Heinz Tomato Ketchup
The very first presentation I went to at Railsconf was “The Gilt Effect: Handling 1000 Shopping Cart Updates per second in Rails“. I was expecting a good technical talk from the title but it ended up being a great business talk as well. Basically what GILT does is take left over luxury goods and sells them in an invite-only, time-limited shopping cart. Normally manufacturers don’t want to keep discounting the goods publicly because they don’t want to devalue their brand, they would rather burn them.
This is a great example, like ketchup, of a business that will bring in more revenue in a downturn. Less people are willing to spend money on luxury good so there are more left over. I have always kept my eyes open for examples of these in the hopes of coming up with one of my own!