Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T00:39:35.007Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Selling the Sewing Machine Around the World: Singer’s International Marketing Strategies, 1850–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Andrew Godley
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The sewing machine was one of the first standardized and mass-marketed complex consumer durables to have been diffused widely around the world before 1920. This global diffusion was almost the sole responsibility of one firm, Singer. Despite its American origins, Singer’s success lay principally overseas. New data provide insight into the company’s international marketing strategies. Although the firm had a reputation for marketing sophistication, Singer did not depend on price discrimination, extensive advertising, or loss-leading expansion of retail networks in its overseas markets. Rather, its success was due to the characteristics of consumer demand for sewing machines, features that combined with its strategic investments in market support services and in its selling organization to create Singer’s enormous competitive advantages in foreign markets.

Type
Articles
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , June 2006 , pp. 266 - 314
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2006. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bibliography of Works Cited

Books

Bairoch, Paul. Cities and Economic Development. London, 1988.Google Scholar
Bayly, Christopher A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Oxford, U.K., 2004.Google Scholar
Brandon, Ruth. A Capitalist Romance: Singer and the Sewing Machine. Philadelphia, 1977.Google Scholar
Calder, Lendol. Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Credit. Princeton, N.J., 1998.Google Scholar
Carstensen, Fred. American Enterprise in Foreign Markets. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984.Google Scholar
Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, Mass., 1977.Google Scholar
Davies, Robert. Peacefully Working to Conquer the World. New York, 1976.Google Scholar
Dicke, Thomas S. Franchising in America: The Development of a Business Method. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992.Google Scholar
Dyer, Davis, Frederick Dalzell, and Rowena Olegario. Rising Tide: Lessons from 165 Years of Brand Building at Proctor & Gamble. Cambridge, Mass., 2004.Google Scholar
Foreman-Peck, James. A History of the World Economy: International Economic Relations since 1850. Hemel Hempstead, U.K., 1995.Google Scholar
Friedman, Walter. Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America. Cambridge, Mass., 2004.Google Scholar
Hounshell, David. From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932. Baltimore, Md., 1984.Google Scholar
Jeffreys, James B. The Distribution of Consumer Goods. Cambridge, U.K., 1950.Google Scholar
Jobber, David. Principles and Practice of Marketing. 4th ed. Maidenhead, U.K., 2004.Google Scholar
Johnson, Paul A. Saving and Spending: The Working-Class Economy in Britain, 1870–1939. Oxford, U.K., 1985.Google Scholar
Laird, Pamela. Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing. Baltimore, Md., 1998.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Brian R. British Historical Statistics. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Brian R. International Historical Statistics: Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Basingstoke, U.K., 2003.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Brian R. International Historical Statistics: Americas, 1750–2000. Basingstoke, U.K., 2003.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Brian R. International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750–2000. Basingstoke, U.K., 2003.Google Scholar
Tedlow, Richard. New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America. New York, 1990.Google Scholar
Thomson, Ross. The Path to Mechanized Shoe Production in the United States. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989.Google Scholar
Wilkins, Mira. The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914. Cambridge, Mass., 1970.Google Scholar

Articles and Essays

Bourne, Frederick G. “American Sewing Machines.” In One Hundred Years of American Commerce, ed. Chauncey M. Depew. 1895; New York, 1968, p. 530.Google Scholar
Bowden, Sue, and Avner Offer. “Household Appliances and the Use of Time: The United States and Britain since the 1920.” Economic History Review 47 (Nov. 1994): 725–48.Google Scholar
Coffin, Judith. “Consumption, Production, and Gender: The Sewing Machine in Nineteenth-Century France.” In Gender and Class in Modern Europe, ed. Laura Frader and Sonya Rose. Cornell, N.Y., 1996, pp. 111–41.Google Scholar
Coffin, Judith “Credit, Consumption, and Images of Women’s Desires: Selling the Sewing Machine in Late Nineteenth-Century France.” French Historical Studies 18 (Spring 1994): 749–83.Google Scholar
Davies, Robert “‘Peacefully Working to Conquer the World’: The Singer Manufacturing Company in Foreign Markets, 1854–1889.” Business History Review 43 (Autumn 1969): 299–346.Google Scholar
Fletcher, Scott, and Andrew Godley. “Foreign Direct Investment in British Retailing, 1850–1962.” Business History 42 (April 2000): 43–62.Google Scholar
Godley, Andrew “Foreign Multinationals and Innovation in British Retailing: 1850–1962.” Business History 45 (Jan. 2003): 80–100.Google Scholar
Godley, Andrew. “The Global Diffusion of the Sewing Machine, 1850–1914.” Research in Economic History 20 (2001): 1–46.Google Scholar
Godley, Andrew. “Pioneering Foreign Direct Investment in British Manufacturing.” Business History Review 73 (Autumn 1999): 394–429.Google Scholar
Godley, Andrew. “Singer in Britain: The Diffusion of Sewing Machine Technology and Its Impact on the Clothing Industry in the United Kingdom, 1860–1905.” Textile History 27 (Spring 1996): 59–76.Google Scholar
Jack, Andrew “The Channels of Distribution for the Innovation: The Sewing Machine Industry in America.” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 9 (Feb. 1957): 113–41.Google Scholar
Koehn, Nancy “Henry Heinz and Brand Creation in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Business History Review 73 (Autumn 1999): 349–93.Google Scholar
Kuwahara, Tetsuya “Early Foreign Multinationals in Japan and the Indigenous Firms: Singer Sewing Machine and Japanese Enterprises, 1901–1960” [in Japanese]. Kokumin Keizai Zasshi [Journal of Economics and Business Administration] 185 (May 2002): 45–63.Google Scholar
Lamoreux, Naomi R., Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin. “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History.” American Historical Review 108 (April 2003): 404–33.Google Scholar
McDermott, Michael. “Singer: Competition and Closure.” In The History of Clydebank, comp. John Hood. Glasgow, 1988, pp. 151–66.Google Scholar
Oddy, Nicholas. “A Beautiful Ornament in the Parlour or Boudoir: The Domestication of the Sewing Machine.” In The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption, and Home Dressmaking, ed. Barbara Burman. Oxford, U.K., 1999, pp. 269–84.Google Scholar
“The Overseas Boom in Door-to-Door Selling.” Dun’s Review (Nov. 1964), 85.Google Scholar
Özmucur, Süleyman, and Şevket Pamuk. “Real Wages and Standards of Living in the Ottoman Empire, 1489–1914.” Journal of Economic History 62 (June 2002): 293–321.Google Scholar
Page, Fernandez, Nancy. “Creating Consumers: Gender, Class, and the Family Sewing Machine.” In The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, ed. Barbara Burman. Oxford, U.K., 1999, pp. 157–68.Google Scholar
Peyrière, Monique. “L’industrie de la machine à coudre en France, 1830–1914.” In La révolution des aiguilles. Habiller les Francais et les Américains, 19e–20e siècles, ed. L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Paris, 1996, pp. 95–114.Google Scholar
Pouillard, Véronique. “American Advertising Agencies in Europe: J. Walter Thompson’s Belgian Business in the Inter-War Years.” Business History 47 (Jan. 2005): 44–58.Google Scholar
Puttnam, Tim. “The Sewing Machine Comes Home.” In The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption, and Home Dressmaking, ed. Barbara Burman. Oxford, U.K., 1999, pp. 285–302.Google Scholar
Robinson, Daniel. “Marketing Gum, Making Meanings: Wrigley in North America, 1890–1930.” Enterprise & Society 5 (March 2004): 4–44.Google Scholar
Schmitz, Christopher. “The World’s Largest Industrial Companies of 1912.” Business History 37 (Oct. 1995): 85–96.Google Scholar
Williamson, Jeffrey. “The Evolution of Global Labor Markets since 1830: Background Evidence and Hypotheses.” Explorations in Economic History 32 (April 1995): 141–96.Google Scholar
Williamson, Oliver. “The Modern Corporation: Origins, Evolution, Attributes.” Journal of Economic Literature 19 (Dec. 1981): 1537–68.Google Scholar

Unpublished Sources

Carstensen, Fred. “American Multinational Corporations in Imperial Russia: Chapters on Foreign Enterprise and Russian Economic Development.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1976.Google Scholar

Archival Sources

Clydebank District Library Archives, Clydebank, West Dunbartonshire, Scotland.Google Scholar
Singer Archives, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin.Google Scholar