It started with a problem.
Stephen Perry of Messrs. Perry and Co., a rubber goods manufacturer in London, received a patent for the rubber band in 1845. The invention was made possible by Charles Goodyear's 1844 vulcanization process, which stabilized natural rubber against temperature changes — raw rubber became hard in cold and sticky in heat, making it unusable. Vulcanized rubber retained its elasticity across a useful temperature range. Perry's patent described bands cut from a tube of vulcanized rubber. The rubber band's commercial adoption followed the development of the rubber manufacturing industry in the late nineteenth century, as the price of vulcanized rubber fell.
Historical sources below ↓Then something changed.
The rubber band required no specialized installation. Any worker could use it without training. It worked on odd shapes, different sizes, and mixed collections of objects. It could be removed and reused, unlike string or tape. These properties made it a general-purpose fastener that appeared in offices, post rooms, banks, and factories wherever small groups of items needed to travel together. The Royal Mail began using rubber bands on letter bundles in the twentieth century. The low cost and universality of the rubber band made it a default — the tool that was always available when nothing better had been designed for the specific task.
What a builder can learn.
Our interpretation: the rubber band succeeded because it was a good-enough solution for a vast number of situations that did not warrant a specialized one. A business operates with many rubber-band solutions: workarounds that function adequately without being designed for the specific problem. These are worth identifying — not to eliminate all of them, but to distinguish between the ones where a purpose-built solution would be significantly better and the ones where the rubber band is genuinely sufficient.
A door still open.
A hypothesis worth testing: if a small business listed its five most common workarounds — the things its team does differently from the designed process to get something done — and evaluated each one for the cost of the workaround versus the cost of designing a real solution, would at least one be worth fixing?
Which of your team's regular workarounds has become so normal that it is no longer seen as a workaround at all?
Follow the evidence.
History is sourced below. Business lessons are editorial interpretations; future possibilities are questions to test, not predictions.
Prepared from primary-source histories. First edition: 25 Sept 2026.