a popular joke in New York about a guy from the rural area that wanted to look like a city guy. When he was asked about which restaurant in New York he would like to have breakfast at, he said, “Let’s have breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Levi’s

• In 1853, an immigrant from Bavaria, Levi Strauss, was bringing different products to San Francisco. He sold everything before the ship even got to the city.
• Soon, he opened the Levi Strauss & Co store. At some point, they started making pants out of a softer French fabric called Serge de Nime. To make it easier to say, they started to just call it denim.
• In 1872, a Latvian Jewish immigrant, Jacob Davis, had an idea to fix the pockets with metal pins. So, he and Levi patented this idea and the pants became even more popular.
• It is interesting that Levi Strauss himself never wore the pants made by his company because they were meant for the working class and he was a wealthy businessman.
• In 1935, jeans became a fashion trend and since the ’50s, they have been seen on famous celebrities like Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. And Marlon Brando even appeared in Levi’s jeans in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Are you interested in the history of famous brands or do you only care about the quality of the products?