Word: lipton
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...Gamble. Tireless Tommy Lipton reversed an old igth Century success pattern. The son of an Irish-born Glasgow groceryman, he quit school at ten, worked around Glasgow for a few years, in 1865 sailed for the U.S. Instead of finding his fortune he drifted from job to job-a worker in the rice fields of South Carolina, a plantation bookkeeper, a clerk in New York. But Tommy Lipton never forgot some of the things he learned in P. T. Barnum's U.S. In 1869, with savings of $500, he went back to Glasgow and two years later opened...
...hired a dozen plump ladies carrying baskets inscribed "We shop at Lipton's" to march up & down outside, drove a hefty, traffic-blocking pair of hogs marked "Lipton's Orphans" through the streets of Glasgow, scattered broadsides from a balloon, even issued authentic-looking pound notes as advertisements-and got in some minor trouble with the law. As Author Alec Waugh* delicately puts it in his readable but repetitious biography: "Lipton had no objection to being a public nuisance where his own interests were concerned...
...Take the Liberty." Because Lipton "had no use for middlemen," he sailed for Ceylon in 1890 and invested in several tea plantations to supply his 300 stores. Britons were used to buying their tea in bulk; Lipton packaged it, hired sandwichmen dressed as Indians to parade through the streets advertising it, soon had everyone persuaded that tea and "Lipton's" were synonymous. By the time he moved his offices to London in the early 1890s, Lipton's name was a British household word...
...took Queen Victoria herself to show him where to draw the line in his publicity schemes. With no middleman to pave the way, Lipton wrote to the Queen in 1887: "I take the liberty of writing to inquire whether your most gracious Majesty would be pleased to accept of the largest cheese ever made [it was to weigh five tons] as a [Queen's Golden] Jubilee offering." A member of Victoria's household staff promptly replied, in effect, that...
...Lipton, unabashed, regained lost ground a decade later with an anonymous donation of $125,000 to the Princess of Wales's fund for the poor of London. "It was the most important single act in his whole life," for when Lipton permitted the release of his name, he immediately became red-hot news on both sides of the Atlantic, won a knighthood from Victoria, and made a friend of Heir Apparent Prince Edward. With one shrewdly timed piece of generosity, "the millionaire who two years before was dining every night at home had become a part of international society...