It’s hard to imagine a world without next-day delivery and one-click shopping, but just three decades ago, it didn’t exist. The story of Amazon begins not in a massive warehouse, but with one man driving across the country while his wife took the wheel. That man was Jeff Bezos, and his cross-country trip marked the start of a journey that would change retail forever.
In 1994, Bezos was a successful senior vice-president at a Wall Street hedge fund. He came across a startling statistic: web usage was growing by 2,300 percent a year. He saw the internet not as a passing trend, but as a tidal wave of opportunity. He decided he had to build a business online, and he made a list of 20 possible products to sell. Books were at the top.
The Garage Beginnings of a Global Giant
Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, moved to Seattle, a city chosen for its pool of tech talent and its proximity to a large book distributor. They set up shop in their garage, with Bezos building the first computer desks from old doors. He invested his own savings and money from his parents, warning them there was a 70% chance they would lose it all. On July 5, 1994, he officially founded the company, initially naming it Cadavra before settling on the more majestic Amazon, after the world’s largest river.
Building a Company Obsessed with Customers
From the very first day, the core philosophy was customer obsession. The early website was simple, but the goal was ambitious: to be the Earth’s biggest bookstore. Bezos and his small team personally packed orders and drove them to the post office. They focused relentlessly on making the shopping experience easy and reliable, even adding a feature that allowed customers to submit their email addresses for a notification when their order shipped—a novel concept at the time.
From Books to Everything Else
The initial success with books was just the beginning. Bezos always envisioned Amazon as an everything store. The efficient model for selling books could be applied to music, then electronics, and eventually, almost every product imaginable. This relentless expansion, fueled by reinvesting profits back into the business, allowed Amazon to scale at an incredible pace, constantly adding new categories and services that customers wanted.
Looking back, the story of Amazon’s start is a powerful reminder that great things often have humble beginnings. It shows the importance of identifying a major trend, taking a calculated risk, and maintaining an unwavering focus on what the customer needs. That simple idea, born in a Seattle garage, grew into a company that reshaped how the entire world shops.
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