9-804-001
REV: SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

GEOFFREY JONES DAVID KIRON

Globalizing Consumer Durables: Singer Sewing Machine before 1914
In 1914, the Singer Sewing Machine Company (Singer) held a 90% share of all sewing machine sales outside the United States and was the seventh-largest firm in the world.1 By successfully developing the huge, but far-flung, Russian market, reinvigorating the industrial revolution in Great Britain, and transforming the lives of countless millions, Singer became the world’s first successful multinational company. Although Singer was the first to produce a reliable sewing machine,2 the company’s market dominance was due more to extraordinary leadership, marketing ingenuity, organizational adaptability, and its continuous efforts to refine one of the most important inventions of the nineteenth century. (See Exhibit 1 for timeline of major events in Singer’s history.) In 1860, The New York Times proclaimed, “What the telegraph is to the commercial world […] the sewing machine is to the domestic.”3 A typical seamstress needed more than 14 hours to stitch a man’s shirt. Early commercial sewing machines could do the same job in slightly more than one hour. Originally called “The Great Civilizer,” the sewing machine created new markets for ready-to-wear clothing, shoes, and virtually all textile home goods, including canvas, sheets, drapes, curtains, rugs, blankets, and towels. During the 1850s, many American inventors and young companies crowded the nascent sewing machine market to take advantage of one of the period’s most promising commercial opportunities. That Singer was able to dominate such a crowded market is reflected in the fact that the only word for sewing machine in many languages was “Singer.” That Singer would dominate the market is much less obvious from a look at the personal life of company founder Isaac Merritt Singer (I.M. Singer). A skilled machinist, I.M. Singer was also a hot-tempered polygamist and would-be thespian.