Did you know that the UPS shipping company was founded by 2 young friends with only one bike and their initial capital was just $100 from another friend?
The two young friends weren't even 20 years old when the calendars showed August 28, 1907! When 18-year-old Claude Ryan and his friend Jim Casey, who just turned 19. Moreover, they did not tell their friends that they borrowed this money to establish a shipping company in Seattle, Washington! The first office of the company they founded was on the ground floor of a hotel located at the intersection of Second Avenue and Main Street.
People didn't have phones back then. So they often sent telegrams to each other. Consequently, these telegrams had to be received and transmitted from the senders. From the very beginning, the original purpose of the company was to receive and transmit these telegrams. But after a while, they realized that almost anything could be delivered on foot or by bike, they decided to expand their business by expanding their business. Casey and Ryan collected the messages, while Casey's older brother George and other young people they recruited were tasked with delivering the collected messages.
Within a few years, the small company grew and merged with its rival, Merchant's Parcel Delivery, to continue operating under that name. In the process, they bought new motorcycles. They even added a few cars to their fleet. Of course, the widespread use of the telephone in the past years had undermined the telegraph business. But that wasn't such a big problem for the young buddies. Because they had chosen another field to work in! They made a living by delivering products purchased from stores to customers' homes.
In the early years of the company's founding, American Post was the company's biggest customer. American Post made an agreement with UPS, leaving the majority of deliveries in Seattle to UPS. The letters used in the UPS logo are not written in a simple font, but using UPS Sans designed for the company.
When they first started using motor vehicles, James Casey wanted delivery trucks to be yellow, not brown. Charlie Soderstrom was the one who convinced Casey to use brown. Soderstrom stressed that yellow trucks would get dirty too often and could tarnish the company's image. For this reason, the company, which preferred to use brown, has not changed since then. In fact, a similar tactic was later applied by other delivery companies.
By the time Casey retired from UPS in 1962, the company had grown so much that they had a turnover of $550 million and 22,000 employees, as well as delivering in 31 different states of the United States.
By 2013, this company had already reached an annual net profit of $50 billion. The company was valued at almost $80 billion and had over five hundred thousand employees spread across 200 countries. Carrying almost 3.8 billion packages in a year, UPS's journey that started with $100 had grown to gigantic proportions within a century thanks to the practical intelligence and quality work ethic of its founders.