The Virgin Story: Telling an Airline Into Existence

In 1979, a young Richard Branson was stranded in Puerto Rico. His flight to the British Virgin Islands — where his girlfriend was waiting — had been cancelled, and the airline shrugged. So Branson did something nobody at the gate expected: he chartered a plane he could not really afford, borrowed a blackboard, and wrote on it: Virgin Airways — $39. Walking down the line of equally stranded passengers, he sold enough seats to cover the charter, and everyone got home.

Five years later that improvised blackboard became a real airline. When Branson told his partners at Virgin Records he wanted to launch Virgin Atlantic, they thought he had lost his mind — they sold music, not aircraft. But Branson understood something his partners did not: Virgin was never really a record company. It was a story about the underdog who takes on giants and does it with more style, more humour and more humanity. An airline fit that story perfectly. So, later, did trains, gyms, mobile networks and spaceships.

That is the rarest thing about Virgin: it is one of the only brands in the world whose story is so strong it can carry almost any product. Customers do not buy a Virgin plane seat or a Virgin gym card — they buy a ticket to the underdog's side of the fight. And the storyteller-in-chief has never stopped feeding the story: every world-record balloon crossing, every publicity stunt in a wedding dress, every cheeky letter to a competitor is another chapter told in public.