Home Box furnishes the rooms domestic workers never mention
Home Box asked 329 domestic workers about their favourite room; none said their own. So the retailer designed and sold furniture for those tiny hidden rooms.
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
2,000 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDDHL Packstation moved parcel pickup into 24/7 lockers and solved failed deliveries
Tested from November 2001 in Dortmund and Mainz, DHL's parcel lockers became a German standard: 12,500+ Packstations and 23 million registered users by 2023.
Read the caseTweag represented sheaves in Haskell by making gluing operations explicit
Arnaud Spiwack encoded sheaves as a Haskell type class, replacing unwieldy sieves with typed covers and explicit gluing.
Read the caseRobert Plath seeded his Rollaboard with airline crews to win trust
Pilot Robert Plath seeded his Rollaboard with airline crews, whose visible use made travelers demand it.
Read the casePeapod sold groceries online in 1989, years before most people had heard of the internet
Two brothers started Peapod in 1989 selling modems and software so Chicagoans could order groceries by computer; Ahold bought the pioneer in 2001.
Read the caseSpark turned its own gaming festival into a giant co-op boss fight to prove its network
Every wristband became a weapon: scanning it at booths dealt damage to a festival-wide boss, proving Spark's network by playing it.
Read the caseMcDonald's China optimized its network, saving $63.75M on supply chain.
McDonald's China, Xiahui Logistics and OAT redesigned the franchise's supply-chain network with optimization, cutting investment and annual transport cost.
Read the caseMuthoot turned India's 18,000-tonne household gold hoard into working credit
Banks feared fake gold and skipped jewelry loans, so Muthoot trained every teller to appraise, capped loans at 70% of value and promised cash in five minutes.
Read the caseSavlon's soap chalk made hand-washing a classroom habit and won the Cannes Grand Prix
Ogilvy baked soap into the chalk rural kids already handled, so writing sessions ended at the tap — 150,000 students in phase one.
Read the caseQi made wireless charging one interoperable standard; Samsung then Apple built it in
The Wireless Power Consortium's Qi spec (2010) made any pad charge any phone; Apple's 2017 adoption ended the format wars.
Read the caseMansfield's echo-planar scanning grabbed a whole MRI image in a fraction of a second
Early MRI built images slowly, point by point. Mansfield switched the gradients fast enough to encode an entire plane in one shot — the speed behind fMRI.
Read the caseUber Eats made its app the Super Bowl ad users build themselves
Uber Eats turned its ordering app into an interactive ad platform where fans assembled celebrity clips to unlock deals, skipping the bought film.
Read the caseKotlin became Android's language by being Java's drop-in successor
Google made Kotlin a first-class Android language in 2017 because it interoperates seamlessly with Java; by 2019 Kotlin was Android's preferred language.
Read the caseLEGO made one brick sculpture cast three different shadows
LEGO proved imagination by building an abstract sculpture whose shadows became three recognizable shapes.
Read the caseWestern Security fingerprint-coded BBC Micro floppies so copiers could not clone them
Western Security keyed each disc to its drive-speed wobble: format normally, measure track lengths, bake them into the loader, and copies fail
Read the caseJapanese brewers designed beer to fit tax brackets and happoshu overtook real beer
Suntory Super Hops opened a malt-ladder tax loophole in 1994; brewers kept cutting malt until low-malt happoshu outsold beer and forced its own tax hikes.
Read the caseOmantel slid into Oman's daily good-morning messages and won Effie Gold
Instead of another app, Omantel sent 3.8m customers personalized morning photos of Oman on WhatsApp — channel traffic up 230%.
Read the caseKao made the refill pouch Japan's default bottle
Kao cut plastic by selling the bottle once, then making thin refill pouches easy enough to become the repeat purchase.
Read the caseCetus paid its chemist $10,000 for PCR, then sold the patent for $300 million
Mullis's 1983 idea to copy DNA by heat-cycling became the engine of diagnostics; its patent outlived Cetus and sold for $300 million.
Read the caseSpotify turned the media-plan spreadsheet into the ad
Spotify and FCB New York coded a music video inside the Excel media-plan spreadsheets planners already open, making the required document the ad.
Read the case