Costco

When sales slow down, owners tend to suspect the product. Maybe the service isn't good enough, the market moved, or the idea was wrong from the start. Sometimes that's true. But a surprising number of small businesses are selling something people would happily buy,...

During World War I, Kimberly-Clark made a material called Cellucotton, a creped wadding made from wood pulp that was far more absorbent than cotton and cheaper to produce. With cotton in short supply, the military bought it for surgical dressings, and the company...

In 1957, an engineer named Al Fielding and a Swiss inventor named Marc Chavannes ran two layers of plastic shower curtain through a heat-sealing machine. The sheet that came out was full of trapped air bubbles. They thought they had invented a new kind of textured...