Thomas Johnston Lipton is a renowned Scottish merchant and yachtsman. It gained wide popularity thanks to the creation of its own brand of tea "Lipton".
Biography
The future entrepreneur was born in May 1848 on the tenth in the Scottish city of Glasgow. His father owned a small grocery store, and in fact the business was a family. Children from an early age started working in the store. Thomas helped his father from the age of five. After his sister and brother died, little Thomas was forced to quit his studies to work in the family business. At the age of fifteen, he made the decision to go to the United States, where he set out to succeed.
Career
In the United States, Lipton never missed an opportunity to make money and jumped at every opportunity. At first he worked in the port, but then he turned up a grocer's job at a local department store. The new job brought not only good money, but also useful knowledge. Working in a large store, Thomas studied in detail the structure of department stores, hitherto unknown in Scotland.
With the knowledge gained, the aspiring entrepreneur returned home in 1871. With a small capital earned in the United States, he opened his own grocery store in his homeland. The shop was small, and therefore Lipton refused to attract additional labor, he himself was engaged in the supply of goods and directly selling them.
In a relatively short ten years, his shop has become very popular in Scotland. Lipton had an incredibly creative mind and came up with various "PR campaigns" for his store. Work was creativity for him, and one day he bought a huge loaf of cheese, and a huge queue lined up at his store just to see this miracle.
To improve the quality of his goods, Thomas began to buy out the industries from which he purchased his goods, including the Ceylon plantations. By 1890, he practically retired from trading in various products and concentrated on the production of tea. To the previously purchased plantations in Ceylon, their own merchant ships were added.
All this significantly reduced the cost of tea, since all intermediaries were excluded. By the end of the nineties of the 19th century, his tea had acquired a bright and recognizable packaging and became popular throughout the UK. Even the queen herself was a fan of Lipton tea. In 1897 she knighted Thomas Lipton.
Personal life and death
The famous businessman was a big fan of football and really wanted to popularize this game in Europe. In 1909, he personally organized a major tournament in Italy, but the Football Federation of England did not approve of this venture, and not a single professional club in the country took part in the competition. It was obvious that without the participation of the creators of football, the tournament would turn out to be unconvincing, and then Lipton invited an amateur team made up of workers from factories and miners. The English team beat all participating professionals and won the trophy.
Lipton died at the age of 83 in 1931. He had no children, and according to his will, all his savings were used for charity purposes.
