Once a business bought a dispenser, Luellen and Moore could depend on revenue from the repurchase of cups. They developed a free-standing dispenser that was sold to businesses, which could sell a Dixie cup of water for a penny. When Dixie cups originally failed to resonate with consumers, Luellen and Moore refocused their efforts on businesses. But what if timing isn’t right for a startup? When timing isn’t right, survive until it isĪs any VC will tell you, timing is one of the crucial stars that must align for a startup to succeed. Embedded in the history of Dixie cups are important lessons for how startups can scale when times are good-and survive when times are hard. That’s why the Dixie cup’s story is instructive for startups struggling to make ends meet during the COVID-19 pandemic. But just as we’ve seen with the teleconferencing phenom Zoom in the COVID-19 era, Dixie cups shot to popularity with the arrival of a major health crisis. In 2012, Smithsonian Magazine even called the Dixie cup a “life-saving technology” that helped stop the spread of disease.īefore the Spanish flu hit, the company behind Dixie cups was a scrappy startup.
What makes this century-old startup story especially poignant today is that Dixie cups, as they came to be known, achieved only moderate growth for 10 years until the Spanish flu of 1918 made disposable cups a necessity and helped the Dixie cup become a household name.
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