easyHistory 5

23rd April 2024

Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, creator and owner of the easy family of brands starting with easyJet.com in 1994 has released a four-minute video celebrating the 30-year history of the easy family of brands which can be viewed on www.easyHistory.info.

The video tells the story of how in 1994 Stelios, then aged 27, made a business trip to Boeing in the United States where he flew on a low-cost airline and stayed in a budget hotel for the first time. That’s when he first had the idea of brand extension! Why not use the same brand on both businesses!

Later in 1994 Stelios settled on “easy” as the over-arching brand he would choose for his family of brands. Until that point, he had been using a shortened form of his own name “Stel” for his brand extension idea. So easyJet would have been Stelair.

Thirty years later easyJet.com remains the best-known easy brand, as you would expect from a business that has carried 1.1 billion passengers since the start, but the easy family now comprises well over 100 different sub brands spanning most consumer facing business sectors and geographies see www.easy.com.

The video spends that last 30 seconds showing the good work done by the Stelios Foundation, the UK registered charity revealing for the first time that it has received more than 84 million euro in donations from Stelios and his for-profit company, easyGroup Ltd which owns and licenses the easy family of brands. Therefore most of the profits from easyGroup each year go to charity!