How Just One Mistake Destroyed The World’s Greatest Toy Car: Matchbox

For nearly two decades, Lesney Products ruled the world's pockets and playrooms. Born in a bombed-out London pub garage after the war, this British firm turned die-cast metal into pure childhood gold, selling hundreds of millions of tiny cars under the Matchbox name and building a monopoly so complete that "Matchbox" became the generic word for toy car itself, the way "Hoover" meant vacuum cleaner. Their factories in Hackney and Kentish Town ran round the clock, their sales curves only pointed skyward, and their executives believed, with total conviction, that no one could ever touch them. Then in 1968 an...