The article “Manufacturing and Marketing the American Bungalow” by Scott
Erbes discusses the effects that The Aladdin Company had on the American
Bungalow. The Aladdin Company was a main manufacturer of these mail order homes.
By intense marketing and propaganda the Aladdin Company, along with several
others, was able to promote and sell these precut homes by mail. The Aladdin
Company was founded in 1906 in Bay City, Michigan by William and Otto Sovereign.
William and Otto started their firm having had no architectural experience at
all. They were inspired by a friend who was in the business of selling precut
boats by mail so they decided to venture into selling precut homes by mail. In
order for William and Otto to get their company started and up to the level that
they wanted, it became necessary to use “mass-marketing” as a ploy to draw
people into the idea of homes through the mail. Their way of enticing people to
buy these homes was through their catalogue. They portrayed the homes by mail,
bungalows, as an escape from life’s worries: A place where one could “commune
with nature”. By taking the promotional aspect to such a high level the bungalow
became very prominent in the America in the early 1900’s. By 1917, William and
Otto were selling more than three thousand homes per year.
They had homes spread all over the United States and included in that
array of owners were several large- scale companies such as the Dupont Company.
Their success continued for the next two decades and William and Otto were able
to broaden their product line from not only the houses but also the furnishings
in the houses. However, the companies momentum was nearly depleted during the
Great Depression. Aladdin’s output dropped drastically during the Great
Depression but in the decades following the Depression, it was able to regain
some of their profit but they never reached the level that they were at before
the Depression. Finally, in the 1980’s the company had to shut down because of
the lack of profit. The author, Scott Erbes, focuses heavily on the different
types of the bungalow and on their origin. The word bungalow comes from the work
Bangla, which is a hut-like dwelling from the region of Bengal, India. This
origin design was greatly altered by the time it reached the United States. The
interpretation of the Bangla into what Aladdin’s designers felt it needed to
look like was drastically different. The design went from something portable to
something that was permanent and used for seasonal outings. People used their
bungalows as their vacation homes and eventually the bungalows became the year
round residents for some of the lower middle class people. It becomes very
obvious that a creation as largely accepted as this one, would attract a large
amount of attention from the media.
