Isaac Singer had 2 passions, being a travelling actor, and inventing and improving things. He used one to fund the other.

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Dave Young:
Welcome back to The Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here alongside Stephen Semple. Stephen, you told me that we’re, we’re going back in time. We’re revving up the time machine again to look at a brand that’s been around, boy, a long time. I’m anxious to find out how long, because I know it was around in Pioneer Times. Because when you read old books or Little House on the Prairie or look at an old Sears and Roebuck catalog, you could buy a Singer sewing machine. Singer is the brand that we’re going to talk about. It’s sort of been synonymous with sewing machines for long as I know.

Stephen Semple:
Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, it was founded in 1851 in New York.

Dave Young:
There we go.

Stephen Semple:
By Isaac Singer. But while we still know about them today, they are not the force they used to be. They used to be huge. For example, when they built their headquarters in New York, at the time, it was the world’s tallest building. They had a massive building in Russia. They had a huge factory in Scotland. At the time, it was one of the largest factories in the world. They were massive. When Isaac Singer died in 1875, his fortune was estimated to be $14 million, which is over a billion dollars today in today’s month.

Dave Young:
That’s in a period of 25 years or so, right?

Stephen Semple:
Right.

Dave Young:
That’s amazing.

Stephen Semple:
Isaac Singer was born in 1811 near Schaghticoke, and I’m butchering the name because it’s one of these ones that’s like an S and an H and a G and a T and a H and a K in New York. Basically it’s in Northern New York near the border of Vermont. Today, it’s still a small town of only about 8,000 people, so I can’t imagine how tiny it was back in 1811. At the age of 19, he’s an apprentice to a machinist, and at the same time he becomes a touring actor. He spent much of his life being a touring actor. He was married. He had a son. He moved to New York where he worked in a press shop.

But I got to say this, not a loyal guy. He went on tour again and married again. This happened several times. He had multiple wives who did not know about each other. This happened several times. But this time he had an idea. He went and worked for a little while as a laborer clearing boulders on the Illinois-Michigan canal. He’s clearing away rocks on the canal, and this gives him an idea to design and patent a rock drilling machine that he sold for $2,000. He created this patent, designed it, sold the patent, and he used this money to set up another touring company.

He goes out touring again, and he runs out of money, and eventually he’s back in New York where he set up a shop making wood type signs. He patented a type cutting machine for those big wooden signs that we used to see. Singer’s landlord is a guy by the name of Orson Phelps was making sewing machines, and it turns out they were hard to make. They were not reliable, and there were lots of returns and unhappy customers. Singer was not getting any orders for his type cutting machine, so he takes a look at the sewing machines.

Dave Young:
It seems like there would be a lot more people that need to sew something than to cut signs.

Stephen Semple:
You would think. Yeah, you would think.

Dave Young:
That seems like a consumer market as opposed to business to business.

Stephen Semple:
Well, although at the time, a lot of sewing machines were sold to the textile industry. But nevertheless, Singer suggests some improvements around the movement of the shuttle and the shape of the needle. He also suggests a foot treadle over a hand crank. At this time, they were all hand cranks, and that was a huge change.

They worked together, the two of them, so Singer and Orson Phelps, to create a new sewing machine. At first, it was to be called the Jenny Lind Sewing Machine because Jenny Lind was this famous actress. It was first to be called the Jenny Lind Sewing Machine, but by the time it got patented, it got patented as the Singer Sewing Machine.

Dave Young:
Oh wait, she was a famous actress and he was a guy that put touring theatrical shows together. Okay, so there’s another story there somewhere.

Stephen Semple:
I’m sure there’s another story there. But by the time it was patented, it was patented as a Singer Sewing Machine, which is also interesting given that Orson Phelps’ name was nowhere on this. Litigation broke out between them and a patent pool had to be created for sharing the revenues from the patent. Once completed, there was no doubt that the Singer Sewing Machine was a superior machine.

It was more reliable. It was more portable. But despite being better, it failed to gain attention in the garment industry and they could not sell it. This was actually initially, Dave, a business to business play. They couldn’t sell it. The industry was very conservative. Singer realized he needed to do something different. Now, remember, Singer was an actor. What he started to do was he became a pitch man and he started to sell directly to consumers through demonstrations at carnivals, churches, and fairs.

Dave Young:
To take it from an industrial machine into the hands of consumers, you’ve opened it up to sell it to millions of people instead of hundreds of people.

Stephen Semple:
Yes, and demonstration. We’ve talked about this before. And because of his acting ability, he could stir up the crowd. He could be the pitch man, and that’s what he did. This worked out well. Here’s how things went. And again, there’s an interesting lesson here. We’ve often talked about this. Things don’t grow in a straight line. 1853, he sells 810 of them.

Three years later, in 1856, they sell 2,564. Three years later, 10,953. In 1867, over 43,000. Seven years later, 262,000. You can just see how the trajectory goes. In 1883, they opened the largest sewing machine factory in the world in Scotland, employing 12,000 people. This factory was big enough that they used this factory up until 1984.

Dave Young:
12,000.

Stephen Semple:
Yes. 1904, they opened a huge facility in St. Petersburg, Russia. 1908, the 47-story Singer Building in New York, at the time the largest building in the world. By 1973, they were doing $2 billion in sales and had 120,000 employees.

Dave Young:
That’s a pretty amazing story.

Stephen Semple:
Yes. The thing that makes this interesting to me is they made a better machine and they decided to sell it B2B, and it was not accepted. They said, “Screw that. We’re going to go direct to consumer.” They went direct to consumer, and they did it first by demonstrations.

Dave Young:
If you had the problem that his partner did where you had an inferior sewing machine and you couldn’t get industry to buy it because they couldn’t keep it working, and he made the improvements that made it a reliable piece of equipment, now you can go to consumers, because otherwise you get buried by bad talk. I mean, not that there were reviews back then, but people knew each other.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Dave Young:
What an eye-opening thing to do is to take something that nobody’s ever had. Nobody ever had a sewing machine in their house probably until Singer started selling these.

Stephen Semple:
Absolutely. One of the first things they did is they created a catalog that was distributed out to consumers. And then in 1920, they started doing ads where they showed a stylish woman using a Singer sewing machine. They are also one of the first companies having direct sales reps. They also put together sales reps. They also did lots of things to reduce the friction and make it easier to buy. We often talk about this, Dave, reducing the friction.

They were one of the first companies to have an installment purchasing plan. They also developed a trade-in program, so you could bring back your old Singer Sewing Machine and buy a new one. They created elaborate showrooms in major cities, often having live demonstrations of sewing. They created classes where they taught people how to sew, and they also did franchising.

Dave Young:
These guys were selling them every which way they could.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, but it was more than just building a better mousetrap. They built the better mousetrap. They did demonstrations to consumers. They did advertising to consumers. They created installment plans. They created trade-in programs. They had classes for teaching people how to sew to grow their market. The other thing they did is they figured out, hey, if we teach people how to sew, we’re growing the market.

Dave Young:
We often talk to clients about how hard it is to grow the market. If you have something that people just don’t understand and don’t know about, it’s a heavy load to carry, to grow the market, to get people to adopt something new. It’s way easier to have something that’s just a better mousetrap.

Stephen Semple:
Yes. Yes, it is.

Dave Young:
And has features that you can talk about to compare. But to actually grow the category, man, it’s a hard road to go, but they did it and they did it well.

Stephen Semple:
And also, they didn’t do it in the early days. They did it in the later days. That’s the other thing you have to think about is the growing the market happens when you’ve tapped your market out and you want to grow your market. They didn’t start too many businesses. Start with, well, let’s grow the market. You can’t start there. You don’t have the resources to start there.

Dave Young:
A sewing machine is a tool. I know some people that have a small school in Africa where they teach trades, but they only teach trades where you could actually… If you owned a sewing machine and we taught you how to make and mend clothes, you could go out and run a little business in your town making and mending clothes for people. It’s that level of machinery. It lets you either increase your own livelihood or make life easier for yourself.

When you think about consumers 100 years ago, either of those two things is a nice proposition, right? If you own a Singer Sewing Machine, you’re not going to pay as much for clothing, and maybe other people will pay you to make clothing or fix their clothing, hem their dresses and their pants, and those kinds of things.

Stephen Semple:
I remember my mom making… I don’t think it was this. I can’t remember what sewing machine she had. It wasn’t a Singer, but making clothes and mending clothes. With four kids and all that other stuff, it was like making and amending of this stuff happened a lot in the home.

Dave Young:
Well, and you think about not just the sewing machines themselves, and I don’t know what extent they were involved in all the ancillary things, but the proliferation of patterns and various threads and all the little things that you need, zippers and buttons and specialty items that people would put into their clothes, none of that was… Unless you’re making it yourself, that business wasn’t as big as it ended up being because it followed Singer.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, absolutely. I think the other thing too is when you have an innovative new product or idea, I actually think it’s often easier to get consumer adoption than industry adoption. If you think about it, if you’re the company running a textile company, first of all, you got to replace all the machines. That’s a bigger expense. Anytime you replace something, there’s all the other headaches. I think it’s easier to get consumers to try new things than businesses to try new things. I think that’s often underestimated. Often underestimated.

Dave Young:
I mean, could you imagine in any big city where they’re teaching sewing classes and you’re the person teaching, you’re the woman that’s in there teaching a sewing class, maybe going city to city, that’s the equivalent of a really popular Instagram influencer today.

Stephen Semple:
There you go. That’s interesting.

Dave Young:
There were sewing circles and sewing clubs. Oh my gosh, we’re having so-and-so come in to be our guest teacher. That’s social media without electronics. But I’m sure there were famous…

Stephen Semple:
Oh, I’m sure there were.

Dave Young:
At least in that world, famous instructors in that circle.

Stephen Semple:
Absolutely there would’ve been. Great observation. Great observation.

Dave Young:
Really cool. They created the whole infrastructure for that to even happen.

Stephen Semple:
They did. They did. Yeah, absolutely did. They did a lot of really super innovative things and just ended up becoming a massive, massive empire.

Dave Young:
It’s amazing. I look back to when I was a kid growing up, my parents owned a small radio station in a small market, 6,000 people in the middle of nowhere, and one of the most successful annual events that we put on, I’ve got pictures of me as a five-year-old standing on the stage with my dad in front of probably 1,000 people, was a cooking show. They would bring in some professional cook and put them on a stage, and it was a homemaker kind of thing.

It was amazing. It was a big event. It was a social event, and it was an educational event. I’m absolutely positive things like that happened around the sewing machine as well.

Stephen Semple:
I’m sure they did.

Dave Young:
A whole community would get together to enjoy this and participate in it. And in fact, I think the sewing machine company was probably one of the big sponsors of it, because it’s the same thing, it’s homemakers.

Stephen Semple:
Yep, yep, absolutely. That’s awesome.

Dave Young:
Really cool.

Stephen Semple:
Did The Galloping Gourmet ever go to your town?

Dave Young:
No, he did not gallop through Western Nebraska.

Stephen Semple:
I just really dated myself with that reference.

Dave Young:
He was already on TV by that time. He had much bigger crowds than me.

Stephen Semple:
I thought you’d find that one interesting. Singer did a lot of cool stuff.

Dave Young:
Very cool brand. He died before the turn of the century?

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, he died in 1875.

Dave Young:
But he had made a pretty big company by then and it took off and dominated the world.

Stephen Semple:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Dave Young:
Great story. Thanks for sharing that one, Stephen.

Stephen Semple:
All right. Thanks, David.

Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to questions@theempirebuilderspodcast.com.

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