Musinsa turned marketplace data into an own-brand basics line that grew 5x in five years
Korea's biggest fashion platform reads demand from its own sales, then makes quality basics it can price low — Musinsa Standard.
Read the casegenius.wikiA CASESTUDIES.CHAT ARCHIVE
Good problems.
Brilliant solutions.
Ingenious ideas that solved difficult problems. Explore what made them work.
The full archive, in the appPublished cases
3,236 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDFresh Express's 1989 breathable bag shipped salad ready to eat and made a category
Modified-atmosphere packaging let pre-washed lettuce travel — and bagged salad became a retail giant.
Read the caseDHL flew shipping documents ahead of cargo so ships didn't wait on paper
Three founders hand-carried manifests from San Francisco to Honolulu, pre-clearing cargo before the ship arrived.
Read the caseGoogle's free Authenticator made time-based one-time codes the 2FA standard
RFC 6238 plus a free Google app let any service add two-factor authentication without proprietary hardware.
Read the caseTIFF's tag directory made one image format outlive every scanner
Aldus and Microsoft published a tag-based image format so one reader could handle any scanner's file and grow without breaking.
Read the caseSNMP won network management by making everything one tiny UDP request
The IETF chose an almost too-simple protocol — get, set, trap over UDP — and it became the standard for managing networks.
Read the caseKirin's electric spoon makes low-salt food taste saltier, no sodium added
A weak electric current through the spoon enhances the salty and umami taste of low-sodium food by about 1.5x, so diets survive without more salt.
Read the caseHeathrow's live transfer forecasts let flow managers act in real time
Over a quarter of Heathrow passengers connect; a CART-based predictor gave 2-hour transfer forecasts every five minutes in a live Terminal 5 trial.
Read the caseFnac Darty gave each appliance a QR 'passport' recording its entire repair life
A blockchain-backed product passport documents origin, repairs and recycling for every appliance, making second-hand and reconditioned goods trustworthy.
Read the caseJPMorgan open-sourced AMQP so no middleware vendor could hold its messaging hostage
A bank wrote an open wire protocol for message queues, and it became an OASIS and ISO standard.
Read the caseADSL turned the phone line's crosstalk problem into its asymmetric design
Bellcore's Lechleider made downloads faster than uploads, and old copper wire delivered broadband.
Read the caseMexico insures its oil budget each year with a secret $1B put-option purchase
Hacienda buys put options on 200-300M barrels from banks every year — ~$1B premium, $6.4B payout in 2015 — so the budget survives oil crashes.
Read the caseMerck Animal Health's OR portfolio added $200M with no new capacity
Vaccines grow in living cells with swingy yields; four years of optimization models turned that variability into $200M of extra revenue — no new equipment.
Read the caseKenya turned fuel imports into a monthly reverse auction — lowest bidder imports for all
Kenya's Open Tender System aggregated marketers' demand; the lowest bidder imported for everyone, bringing scale and transparency to fuel.
Read the caseGermany's 5G auction raised €6.5B and made winners cover 98% of households
BNetzA bundled spectrum licenses with coverage obligations: four operators bid €6.5B over 497 rounds, and each must reach 98% of households by 2022.
Read the caseASML's time-stamp service concept cut extreme chip-tool outages 20%
Guaranteeing time-to-part instead of stock levels: ASML's redesigned service supply cut extreme long-downtime events 20%, worth an estimated €1.5B a year.
Read the casersync updated files over slow links by sending checksums, not data
Tridgell and Mackerras split files into blocks and moved only unmatched parts, so one round trip synced any two similar files.
Read the caseRoomba cleaned homes by bouncing and sensing dirt instead of mapping the room
iRobot made robot vacuums consumer products by trading navigation smarts for cheap sensors, random coverage and a patented cleaning head.
Read the caseGoogle ran 60+ products on one Bigtable instead of a database per product
One sparse sorted map on thousands of commodity servers let every Google product tune its own schema and still share the platform.
Read the caseWinia's Dimchae fridge recreated the buried kimchi jar — and a new appliance market
Mando's Winia unit turned Korea's seasonal kimjang ritual into an appliance category by engineering the 0 to -1°C science of a buried jar.
Read the case