Formed by a combination of founders Harold “Matt” Matson and Elliot Handler’s names, Mattel started life as a picture frame company, launching from a garage space in 1945.
Handler’s wife Ruth started making doll’s houses from the wood left over from the picture frames, a profitable sideline that convinced the founders that switching to toys would be a good idea.
In 1901, childhood friends William Harley and Arthur Davidson began work on a motorised bicycle from a Milwaukee garage.
After realising that the engine was hopelessly underpowered, the friends built what is considered the first Harley-Davidson motorbike. Five years later, they moved to a nearby factory space, which is the company’s headquarters to this day.
While vacuuming in his house in 1978, UK engineer James Dyson became frustrated at the loss of suction power from his clogged-up Hoover.
While visiting a local sawmill, Dyson realised that large industrial cyclones used to remove sawdust from the air could be applied to vacuum cleaners.
Dyson’s tinkerings were rejected by every major manufacturer for five years, plunging him and his wife into debt. The couple began growing their own vegetables and sewing up old clothes in order to save money, a decision that paid off when Dyson eventually got the breakthrough that changed the industry forever.
Australia’s garages are also a source of start-up innovation. In 2007, Sydney entrepreneur Matt Barrie bought a website from a Swedish man, renamed it Freelancer.com and started running the fledgling business from his garage with one employee.
With a few tweaks the site was pulling in so much traffic that it was crashing almost every day.
Barrie had to re-write the code after six months and the website was able to grow globally, with 40% of outsourced jobs now coming from the US compared to 5% from Australia.
While Grabble, a tech newbie not even into its second year, cannot be compared to the likes of Apple and Amazon, there are high hopes that the business will follow in these illustrious footsteps.
Founded in a Wollongong garage by Stuart Argue and Anthony Marcar, Grabble provides retailers a point-of-service app for purchases.
Picked up by the Startmate accelerator program, Grabble have gone from Wollongong to the US in record time, after being acquired by retail giant Wal-Mart.
