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André Michelin

lines on the record: 36
first: 2025-07-03
most recent: 2025-07-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Of a thousand people are using it, so it has to be good. I'm going to get a key to magical experiences. I'm going to be able to start going on the road, seeing my country, staying at wonderful inns, having great meals. But the point from the company's perspective is brilliant. Anything they could get more people to join the automobile age was good for Michelin. The Michelin guides provide them with compelling reasons to try out their cars and to wear out their tires. The restaurant or the hotel could become the reason for the journey. And this is when they introduced the Michelin star system. And the Michelin stars spelled that out. So the initial Michelin star system was a single star called attention to quote a good table in its community. Two stars to an excellent table worth the detour. What a great line. Worth the detour. Now drive a little further, just a couple more miles. A couple more miles cost tens of thousands of customers. How many more tires are you selling? And then three, one of the best tables in France.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“eighteen oh five sixty thousand copies of the French guide had been distributed free of charge, and then Andre advertises the fact that sixty thousand of these free guides are available, you should use them, you should help make them better, but he does it in the Andre way. He calculated that so many books, each about an inch thick, if piled up, would equal five Eiffel Towers, one on top of the other. And then he says, why are so many people? And there's 60,000 people using this book. Why is so many people? We can stack the size of five Eiffel Towers. Why are people using this guide? One picked up the red guidebook because it contained the key to some magical experiences. This is just great writing. Opening the door to truly fine hotels, tables set for superb meals. It was a guaranteed time and money saver. So from the customer's perspective, from the user's perspective, it's like, okay, this is free. You guys put all this effort into it.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thanks to the publicity value of the guidebook Joe Hotel keepers. What is he saying? I give you publicity. You give my readers better prices. So then this may be the first time I mention another trait that both Andre and his brother have and they believe in and the fact that they are willing to invest for the long term. Remember in 1891, they start making your tires and they never stop. The first Michelle guy could only be used by a small minority. There was not a lot of motorists in France yet. Yet if found its readers. It helped that the guide was given away for free for the first twenty years of its existence, and it helped that Andre was hell bent on making every issue better and better. Here's a line about that. Each new edition was a torto force requiring painstaking checking, updating the introduction of new features. So look how much progress he makes in just five years. First one comes out in 1900.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Only with its own resources, it would take several years to produce an accurate and perfect guidebook. Andre's call for help was an early example of a form of publicity that he may have invented, containing a question or announcing a competition engaging the reader's participation all at the same time reminding them of the name Michelin. This is something he does over and over again, more advertising for your advertising. So he goes to the hotels that are featured in his guide, which advertises his products, and says, hey, if you're going to be in the guide, you need to agree to put these in a special place where patrons of your hotel can see them and pick them up. Then he didn't stop there. He insisted on getting better prices for the people using his guide. So hotels listened the guide had agreed to indicate prices for each meal and for different rooms. Prices representing a formal agreement to holders of the Michelin guide, an engagement that Michelin was able to attain.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the mission guide was very rudimentary. Andre does something smart. Everything this guy does is smart. He turns the readers and users of the guide into contributors. So in the first guide, he puts this. The present edition will obviously be found to be imperfect, but the work will improve from year to year. It will become perfect all the sooner if drivers will apply more precisely and in greater numbers to the questionnaire. So in every single book there's a questionnaire. What did we get wrong? Without them, the drivers and the contributors, we could do nothing. With them, we can do everything. Then he does another smart thing. He then runs ads to help improve the guide, which itself is a form of an at. The Michelin guide is essentially an ad disguise in disguise. So he's going to run ads in newspapers as a call to action to improve the guide, which is also an ad. And so this is what the ad said. So mister and misses, it is in your interest that the guide be as accurate and complete as it can be, for if Michelin had to work.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whom would be offered free of charge? The extravagance of this wager continues to astonish this four hundred page travel guide for users of a mode of transportation then only in its infancy represented considerable investment and is another smart bet early. I need to bring this up. The maps inside the guides. They made those maps. They even printed stand alone maps. So you know the accordion style maps that used to be in like every single car? That device of making it easy to fold and unfold, the Michelin brothers invented that. They drew the maps. They wrote the guides. They created the routes. They built the signs. And they did this when the market was tiny so when cars arrived in large numbers, Michelin already owned the road. It also is important to point out they didn't wait till perfect to start. The very first issue in 1900.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Best at. He starts it in 1900 and he works on it for 31 years until his death. Eventually, these little red books that he creates will spawn the Michelin star rating for restaurants and become the global gold standard in fine dining that we still use today. In fact, when me and Cameron were talking about this book, he said something that was interesting. He's like, it's pretty wild that a guide made by a tire company, you fast forward 120 years. And chefs today will literally commit suicide if they lose one of their Michelin stars. History unfolds in very unpredictable ways. So again, this is another smart bet early. The publication of the first Michelin tire guide informed new motors. Remember at this time, these were rich people. So the publication of the first Michelin tire guy informed new motors, wealthy people accustomed to a certain class about well kept hotels, good restaurants, and ways to communicate by mail, telegraph, or telephone. Andre intended the guide for chauffeurs.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More wear on the tires and therefore more tires sold. Every single sign had an ad that said gift of Michelin. If you think about this, they just designed this core loop, right? Encourage more driving, which leads to more movement, more movement leads to more wear, more wear leads to more tire sales. And then they just figured out how can we keep this loop spinning? How can we expand it? So this is one of the most remarkable things. So in 1900, okay, Andre publishes the very first Michelin Guide. It is a free travel book with maps, locations of mechanics, locations of hotels, restaurants. The goal was to give people helpful information so they drive farther and thus tear down their tires. Their insight was interesting here. The car is just an accessory to the tire. Now, making the Michelin guide was what Andre loved the most and what he was doing.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the most widely read papers in France, the column was called Michelin Mondays. Readers of the column would learn about routes they could take for driving, they'd learn about hotels and inns on that route, special meals, remember this is going to be turned into the Michelin Stars when he does the guide many years to the future. They learn out special meals on the route. They learn about different sites. They learn about where the mechanics are. And Andre was prolific in all things that he did, not just this. He wrote hundreds of these columns. One of the books made a reference to an idea that appears in the six hundred and thirty sixth Michelin Monday column. Here's another idea that blew my mind. They built road signs across France. The job of the government was done by a private company. They built all these road signs, thousands of them, for free. Why? Because better signs meant longer trips, more driving.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the first car ever raced using Michelin Tires. The exact same thing happened in this race that happened when they did this for the bicycle race. It gives them a ton of flubbicity and then orders for tires start flooding in. When they're not driving these races, they made sure to sponsor. They sponsor air races, bicycle races, car races. They would offer to put up money for cash prices for the contestants that win. This is what they said. To sell tires we first had to sell excitement. And there's a great line where it says Andre Michelin made promiscuous use of the press. So think about it. It's like when you do these bike races, when you do these car races, when you're sponsoring air shows and you're sponsoring every single thing where people are traveling on rubber, because there are spectacles, the newspapers and the media of the day are automatically for free covering the spectacle. But Andre didn't stop there again. He made promiscuous use of the press as one of the greatest lines. He wrote a column every Monday for.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Leads to more movement. More movement leads to more wear. More wear leads to more tire sales. They realize that a tire company will only prosper if people travel more. So we are not going to sell tires. We are going to sell movements. And they commit to this mission for the long term. There's a great line in the book. It says in the year 1900, Michelin's purpose had been to get more people on the road. And in the mid-1920s, that purpose had not changed. And there's just a litany of great ideas that they use to do this, to encourage more people to get out on the road, if more people are on the road were automatically. We don't have automatically going to sell more tires. So the first thing they do is they increase demand with spectacle. They viewed races as opportunities to demonstrate their new products. They already knew this worked for bicycle racing. Why wouldn't it work for car racing? They build their own car called the lightning, and they drove it themselves in one of the longest car races in Europe.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their product. They believed in the superiority of their product. So if they test out their product and they go for a ride in a car or on their product, their outcome after that happened, Andre proclaims, he's like, in 10 years, all cars are going to have our tires. Our product is just so obviously superior over the alternative. So once they have this new product, they have this air-filled tire that you could attach and train. It's easier to change a tire. It's much smoother ride. Now they have to figure out, okay, we can bake this thing, but how do we sell this thing? We're in a such an almost non-existent market. So how do we make this happen? How do we sell more tires? This is the genius part. This is the part that I was most fascinated with in both books. You must, they figured out you must create the conditions for your product's success. You must create the conditions for your product's success. They converge everything around this core loop. Encourage more driving, which”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Important to point out the perspective of the Michel Lebrothat. So there is this story I shared a few weeks ago that I absolutely love. So two shoe salesmen arrive on a remote island. The two salesmen, right, see completely different realities based on their mindset. One salesman looks around notices that nobody on the island wears shoes, writes back to his company, says, hey, there's no opportunity because no one here wears shoes. The other salesman sees the exact same situation but reaches the opposite conclusion. He sends back a message saying there's an entire population that could benefit from our shoes, but simply hasn't been introduced to them yet. The Michelin brothers were like the second salesman. They look at the market and they're like, oh my God, we're going to go all in on making car tires that run on air because there is an infinitesimal. That's the word they use. Minority of the cars in France running on air. So a small number of already small number and they're excited about this. And their point was if you just use.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Varying accounts, sometimes as low as 350 cars in France at the time to as many as 3,500 total cars in France, but not. This is 3,500 anywhere from 350 to 3,500 total cars in the entire country at the time. At the time they make this bet, cars are expensive. They're toys for the rich. They require full-time chauffeurs that will double as mechanics. These cars could not stray far from a repair shop. In fact, many, many years ago, probably five years ago, I read, I'm going to reread it, the biography of the founder of Cadillac, this guy named Henry Leland. He's a fascinating mind, a fascinating experience. He came up with the first successful car company ever founded. And he also came up with one of the most successful new car ads by Cadillac. And the ads were successful because it said return, trip included. At this time, it was expected you're going to go out in your car at some point. Something's going to break on it, so your chauffeur has to fix it. And that's the only way you're actually going to come back. Now, I also think.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of our resources on inventing for the new not the old, to which his brother then provides the following objection. It is very difficult to port the air tire from the bicycle to the much heavier car. Andre replies, the more difficult the problem, the less chance there is of being followed, the more fruitful the triumph will be true progress boldly supported always ends up triumphing. And so you could think about this in a very simple way. Four tires are better than two. So what do they do? They do another smart, there's a lot of smart bets they make early. And so they agree to take, they're making a ton of money, obviously from manufacturing, you know, their bicycles are. So they agree to take large profits from making bicycle tires. And instead of taking very large dividends from themselves, they're going to reinvest that profit into creating tires for cars. In other words, they made a very smart bet early. There's not a lot of cars in France when they made this decision.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Horse drawn carriages, but pretty quickly they realized, hey, we have a great idea. Four is better than two, but we're pointing it at the wrong target. So Andre, again, I love the way this guy this guy spoke. He sees the first few horseless carriages in Paris. And so he says, why not also put these strange vehicles that make a hellish noise and crawl like turtles on our removable tires? And his little brother says, wouldn't it be better to concentrate our efforts on horse drawn carriages which offer a practically unlimited customer basis? This is so smart. Again, Andre just gets it. Andre does not share this opinion. He says, the car with tires will replace the horse. It is not the last progress that with one should proceed. Not even with today's progress, but with that of tomorrow. And Andre's point is I believe that the car is going to replace the horse, therefore we should focus and”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The car market for all intents and purposes barely exists. Let's just put it that way so volunteers will sit on a seat and if they sit on the seat on the wheel would they were subjected to quote torment unknown to the inquisition. Andre's got a gift with words. He's just hilarious. The writer was rattled mercilessly by bumps on the track. The riders on the pneumatic seats, which were obviously Michelin tires, the airfield tires, right, experienced a smooth, silent glide. The president of France happened to stop by, try the demonstration, and then congratulated on the Michelin brothers on their invention. So then they have this very simple idea, like, well, most of our business right now is bicycle tires, but they have two wheels. Four wheels is better than two. Can we make tires for vehicles that have four wheels? At first, they're like, oh, maybe we should make tires for...”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, in this case, this is truly international because people from all over the world go to this expedition in Paris. So they call this demo the Michelin Wooden Forces. The clever demo consisted of two seats on a rotating carousel trap. One seat is mounted on a tire and the other was on a bare wooden wheel. So their product and the other one is their competition, right? So at the time, the horse drawn carriage market is so much larger”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of their product's advantages over the competition was how much easier was to change. It would take fifteen to thirty minutes to change attire instead of half a day. So they organized their own by grace. They call it the International Michelin Competition, which is hilarious because it's only in France at the time. Then the basic requirement's simple. To get into the race, you have to ride on Michelin tires. And then Michelin fills the entire course with nails, thereby allowing a demonstration of how easy it is to change a Michelin tire. They're constantly obsessed with having fun and showmanship with their marketing. It's almost like this is like Red Bull before Red Bull. If you haven't listened to that episode, I think listening to this and then immediately when you're done listening to episode 333, which is on Red Bull's founder, Dietrich Matches, which I think is one of the best episodes I ever made, you're going to see a lot of similarities between them. So what do they do? They're going to go to where all their potential customers are. So they set up this demonstration at this giant exposition in Paris in 18.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the Michelin guide, which leads to the Michelin restaurant stars, may be the most successful guide in history, drastically expands the market for their product. But that was just one great idea, his best idea. But I'm telling you, when I write out all, I took all my notes from two books. I read like, I don't know, 700 pages for this. And when you just list out all of the different marketing ideas that this relentless and prolific person had, it's 12 pages long. And so let me just give you an example. They obviously said, hey, you know what? Winning bicycle races seems to be pretty good for business. Maybe we should lean into that. Why are we waiting around for other people to have bicycle races? Why don't we have a bicycle race attached to our brand? And then what if we set up our, this is such a great idea? And then what if we set up the track, right? The racetrack in a way that will demonstrate the advantage our product has over our competitors.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Michelin Tires. So if you were in their position, think about this. You go from one year from nobody having your tires to 10,000. What are you going to do? You're going to do exactly what the Michelin brothers did. And I think would also play to their nature. They loved being focused. That's another thing we'll talk about a lot about. So they're going to retain from here on in, they're going to retain a singular focus. Everything for tires, tires for everything. Everything for tires, tires for everything. So their dream is like anything that's going to travel over land, we're going to put on our rubber. And there's such great lines in both books about this. Let me read to them to you. This will be until the death of the two brothers, the great ambition of the house. Here's another one. The path that the company must take is laid out. It will be tires, nothing but tires. Michelin will remain specialized. And so when I say Andre may be the greatest marketer of all time, he's the inventor.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lines in this, he said the pneumatic is and will remain by its very nature the most comfortable and fastest of the tires. Remember, they were the only company selling this product at the moment, okay? We have confidence that the bicycle public will say of our pneumatic, this is an improvement. No, this is a revolution. Now this is the hilarious part. Remember when they're like, hey, we don't have time to do this. We can't do this if the younger brother is like, we can't do this in 15 days. When the race ends, Michelin has 12 tires in stock. They've only been able to make 12 of them by the end, and this is how important, and they're just gift of spectacle and getting attention and then drastically increasing the market for their products in an indirect way, which is the main theme of what I want to talk to you about. But they have 12 tires in stock at the close of the race. By the end of the following year, 10,000 French bicycle riders are using.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The favorite of the event refuses to sign a contract because he's already signed to Dunlop. So they have the idea. It's like, hey, there was this great bicycle racer named Charles. They treat him royally. It sounds like they got him drunk. So it says, after liquor's in a cigar, they propose that he try to race on the Michelin detachable, which is what they're calling it a thing. Three hours later, convinced in half dazed, Tarant signs the contract. In the retelling of their own history, there was an interesting line that it came across. They called the house, so the house of Michelin, because it turns out to be a dynasty after this. They talked about this lunch being really important and how they were convincing to get Charles to race for them. And they had a great line in recounting their own history. He said, success is often made of these small details. So the end result of the race is that Charles races for three straight days with no sleep, and he arrives seven hours and forty minutes ahead of the race favorite. Then Andre, in a single day, he'll make and run and add in the largest newspaper announcing the victory. I just want to pull it up.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thinking of ways how do we sell this? A few weeks later, the most read and influential newspaper in France announces a race for bikes. The race starts in Paris, it ends in Paris, it travels a total distance of twelve hundred kilometers. The event was scheduled for fifteen days later, and so we see this correspondence between the two brothers. You're going to see that the older brothers obviously, you know, the one that's way more aggressive. So the older brother Andre writes his younger brother. He says, this would make for a fantastic launch. We need to win it. His younger brother writes back. The deadline is too short. We will never be ready. Andre, the older brother, writes him again. We are the only ones with a detachable. It is an advantage we have and we may never have again. Figure it out. He was dead right in saying that because of what happens next. So the two brothers go to see the favorite of the Vantha again. Their tires are entered into the race. They obviously want to win it.”
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“Superpower. The first superpower is they built the best products in the world in their category, and that was their goal from the very beginning. I told you they're extremely ambitious. They're extremely obsessed with winning. That was the talent of the younger brother, right? Edward. The second superpower was that the older brother Andre may be the greatest marketer of all time. So the fact that the co-founders, this is a really important point before I start going into it immediately. They make this invention and then they're like, we're going to find the best possible way to market it right away. Really important point to understand is the fact that the co-founders and brothers had complementary skills. This is very important. One makes the product and one sells the product. Andre would show him to be as gifted in explaining tires as his brother was in designing them. And the way that Edward explained this is I'm the champagne, he's the bubbles. So at this point in time, they're the only people in the world with a detachable pneumatic, air filled tire for a bicycle.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There rides on air and is easier to fix and repair. Now this is nuts, and so this is essentially the product that he is attacking. At the time, the repair manual that is used for changing a flat tire on a bicycle was sixty pages long of detailed explanations. So we're just going to make that easier and then we'll find a market. Now, they had an advantage over other rubber companies and other tie manufacturers too is because they were completely desperate and they were in a bad situation. Their backs were up against the wall. So they said we have to recognize the factory's best cards and play them hard. This is what I meant about them being default aggressive, which will reappear over and over again throughout our conversation. In May 1891, the Michelin factory began producing removable tires and it never stopped. Now, again, this is a technical achievement. No one else in the world had this invention at the time. And now for the first time, we get to their other.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Puncture proof, and they would last a long time, but they would produce this extremely rough ride. They said like he'd ride around on rubber tires and it would hurt your liver after a tire after a while you felt every bump and if people weren't using solid rubber tires they would use tires made out of wood which also felt like shit so he sees a massive opportunity to make improvement and this insight that he has he says as long as it takes a day to patch a nail hole this new tire cannot develop a market it will not find a market what is needed is to make it easily removable which they will call detachable okay what is needed is to make it easily removable and that will change the future of the bicycle and so Edward's first idea for a product is hey we're just going to take this existing and this existing product that has potential and just make it easier to repair to save people time and so he sets him and the rest of his employees to the task of creating a bicycle”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A few hours later a tourist arrives in the yard of the factory with his bike. His tires have bursts and he asks for help repairing them since he knew it was a rubber factory, right? So it takes Edward half a day, and the book says a lot of swearing, which I thought was funny, to repair the Dunlop pneumatic tires, so all that means is Dunlop is the first person to invent tires that run on air instead of solid rubber tires. At the time, tires filled with air were extremely rare, and they had this Win Dunlop came up with this weird idea that you should glue them to the rim, making them very labor and time intensive to repair. So imagine your bike gets a flat tire and it takes you, you know, six hours to fix it. But Edward realizes something. He fixes it, then rides the bike to test it, and he's shocked at how much more comfortable air filled tires are for the rider over solid rubber tires. Before air-filled tires, everybody used solid rubber tires because they were.”
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“In getting more details. Now another thing I admire about the brothers is even though their experience, they're extremely ambitious. So their idea is like, hey, I don't want to be just this like small local factory making a profitable product in a dying industry. They are going to throughout their career, they're going to successfully ride multiple technological waves. This is 1891. So horse-drawn carriages, which they're making products for, they're currently being displaced by the bicycle and then soon to be the car. So they're talking about switching to a market can we build products for instead of a dying market for a growing market. And so they're reading about these inventions that Don Lop is making with the bike tire. And so the brothers had already been talking like, hey, maybe we should make bike tires. There's going to be a lot more bikes in the future. We can build the best product in a growing market and be in a way better position than just making this rubber break for horse-drawn carriages.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is what he said. The first necessity was for me to learn my trade. I can only learn it by questioning the workers, so I had to have a conversation with them where I was their inferior, and the best way to get them to talk was to openly and completely admit my ignorance. In practice, I conducted my questioning in the tone of a friendly conversation by saying, How are you going to do that? Why can't you do it differently? Is there another way? I explain these questions to the worker asking if he encountered any difficulties in the execution that I had not anticipated. I noticed that even when I knew the issue quite well, this friendly conversation was extremely useful for gathering facts, and then is the most important sentence to my opinion of the entire thing he's talking about here. There are things that the man who handles the material for eight hours a day knows while his boss, who is necessarily occupied with multiple issues, may be unaware of them. This friendly talk was extremely useful.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She says Give me a day to think about it the next day Edward goes in and visits her again. She says you can have the money and then she tells him the reason that she asked for a day. She said I had to go to the local convent and make sure that if this fails, they have a room that I could live there. She literally invests every single last dollar in trying to save her father's company and was willing to go live with nuns if this failed. So now that he has the money, Edward takes an inventory of everything the factory is making. Most of the products are unprofitable, so he just starts cutting every unprofitable thing and he decides to focus on their most successful product, which at the time, remember this in the late 1800s, it's a brake pad for horse drawn carriages made from rubber. The only problem is Edward was in his own words completely ignorant of rubber manufacturing. Now how he solves and alleviates his ignorance is really smart and maybe even a little genius.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time, this small factory that's about to go bankrupt that was founded by their grandfather was producing farm tools and then assorted products made from rubber like hoses, the rubber part is obviously going to be important. So keep that in mind. The factory was not making tires. So when the younger brother Edward shows up at the factory, he finds a stack of unpaid bills. A small team of workers who haven't been paid their full wages in months, and a banker refusing to extend any more credit. So their grandfather's companies on the brink of bankruptcy, they can't get any credit. So they go to the grandfather's daughter, their aunt, and say, hey, I need 500,000 francs to invest in terms.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Instead. And so I was thinking about this while I was reading both books the artist, the brother that's the artist, is going on to be is going to go on to become one of the greatest European industrialist in history, while the engineer may be the greatest marketer in history. Another thing to know, when they start doing this, they had no experience. They were very unlikely you wouldn't have predicted that these two brothers would go on to do what they accomplished. But as you're going to hear, they're both wicked smart, relentlessly resourceful, very secretive, which is actually really important. I'll talk more about that later. They're obsessed with quality and obsessed with winning, and then I think one of the most important traits that just jumps out in both books is the fact that they're both a default aggressive. They don't dilly-dally and wait for opportunities to come to them. They're default aggressive. They go after them with everything they have. So when they did not, when they take over the factory, they didn't know what product they should be making.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To give you, there's a few things you should know like some prehistory and some background before we get into how Andre came up with all these great ideas essentially to market what would seem like a commodity product. It's a tire. There are other people's making tires. So the prehistory that's important was the fact that the brothers were asked to take over a failing family business. So the two brothers, Andre's the older one and Ed Ward is the younger one. They will eventually turn this failing factory into Michelin. It was not that at the time. And so Andre, when this happens, he's in his early 30s. Ed Ward is in his late twenties. Andre was trained as an engineer and he was the obvious choice to run a factory manufacturing new products, right? But he wanted to live in Paris and not the remote and isolated part of France where the factory is located. So in a reversal of roles, he convinces his younger brother, who is an art student, to run the factory.”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Company still holds more than a hundred years later. So the two books I read were Michelin, a century of secrets, which details how the two brothers kept their entire operations, shrouded in secrecy, while simultaneously going to extreme lengths to make their company and its products known to the world. And the second book was the Michelin Men Driving an Empire. So the first book was actually translated from French by my friend Camerist, who also helped me with last week's book on Michael Ferreira. Cameron and I have been texting all week about the just insane stories that are in these books. So most of what I want to talk to you about is the genius that the older brother, Andre applied to marketing and advertising, but there are a lot of things, there's just a lot of things in the story I think will blow your mind, at least they blew my mind, and even more amazing is what Andre was doing in marketing and advertising. Before there was any kind of playbook to learn from, he starts coming up with great ideas in the late 1800s, for God's sake. Before I get there,”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Michelin brothers have to be one of the best co founder teams that I've ever read about. So, one brother made the product and the other brother sold the product. And they did their respective jobs better than anybody else in the world. Andre Michelin may be the greatest marketer of all time, and his brother Edward is one of the greatest industrialists of all time. In fact, Ed Ward would give the following speech to his employees counseling. Says little streams make big rivers. A single minute lost each hour adds up to eight in a day. twenty four hundred minutes in a year. That's forty hours per worker. If our factory employs twenty thousand workers and each loses that minute per hour, that is the equivalent of three hundred thirty three years of work lost. In fact, there's a line in one of their biographies that says saving both time and money was one of the principal”
2025-07-03 · Founders · #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT