The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread
In 1912, Otto
Frederick Rohwedder invented sliced bread. What a great idea: a
simple machine that could take a loaf of bread and ... slice it.
The machine was a complete failure. This was the beginning of the
advertising age, and that meant that a good product with lousy
marketing had very little chance of success.
It wasn’t until
about twenty years later—when a new brand called Wonder started
marketing sliced bread—that the invention caught on. It was the
packaging and the advertising (“builds strong bodies twelve ways”)
that worked, not the sheer convenience and innovation of
pre-slicing bread.