The staff, the critics, and retailers all said it would fail.  It lacked all the things people wanted but gave them one thing they had not thought about.  And a star is born.

David Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is... Well it's us, but we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients. So here's one of those.

[Tapper Jewelry Ad]

David Young:

Stephen, we're doing a flashback today, right? We're going back to when, the seventies?

Stephen Semple :

Yeah. And we're also doing a little bit of a departure because we're actually going to talk about a company at the stage that it was very... Still, it was already large. It was already successful, but I still think there is a lesson to be learned. And what we're going to talk about is the birth of Sony Walkman.

David Young:

The birth of a Sony Walkman. It was a thing before Guardians of the Galaxy for you kids that are listening.

Stephen Semple :

It actually played this little thing called a cassette.

David Young:

We can go into all kinds of minutia and trivia about cassettes and their interaction with pencils or big pens.

Stephen Semple :

I'll be wearing my shirt that has all the records and cassettes on it. I dress inappropriately, I apologize to everyone.

David Young:

And maybe we should offer a mixed tape prize.

Stephen Semple :

There we go. So anyway, going back to the birth of the Sony Walkman, it all started with the Sony chairman. And I'm going to butcher the name, so I apologize. Masaru Ibuka. And when he traveled he loved listening to music. Now Sony had this product... It was actually called the Pressman. It was for recorders. So it had a recorder and a microphone, but it also had the ability to play things back. So Sony had this product. And when he traveled, he took it with him and he would listen to music on planes and things along that line.

Stephen Semple :

And he found it was just too heavy. He said, "This thing is just way too heavy." And so he went back to his designers and he said, "Look, let's modify the Pressman. Let's get the weight down. Let's remove the recording feature. Let's remove the speakers. Don't put a radio in it, but basically let's strip this thing down that basically all it does is play a cassette through headphones. That's what this will do, nothing more. No speakers, no record, no radio, no bells, no whistles, no nothing."

David Young:

It doesn't even have to be much bigger than a cassette itself.

Stephen Semple :

Right. Yeah. And if you go back to the early Walkmans, they were not... It was funny, when CDs came out and went to the Discman, the Discman was actually bigger than the Walkman-

David Young:

But it had to fit a CD in it.

Stephen Semple :

Yeah. It was about that thick, but not much bigger than the size of a cassette and very reasonably priced and highly durable and all those other things. But here's where it gets interesting. His designer said, "No one's going to be interested in this. This is a stupid idea. No radio, who's going to want it? No speaker, no record. No. People carry around... They carry the boombox on their shoulder. And that's what they want because there's a group of people wanting to listen to the music, and we want to be able to record stuff and all that."

Stephen Semple :

And so he faced this tremendous pushback, but he said, "Look, we're doing it." And then he took it out to retailers and retailers are like, "No one would be interested in this. No one's going to want this. This is a dumb idea because it's got no speaker, no record, no radio. That's not how people consume this.