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In 1995, Smith Corona filed for bankruptcy. Olivetti was dismantling its typewriter division. Royal had already retreated. Every analyst in the industry had reached the same conclusion: the typewriter was finished as a commercial category, killed by the personal computer and the word processor boom that followed it.
One manufacturer didn’t agree.
Brother Industries had been making typewriters since 1954. It had quietly become the world’s largest typewriter manufacturer by unit volume — a fact that appeared in almost no headline at the time. When IBM announced the Personal Computer in 1981, Brother didn’t panic, didn’t pivot dramatically, and didn’t exit the category. It found the gap between too complex and too simple, sold ten million electronic typewriters into a market its competitors had written off, and used the revenue to build a printer business that nobody was watching.
Today Brother generates roughly seven billion dollars in annual revenue. Its typewriter ribbons are still in production. The machines are still being serviced. And the story of how that happened is stranger and more deliberate than almost anyone realises.
This is the full history.
One manufacturer didn’t agree.
Brother Industries had been making typewriters since 1954. It had quietly become the world’s largest typewriter manufacturer by unit volume — a fact that appeared in almost no headline at the time. When IBM announced the Personal Computer in 1981, Brother didn’t panic, didn’t pivot dramatically, and didn’t exit the category. It found the gap between too complex and too simple, sold ten million electronic typewriters into a market its competitors had written off, and used the revenue to build a printer business that nobody was watching.
Today Brother generates roughly seven billion dollars in annual revenue. Its typewriter ribbons are still in production. The machines are still being serviced. And the story of how that happened is stranger and more deliberate than almost anyone realises.
This is the full history.
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