Coco Chanel

Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel grew up in an orphanage where the nuns taught her to sew, then spent her early adulthood as a seamstress and cabaret singer. While the fashion world piled ornamentation on everything, she edited it away, borrowing fabrics and silhouettes from men's sportswear and turning jersey, a material used for underwear and workmen's clothing, into elegant, comfortable garments women could actually move in. By the 1920s she had changed what women wore and what it meant.

For founders and operators, this case is about reinventing an industry by understanding what customers actually endure, not what they say they want. It asks you to find the equivalent of the corset in your category: the thing everyone accepts as standard that quietly makes the customer experience worse. The way Chanel located that mismatch and removed it, then built a product and a brand on the gap, is the part the app keeps for you.