Thomas Lipton

Lipton started with one Glasgow grocery and grew a chain of hundreds by buying direct and selling cheap. His big move came in 1890, when he bought tea estates in Ceylon and cut out the wholesalers, selling packeted tea in fixed weights under the promise of going straight from the garden to the teapot. Shoppers no longer had to trust a grocer's scoop from a loose chest. The brand outlived his shops by a long way and is still on supermarket shelves worldwide.