Weight Watchers

Weight Watchers began in a Queens, New York living room. In 1961, a housewife named Jean Nidetch — 214 pounds and frustrated with yo-yo dieting — took on the "Prudent Diet," a regimen out of the New York City Board of Health, and made her real discovery along the way: the diet was easier to stick to when she talked about it. She began hosting weekly sessions in her apartment with six overweight friends; within two months, forty women were crowding in each week. The support group WAS the product. Weight Watchers incorporated in May 1963, and its first public meeting drew about 400 people. Franchising followed in 1964, and by 1967 there were over a hundred franchises across several countries; H.J. Heinz bought the whole company in 1978 for $72 million.

By the 1990s, Weight Watchers was less a company than a fixture of American life — the weekly meeting in a strip mall or church hall, the scale at the door, the applause when a member hit a milestone. Then in 1997 came the mechanic that defines the era's memory: POINTS, an algorithmic formula that turned any portion of food into a single number. Suddenly the whole grocery store had a secret score, and "how many points is that?" entered the language. The same year, the company hired its most famous face: Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, who spent a decade as its spokesperson, lending royal wattage to a thoroughly suburban ritual.

The company itself kept mutating — Heinz sold it to a European investment firm in 1999 for $735 million, it went public again, and decades later it rebranded as "WW" and pivoted toward apps and wellness language. But the version lodged in '90s memory is analog and communal: your mom's meeting night, the points calculator in the junk drawer, the low-fat cookbook on the counter. Long before anyone tracked anything on a phone, Nidetch's living-room insight — that people succeed together — had already built the biggest name in the business.