# What Is the Lindy Effect? Why Some Products Sell for a Hundred Years

- URL: https://girisimcikafasi.com/en/blog/what-is-the-lindy-effect/
- Published: 2026-10-25
- Updated: 2026-10-25
- Category: Marketing and distribution
- Publisher: Girişimci Kafası

When Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his Dictionnaire de musique in 1767, he included the notation of a few folk tunes. One of them was the melody Swiss herdsmen played on the horn to call their cows down from the mountain pastures for milking: the Ranz des Vaches, or Kuhreihen in German. Beside the notes, Rousseau added a strange remark.

The Swiss loved this tune so much, he wrote, that playing it in their regiments abroad had been forbidden on pain of death. It reduced those who heard it to tears, drove them to desert or killed them, so fiercely did it stir their longing to see their country again.

Rousseau had not made the story up. In 1710 the Basel physician Theodor Zwinger had mentioned the same tune in a medical text, writing that mercenaries who heard it fell into a state of prostration. A herdsman's melody of a few notes was thought powerful enough to break up an army. Its power came not from the notes, but from what it brought back to people.

## How did a sweet nobody praises survive for 179 years?

In a September 2026 piece for The Hustle, Katherine Laidlaw shows that the same power still sells today. One of her examples is Necco Wafers: colourful, chalky discs of sugar wrapped in crinkly waxed paper. In 1847 Oliver Chase, an English immigrant, invented a lozenge cutting machine and began making the wafers with it.

Customers never praised the taste; among the descriptions Laidlaw collects is "stale Tums". But when the company went bankrupt in 2018 and production stopped in July 2018, things changed. According to the candy historian Beth Kimmerle, a single roll sold online for more than $1,000. In a story reported by NPR, a 23-year-old offered her 2003 car in exchange for a wholesaler's entire stockpile.

Spangler Candy bought the brand and the machines, and the wafers went back into production in May 2020. Kimmerle's line stays with you: nothing reveals the emotional value of a product quite like telling people they may never be able to buy it again. For her, candy is "our fastest form of time-travel."

## Lessons from products that last

### Know what your customers are attached to

In 2009 Necco changed its recipe, dropping artificial colours and flavours and making the wafers softer. The aim was to win over young mothers watching their children's diets. Long-standing customers complained, and in the summer of 2011 the original formula returned. People, Kimmerle says, do not want a fruitier taste; they want the cues that tell them "this is the thing I remember". Before you improve your product, ask what your customers are really attached to.

### Let the product carry its own advertising

Kimmerle puts Necco's early success down to two things: its machines made it the first US company to produce candy at scale, and every wafer was stamped with the brand. Each sweet was an advertisement for itself. If your product says who made it at the very moment it is used, every sale prepares the next one.

### Settle inside a habit

Laidlaw's second example is the till receipt. According to the historian Jane Sancinito, humanity's earliest writing is receipts. One reason paper receipts survive in the age of the smartphone is path dependency: once a technology is built into infrastructure and habits, it stays even when better options exist. By The Hustle's 2026 estimate, it is a business worth about $5 billion. Once your product is part of a habit, a rival cannot simply be better than you; it has to change the habit too.

### Protect the core, change what surrounds it

The third example is the Old Farmer's Almanac. When Robert Bailey Thomas published the first issue in 1792, he wanted it to be "useful, with a pleasant degree of humor". According to Laidlaw, Thomas's weather formula is still kept in a locked black box at the headquarters in New Hampshire. Long-range forecasts, meanwhile, now come from a weather company. Laidlaw's 2026 piece puts the print run at about 2.5 million. The readers changed, the method changed, the box stayed where it was.

## Homesickness and Lindy's law

The Swiss soldiers' affliction was named in 1688 in Basel by Johannes Hofer, a medical student not yet twenty. In his dissertation he joined the Greek words nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain): nostalgia. The word was born as the name of a disease, with symptoms thought to include fainting and high fever. Physicians of the time also called it mal du Suisse, the "Swiss illness".

The second idea is more recent. In 1964 Albert Goldman used the name "Lindy's Law" in The New Republic while describing the talk of the comedians who gathered at Lindy's delicatessen in New York. In his 2012 book Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb broadened the idea: for things that do not perish, a book, an idea, a habit, the time something has already survived is the best estimate of how long it has left. A book that has been in print for forty years can be expected to stay in print for another forty.

The Lindy effect tells a founder this: products that last hold on to a need that lasts. Remembering, keeping records, trying to see the future. Features age; needs remain.

## Changing in order to stay the same

In Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel Il Gattopardo, published in 1958, the young Tancredi tells his uncle, the Prince:

> "Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com'è, bisogna che tutto cambi."

If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change. The almanac did exactly that: it left the box alone and changed everything around it. Necco opened the box and closed it again within two years.

If you told your customers tomorrow, "we don't make this any more", would anyone shed a tear? And if they did, what exactly would they be mourning?

*To understand what your customers are really attached to, [What Is Product-Market Fit, and How Do You Know You've Found It?](https://girisimcikafasi.com/en/blog/what-is-product-market-fit/) is worth a read.*